Wednesday, Apr. 21, 2010

Schools: on the upside

There seems little doubt that, if Wake switches to neighborhood schools, some individual schools will get worse.

In the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system, which has neighborhood schools - and worse poverty - 3 percent of elementary and middle schools are "low-performing," compared to none in Wake, according to state data.

It's not at all clear, though, that with neighborhood schools Wake would do worse overall than its current lousy 54 percent graduation rate among poor children.

That's well below the state average of 63 percent of poor kids graduating, and a bit below the 58 percent mark in Charlotte-Mecklenburg.

Consider the other end of scale: As switching to neighborhood schools make some schools worse, others get better.

According to state data, 7 percent of Mecklenburg's high schools qualify for the highest ranking, "honor schools of excellence," compared to none in Wake. And 61 percent of Mecklenburg's high schools fall in the second-highest category, compared to Wake's 48 percent.

Adding them together, then, 68 percent of Mecklenburg's high schools are in the state's top two of nine tiers, compared to 48 percent in Wake.

Their combined high scores are almost identical in elementary and middle schools.

The story is reversed at the bottom, where Mecklenburg has more bad schools than Wake. For example, 21 percent of Mecklenburg's high schools rank in the bottom two rungs, compared to 13 percent in Wake. Mecklenburg has many more bad middle and elementary schools.

So if there are no bad schools in Raleigh, there also aren't as many great ones.

In that regard, Wake's schools present something like the rough uniformity of our state's community colleges, while Mecklenburg's system resembles the wider range of quality among our state universities.

Which way is better? Why?