Wake votes on issue Wilson slipped around

Wake County voters are going to the polls today in an election that the News & Observer touts as a referendum on school diversity. Candidates have staked their campaigns on whether they support the school system's diversity policy, which buses students to achieve a ratio of affluent vs. low-income students. A group of parents is backing candidates who promise to end the diversity policy and send students to nearby "neighborhood schools."

At least in Wake County there's a referendum on the matter. In Wilson County, a court-enforced racial balance policy was quietly abandoned in favor of "neighborhood schools" a decade ago. Unlike in Raleigh, where politicians and community leaders such as WRAL CEO Jim Goodmon supported the diversity policy, Wilson County's racial balance policy had few, if any, defenders. The Wilson County Board of Education extricated itself from the racial balance order, which had been imposed on Wilson City Schools in 1970 by a federal court. The order, which paired formerly all-white and formerly all-black schools for diversity, carried over when city and county schools merged. By the late 1980s, changing residential patterns had left some student bodies around 90 percent black while other schools were nearly 90 percent white. A citizen task force, which my wife was involved in, attempted to rebalance the racial diversity and eliminate the paired schools solution the court had imposed. Emotional appeals, similar to what Wake County is experiencing now, resulted in only a partial correction of the imbalances. A pocket carved out of an all-white suburban area, for instance, was assigned to nearly all-black Hearne School. Parents who vowed to make the best of the situation lifted Hearne's financial and volunteer support and resulted in dramatic improvements for the school and its diverse student population.

But moving children to another neighborhood remained unpopular, and the school board took two steps to address that issue. First, the board convinced the federal court that it had achieved "unitary status," eliminating the vestiges of a segregated dual school system. This dissolved the outdated court order. Then the board revamped attendance zones creating "neighborhood schools," with support from African-American members of the board and no outcry from the black community.

State statistics show the impact of the neighborhood schools concept on racial diversity. Those data show Barnes Elementary School is 87 percent black while Lee Woodard Elementary is 62 percent white. Federal courts have struck down reassignments based on race, but Wake County uses a more useful statistic — family income — for achieving diversity. I did not find that data for Wilson County Schools, but Census data show racial minorities are more likely to be of lower economic status.

My guess is that Wake County voters will choose candidates who support neighborhood schools over economic diversity. The neighborhood concept has great appeal, but Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, which already lost the diversity battle, lags behind Wake County in student achievement and graduation rates. Parents might get what they want, but at the cost of falling overall achievement scores and educational quality.