When my wife and I in the late 1970s began angling to buy our first house, it seemed logical to look a few miles downstream across the Delaware River from where we lived in little Yardley, Pa., to the capital city of Trenton, N.J., where I was working for the afternoon paper.
Trenton was struggling from the decline of its "legacy" manufacturing base. But it had some convenient neighborhoods with fine old housing stock at bargain prices.
We shopped there hard and even made an offer on one handsome gray stucco battleship of a place. The sellers were asking something like $33,000, and we offered maybe $31,000. There was no deal.
The truth was, we probably lowballed the offer subconsciously hoping it would be rejected. We were ambivalent about moving into Trenton because of the schools. Our only child at the time was in elementary school. The elementary he would have gone to was decent, but the junior highs and the city's one high school were substandard in every way, reflecting the social maladies common to this country's impoverished urban cores.
We investigated private schools, but our heart wasn't in it. We believed in public education and wanted our child to go that route. The upshot was that we bought a place right back over in Yardley, staying until The N&O beckoned in 1981.
The moral of this story, at least from the Trenton perspective: Because of unbreachable school district boundaries encompassing some very poor neighborhoods, middle-class families with children faced huge disincentives to becoming Trenton homeowners. And so the cycle continued.
In Wake County, the school system's economic diversity policy is what keeps the county from fragmenting into neighborhoods whose desirability is heavily influenced by perceived school quality.
Yes, of course there are affluent and nonaffluent neighborhoods around here right now. But those characteristics will be magnified and calcified if more neighborhoods are served by schools full of kids from well-off families and others by schools full of kids whose families must deal with all the challenges of poverty.
How many parents who are professionals or successful business people - the kind of parents whose children seem to have the inside track on colleges and careers - live in subsidized housing or in places that only a slumlord would love?
Fill a school with children from disadvantaged backgrounds, and it's a known prescription for underachievement and diminished horizons. It looks as though Wake's school board will put the diversity policy on the chopping block this week, but any changes should be made with an eye toward just how easy it would be for the Raleigh area to become afflicted with some of the same problems that have been millstones around the necks of many communities up North.
Judging from the thrust of a resolution the school board is set to consider on Tuesday, Wake could end up with attendance zones like those used by the Fairfax County school system in Northern Virginia.
Fairfax assigns students to schools within geographically coherent clusters. A high school is at the tip of a pyramid, with feeder schools below. Socioeconomics can be a factor in drawing attendance zone boundaries, but proximity is trump.
I grew up in Fairfax County and graduated from high school there (Lee High, Springfield, Class of '64). Lee, like all of Fairfax's schools, was racially segregated during my time. In that regard it's come a long way: During the last school year it had a rainbow enrollment that was 28 percent white, 26 percent Asian, 26 percent Hispanic and 16 percent black. Thirty-nine percent of the students were classified as economically disadvantaged.
At McLean High School across the county to the northwest, in one of the region's more affluent communities, the enrollment was 63 percent white, 19 percent Asian, 9 percent Hispanic and 4 percent black. Eight percent of the students qualified for free or reduced-price meals.
Granted that the pool was smaller, but among McLean's "poor" students who took the SAT two years ago, the average combined SAT score for reading and math was 1029. Something wasn't working as well for Lee's disadvantaged students. Their comparable score was 936.
Presumably the McLean students benefited from the school's upper middle class ambience, bringing high academic expectations and levels of support. That is the kind of boost Wake's diversity policy seeks to impart when it distributes kids from poor neighborhoods into schools in the well-off suburbs.
But under the attendance zone model, homebuyers will end up paying a premium to live in McLean - or, say, Wakefield or Preston - because of the schools. The flip side is that families with modest incomes will tend to be priced out of those zones. They'll have to settle for places where the schools have larger numbers of poor kids, perhaps like the neighborhoods served by Lee High School.
The forecast would be for winners and losers, in terms of property values and, more importantly, in terms of students' academic prospects. Wake County, where the goal has been to keep any student from having educational opportunities circumscribed by where they live, will find the Fairfax brand of medicine hard to swallow.
