Controlled choice may not be the perfect solution for student assignment in Wake County, but it can be a successful one.
Neither "diversity" nor "neighborhood school" proponents will get all they want under this proposed assignment plan, but with a little compromise, each side can have its basic goals met.
Simply put, controlled choice would divide the county into attendance zones. Parents would choose, in order of priority, the schools they want their children to attend based on a number of factors. Determining what those factors are and assigning them a weight is where the heavy lifting comes in.
Chances are, neighborhood school proponents will be the big winners, because they'll be virtually guaranteed closer proximity and greater stability than under the busing-for-diversity model. As a parent, school board candidate and now member of the controlling majority, Debra Goldman has encapsulated the desire of the neighborhood school movement with her "live in Cary, school in Cary" mantra. While it's doubtful that attendance zones would adopt the exact boundaries of intact neighborhoods, they would become the educational communities around which parents can plan their child's academic life.
In my book, that's more than half a loaf.
However, Goldman, board Chairman Ron Margiotta and fellow majority members John Tedesco, Deborah Prickett and Chris Malone could blow this potential victory for their constituents if they ignore controlled choice's foundational elements of social, economic and racial integration. Margiotta, in particular, has said diversity will not be a priority in the creation of new zones. That would be a mistake, since fostering racial diversity is one of the model's biggest successes.
What's more, as controlled choice architect Michael Alves warned last week, any model without racial diversity is doomed to political failure. If Margiotta and the majority insist on leaving racial and socioeconomic diversity out of the controlled choice mix, they will be victims of their own stubbornness.
If a racially diverse controlled choice model is adopted, diversity supporters, especially NAACP state chairman Rev. William Barber, won't have much of an argument against it. After all, controlled choice has been used primarily as a tool of integration. In 2003 the model was accepted by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in the Pinellas (Fla.) school district as part of a settlement that ended three decades of busing.
Of course Barber and others can and probably will argue about the formulas used to create the attendance zones. Still, it will be hard to reject an assignment model that's been accepted by the same legal defense fund that won Brown v. Board of Education (of Topeka, Kan.).
Politics aside, Barber and his supporters will eventually confront the ultimate compromise - acknowledging that diversity has done little to reduce the achievement gap and graduation rate disparity between African-American and Hispanic students and their white and Asian counterparts.
Even if Barber and Margiotta come up with attendance maps that please everyone, controlled choice does not have a record of significantly increasing student achievement.
We shouldn't expect it to. The racial and economic makeup of a minority student's classroom is incidental to academic achievement. Being prepared and ready for the school day is the real determinant of academic success. That's the civil rights battle Barber and his supporters must wage. It's a challenge they're uniquely qualified to undertake.
I'll never forget observing activist Mary Williams as she prepared about 50 students and parents for the July 20 protest march. Her charm, humor and passion enthralled the audience as she taught them civil rights songs and chants of the 1950s.
Driving home, I couldn't help but wonder how much narrower the achievement gap could be if Williams used her talent to convince her audience that turning in completed homework on time is as critical to their future as civil rights songs of the 1950s are to their past.
