Hardly a day passes without some newspaper, magazine or television station in the country talking about Wake County being a leader in school integration efforts.

In the past month alone, the Wake school system has been prominently mentioned in publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, U.S. News and World Report and the Christian Science Monitor. The stories have focused on Wake's efforts to keep a mix of wealthy and poor students in classrooms.

"Wake has a great reputation nationally," said Ann Denlinger, president of the Wake Education Partnership, a nonprofit advocacy group for public education. "It's held up as a school system in a large urban area which has realized great academic success."

But while Wake is a national darling, the system faces a backlash from some parents over its student assignment policies.

"Wake County is a paper tiger," said Dave Duncan, president of Assignment By Choice, a group which has criticized Wake's assignment policies. "They do a good job of promoting it, but they've done an abysmal job of implementation."

Wake got attention nationally in 2000 when the school board stopped using race and started using family income to keep schools diverse.

The district tries to keep schools at no more than 40 percent of students receiving subsidized lunches based on research showing that academic performance drops when there are too many low-income children. Despite the policy, the number of schools not meeting the goal has increased over time.

Over the years, school officials from other communities have toured Wake to see the approach in action.

Wake's profile got even higher after the U.S. Supreme Court limited the use of race in assigning students in a June 28 ruling. That decision triggered national news stories about how school districts could use Wake's approach to integrate schools.

Richard Kahlenberg, a Washington-based researcher for the Century Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy research group which supports using economic diversity policies, said it's natural that Wake would get so much national attention. Of the 40 school districts in the nation using economic diversity, Kahlenberg said Wake, at an estimated 136,000 students this coming school year, is the largest.

Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards held up Wake as a national model for school diversity last week. He cited Wake to help justify his proposal to spend at least $200 million to promote economic diversity nationwide.

The news stories have focused on how the number of black students in Wake who passed state reading tests more than doubled since 1995 to 82 percent in 2006. Critics of Wake's policy say similar gains have taken place statewide.

But Duncan argues that Wake can't prove how successful its diversity approach has been. He points out that Wake doesn't specifically track the academic performance of students who are bused for economic diversity.

"To seem, rather than to be, is Wake's approach," said Duncan, playing on the state motto: "To be, rather than to seem."

Kahlenberg said it's not surprising there's a local backlash.

"What Wake is trying to do is politically challenging," Kahlenberg said. "Trying to make all the schools equitable is something that people say they support. But in practice, people who are more advantaged will be against it. It isn't surprising to me that local perception is so mixed."