A condensed version of Dean Boger’s 2003 article, Education’s “Perfect Storm?” The Effect of Racial Resegregation, High Stakes Testing, and School Inequities on North Carolina’s Poor, Minority Students, is archived online from the Spring 2003 issue of Popular Government. The perfect storm for public education consists of three factors: resegregation along increasingly marked socioeconomic and race lines; high-stakes testing and accountability; and continuing inequalities in school finance and resources. The factors’ convergence, to summarize Boger, would be a major blow to public education.
Dean Boger’s article describes the judicial pickle in which desegregationist school boards found themselves in 2003: federal judicial control after Brown and Swann transformed the South into the most integrated region in the nation; but, as local control sifts back to school boards, the federal courts have taken away the tools with which they might remain models of integration – namely, the ability to directly consider race while making school assignments. And that judicial erasure of an integrationist tool is joined by local political pushes for neighborhood schools and parental choice. The article goes on to cover the other factors, but I want to remain on segregation for now. In the conclusion, Boger finds some hope in the Wake County school system’s approach using socioeconomic indicators, that had been in place since 2000 (before that, since the 1970s, Wake used race).
Within North Carolina and the Fourth Circuit, the model of school assignment that Wake County has chosen to pursue would, if adhered to over time, avoid much of the educational damage that this article has forecast. Wake County assigns students on the basis of socioeconomic status and academic performance: no school may have more than 40 percent of its children eligible for subsidized lunches or more than 25 percent of its students scoring below grade level. This approach actively resists the demographic trends toward high-poverty and low performing schools that set up sorting behavior by white and middle-class parents. Yet the capacity of the Wake County school board to sustain broad support for these policies will be seriously tested in the coming few years, and other school districts may not find leaders willing to follow Wake County’s example.
Alas, Boger predicted correctly, Wake couldn’t hold up. On Tuesday night, the Wake County school board, consisting of a new majority that came about with the October 2009 school board elections, voted to end school busing for diversity.
The current superintendent, Del Burns, announced his resignation after the new Wake County school board coalesced. He said he could not ”in all good conscience, continue to serve as superintendent.” From the Independent:
“I will not allow myself to be a pawn in political gamesmanship.” The new majority’s policies, Burns warned, if allowed to take effect, would balkanize Wake’s schools, chopping the unified system into separate “have” and “have-not” subdistricts—some 20 in all. High-poverty areas, or zones, would have high-poverty schools, despite extensive research about how that hurts the children forced to attend them.
For more on some of the politicking behind all this, see the Independent’s treatment, tellingly titled “Wake County Goes to Hell”:
Indeed, the Wake election was the mirror image of the tea-party campaign mounted nationally last year against President Barack Obama’s health care reforms. In both cases, a loud, relatively affluent minority was fighting to protect its rights as it perceived them (“my” health insurance, “my” schools). In both, people vehemently rejected any suggestion that what they have should be shared with others (the uninsured, schools in low-income neighborhoods).
And in both, organizers were supplied and paid for by rich conservatives.
In Wake County, in fact, the same multimillionaire conservative helped fund the anti-health care protests and the campaign to seize the school board: Raleigh businessman and former state Rep. Art Pope.
Politics aside, it’s important to recognize that, for many folks interested in education, integration is about more than cultural benefits. It is about student improvement. The version of Dean Boger’s article that appeared in Popular Government highlighted Bill McNeal – then Wake County’s superintendent (he left in 2006 to head up NC’s Association of School Administrators).
In the two years since McNeal became superintendent of Wake County Schools, the district has posted impressive gains in the end-of-year tests. Last year, 89.4 percent of students in grades 3-8 scored at or above grade level, a 4.5 percent increase since 2000. Reading scores were up two points for all students, four points for black and Hispanic students; and math scores were up three points for all students, six points for blacks and Hispanics.
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And speaking of student improvement – let me close with a link dump. I’ve noticed several interesting articles lately on teachers; and one, today, on Diane Ravitch. Perhaps this is all warm up to one our our next great domestic debates, revising No Child Left Behind.
The Atlantic and NY Times seem to have engaged in a contest on who can create the best how-do-we-make-good-teachers articles Here’s the Atlantic’s take, and here is the NY Time’s.
And here’s the key graph from the Ravich article:
Once outspoken about the power of standardized testing, charter schools and free markets to improve schools, Dr. Ravitch is now caustically critical. She underwent an intellectual crisis, she says, discovering that these strategies, which she now calls faddish trends, were undermining public education. She resigned last year from the boards of two conservative research groups.
If local politics has you down, go enjoy those articles.
