Nobody in his or her right mind should be satisfied with the patterns of academic performance among Wake County's public school students who come from economically disadvantaged families. Those students typically lag their more affluent peers, bearing out the conclusion that family income is a key predictor of academic success.
It is a difficult problem whose persistence signals that this community still has work to do in figuring out how best to educate many of its young people, whose opportunities can be unfairly dimmed.
Members of the Wake school board's conservative majority say the right things about wanting to improve academic outcomes for poor students, many of whom are African-American. But the momentous change they are poised to make today runs a high risk of just making matters worse.
It seems clear that, other things being equal, disadvantaged students will struggle even more to do well in school if most of their classmates face the same obstacles related to poverty. So the board's declared intention to scrap Wake's long-standing policy that's meant to keep school enrollments socioeconomically diverse amounts to a headlong leap in exactly the wrong direction.
The upshot is bound to be the emergence of schools where poverty is a common denominator. People who could afford it would flee any neighborhood served by schools with a high quotient of kids from poor families. Some schools in more affluent areas would become crowded; those in poorer areas would be underenrolled. To prop up the high-poverty schools, more money might be spent. But would there be enough money available to overcome the challenges? Would there be the will? There's little reason to think so.
The group of business leaders who endorsed a full-page ad in Sunday's N&O, calling for a "uniformly strong" school system, clearly understand the risks of letting some schools predominantly serve poor neighborhoods. These leaders know how their companies have benefited from a system that has avoided the curse of high-poverty, failing schools. Their views are among those that the school board should take the time to more carefully explore.
Conservative board members would fulfill campaign pledges by axing the diversity policy. But if academics are in fact the bottom line for this board, members will find a way today to climb back off the ledge and do more truly to safeguard the young people in whose interests they supposedly want to act.
