Wake school leaders put little emphasis on long-pursued diversity goal

The Wake County school system attained both a national reputation and long-standing criticism for its goal of keeping demographic balance among students attending each school.

But recent leaders have put little emphasis on using student assignment to achieve that goal, even as high-poverty schools have more than doubled in number. Instead, they’ve put more focus on approaches such as adding popular magnet school programs.

Schools where at least half the students received federally subsidized lunches numbered 18 in 2008; last school year there were 42. Also, since 2008 and during an economic recession, the number of schools where at least 70 percent of the students are receiving subsidized lunches has gone from none to nine.

Administrators say that they’re moving away from relying on assignment as the primary way to improve achievement at low-income schools. Instead, in the coming weeks, they’ll present to the board and the community new approaches to improve student achievement at lower-performing schools.

School board members say they are still concerned that high-poverty schools make up a quarter of Wake’s schools. But they cite such factors as community resistance to busing and the pressing need to deal with growth as reasons for not trying to redistrict students to promote diversity.

“This year we were obviously trying to alleviate crowding in the Cary and Apex area and that has taken priority over a lot of things,” school board Vice Chairman Tom Benton said. “I think the school board will have to lead the community in a discussion about how much it values culturally and economically diverse schools.”

Former school board member Ron Margiotta said critics of the former Republican board majority who protested the GOP assignments aren’t holding the current Democratic board majority to the same standard.

“They had people arrested at meetings,” said Margiotta, chairman of the GOP-led board during a tumultuous period from 2009 to 2011. “Where are they now? Why aren’t they concerned this school board isn’t promoting diversity? They’re not.”

Those who speak in favor of avoiding high-poverty schools said having too many students from low-income backgrounds in the same school kept achievement down and made it less desirable for teachers to work there.

“Having high concentrations of poverty, based on decades of research, has an effect on performance,” board Chairwoman Christine Kushner said in June 2013. “We can’t ignore that.”

The changing approach was clear in the school assignment plan for the 2015-2016 year approved by the Board of Education last week. School administrators said none of the moves in the plan would reassign 2,734 students next year solely to meet the achievement guideline in the assignment policy. The achievement policy talks about minimizing concentrations of low-income and low-performing students at each school.

Elections brought change

The issue of promoting diverse school enrollments has been a long-running issue in North Carolina’s largest school district.

In the 1980s and ’90s, Wake assigned students to try to create racially balanced schools, often using busing to achieve the goal. But amid concerns that the legal climate was changing, the school board switched in 2000 to trying to keep schools from having too many students who received subsidized lunches.

Fueled by suburban discontent over student reassignment, the GOP majority that took office in 2009 formally dropped socioeconomic diversity from the assignment policy and moved large numbers of low-income students to schools closer to where they live. In 2011, the board adopted a choice plan under which families could request a school from a list of options.

The Democratic majority that took office after a hotly contested 2011 election modified the assignment policy to include language about minimizing concentrations of low-income and low-achieving students at schools. The board also discontinued the choice plan to restore Wake’s former practice of having every home address assigned to a specific school.

But during the past three years, board members have given multiple reasons for not using diversity-based assignments. Examples include a lack of planning time for the upcoming year or their desire to give families a one-year breather from reassignment.

The Rev. William Barber, president of the state NAACP, had been a vocal critic of the GOP-led board, leading protests that led to arrests at board meetings. In 2011, he called the election results “a major step forward.”

Last week, Barber said he would need to talk with local NAACP representatives before commenting on the current situation. Efforts to reach him for further comment were unsuccessful.

Stability as a goal

During a work session last week, board members touted the increased stability they are providing families.

“You’re seeing a board that’s working with more of a business-based approach,” school board member Jim Martin said in a interview. “Businesses don’t like disruptions. You see a business style of operation instead of a disruptive political process.”

School officials did not respond to questions about what impact the assignments might have on school demographics next year.

Benton, the board vice chairman, said parents will only accept their children being bused a “reasonable” distance. In areas such as eastern Wake, he said it would take busing students 20 miles – which would not be reasonable – to provide diversity.

“We can’t go back to ‘forced busing’ of students in large numbers,” he said. “I don’t think we’re at the point in society where we can do that. We need to be more creative.”

Former school board member John Tedesco said the past three years shows how realistic the board has become about busing for diversity.

“You can’t keep reshuffling the deck each year,” he said. “They realize that. It’s now the third rail of Wake County politics they don’t want to touch.”

In lieu of assignments, the board has used approaches such as approving nine additional magnet schools over the past three years. Magnet schools have historically been used to attract more affluent students to targeted schools by offering special academic programs.

Kushner, the board chair, said it will take a “holistic” approach to raising achievement that goes beyond assignment.

“We also have had a history of integration and working through balanced populations,” she said. “We need to give renewed focus on that with magnet programs, choice as well as funding equitable programs.”

Martin, the school board member, said the board has kept the gap between have and have-not schools from getting worse in the past three years.

“We moved into such a turbulent environment that I don’t think it was possible to say in 2011 where we would be in 2014,” he said. “We have regained extensive stabilization, which is good for all aspects for our schools, which is particularly good for student achievement.”

Concentration of poverty

Yevonne Brannon is chairwoman of the Great Schools in Wake Coalition, which had been highly critical of the GOP board. She said the current board should get credit for providing more options for families by expanding the magnet program. She said other steps, such as reducing student suspensions and changing the rules for police officers assigned to schools, are providing a good educational foundation.

Brannon said the board is reacting to a community that doesn’t have a big appetite for using school buses to balance schools.

“It’s important that we don’t look at just one thing and not look at what they’ve done to improve the quality of education for students,” Brannon said. “While the number of high-poverty schools has increased, a good deal of that has to deal with the increasing population of high-poverty children.”

Out in the high-poverty schools, teachers and staff continue to work each day with students who on average don’t do as well academically as affluent students.

At Walnut Creek Elementary School in Southeast Raleigh last year, 74 percent of students received subsidized lunches. Ninety-nine percent of the enrollment was minority children.

Tim McAllister, Walnut Creek’s technology teacher, has seen how different it is working at Walnut Creek compared with Brassfield Elementary School in North Raleigh, where 13 percent of the students receive subsidized lunches.

McAllister said most of the Brassfield kindergarteners he worked with were reading at least one grade level above by the end of the school year. He said they work hard to get the most of Walnut Creek’s kindergarteners reading at grade level by the end of the school year.

“I grew up around here,” McAllister said. “It takes a special kind of teacher to work here through some of the challenges. But I enjoy working here.”

Vonda Martin, Walnut Creek’s principal, is optimistic that the new approaches Wake will unveil soon for raising student achievement will help her school. Walnut Creek was one of five high-poverty schools that lost funding this year when the district decided not to continue the Renaissance Schools program after federal funding ran out.

“The district is in talks with what they can do to replace some of the funding we lost,” said Martin, who grew up in Southeast Raleigh. “So I’m not worried about that. I feel pretty reassured they’re keeping our best interests in mind.”

But Jim Martin said he believes the board will eventually have to confront high-poverty schools directly. She said it’s not sustainable to have some schools with 5 percent of students receiving subsidized lunches and maintain other schools where the level is more than 80 percent.

“Low-income schools are not good for achievement, everyone knows that,” she said. “How we can address that, we don’t have any magic solutions.”

This story was originally published December 6, 2014 at 4:19 PM with the headline "Wake school leaders put little emphasis on long-pursued diversity goal."