In practice, the Wake County school system's diversity policy was fraying around the edges, torn by the pressures of growth and the sheer logistical difficulty of keeping schools balanced in terms of the share of students from lower-income families.
But the now-discarded policy's chief aim was critically important: It was supposed to be a bulwark against the creation of schools where most of the students were poor - a setting that puts those students at even greater academic risk.
As the school board gropes for another approach to student assignment and considers the model known as controlled choice, there must be a resolve to avoid lapsing into a pattern that includes any of those high-poverty schools. Not only a resolve, but a practical, realistic way of actually doing it.
Does that ask the impossible? Perhaps so, given that the five board members who make up a one-person majority have staked themselves out in favor of neighborhood schools in which diversity would not be an official goal.
Still, chairman Ron Margiotta - reacting to an upsurge of community concern - has said that he and his four allies do not intend to create "high-poverty or low-performing" schools. Where there's a will, there might be a way - if the majority members can embrace an assignment model that in the end might not look too much different from the current one.
Maintaining choices
Controlled choice was the focus of a meeting Tuesday by the board's student assignment committee. The concept, as explained by Massachusetts-based consultant Michael Alves, seems to dovetail with the attendance zone approach that committee chair John Tedesco has been moving toward. Once zones were laid out, families would be able to choose schools in those areas, depending on available space.
Tedesco and three like-minded colleagues who won election last fall campaigned hard on the prospect that after the diversity policy was scrapped, all families would be able to send their kids to schools near where they live.
Tuesday, in what was either a blinding flash of insight or a simple bow to common sense, Tedesco said, "You can't have every child going to their neighborhood school or else you'd have schools over capacity and schools under capacity." He went on to add that families could be given "four or five logical choices" of schools. None of that amounts to a flat-out conflict with the principle of diversity - depending on how attendance zone boundaries are drawn.
And that is likely to be the biggest challenge in ensuring that any zone-oriented plan yields schools with a reasonable socioeconomic mix.
Poor parts of town
Partly reflecting the long-ago blight of legal segregation, Wake County still has a mostly African-American concentration in parts of Raleigh. Those neighborhoods tend to be on the lower end of the income scale. Other sections have relatively high Hispanic populations who also struggle with poverty. What has given extra urgency to the Wake school assignment debate is the fear that a neighborhood or zone model would isolate disadvantaged minorities in schools that could not meet their needs.
If poorer neighborhoods were allocated among different zones, rather than grouped together, a measure of diversity could be achieved. But that likely would entail some of the busing for diversity's sake that the school board majority has denounced and that is unpopular with many of their constituents. Nor would many higher-income families be likely to welcome being put in attendance zones with less well-off folks.
Tedesco said he envisions retaining the system's network of magnet schools - another head-scratcher as to how it would work. But if the board keeps a steady focus on giving all students a fair and comparable chance to succeed, it will have to treat diversity as a key piece of the puzzle.
Alves, the controlled choice guru, put it this way: "What's most important is that the zones are diverse and that they have equal quality of education." That's close to what supporters of the old system-wide diversity policy have been saying all along.
