Two alternatives to race-based busing
What should govern school assignment – income or address?

By T. Keung Hui


RALEIGH North Carolina's two largest school systems have taken vastly different approaches to two thorny issues: Student assignment and educating low-income students with academic deficiencies.

Wake County, the state's largest district, has used buses instead of greenbacks to address the academic needs of impoverished students.

To control growth and limit the number of high-poverty schools, Wake's system moves thousands of students each year, sometimes sending kids on bus rides of more than 20 miles.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools has shifted to a system of largely neighborhood schools, resulting in a stratified mix of affluent suburban schools and high-poverty ones near uptown. Instead of busing to balance low-income students at each school, the district pours millions of dollars each year into high-poverty schools to boost the performance of academically disadvantaged students.

Both paths remain controversial – and each side has supporting evidence.

Supporters of Wake's "balance the poverty" method cite the large number of low-scoring schools in CMS, the difficulty such schools have in attracting strong faculty and the flight of middle-class families from high-poverty schools.

But neighborhood-school advocates counter that Wake's approach merely masks problems by spreading around the weakest students, while alienating families with the angst of constant reassignment.

And Wake can no longer boast of superior academic performance by minority and low-income students. As Wake and CMS have grown closer in size and demographics, the performance of their black and impoverished students has become virtually indistinguishable, despite the fact that CMS kids are far more likely to attend high-poverty schools.

Public opinion

Despite some community complaints, neither district is contemplating change. But in Wake County, which recently adopted a plan to reassign 24,654 students over the next three years, there's a push from upset parents to adopt an approach similar to Charlotte's.

Wake leaders say CMS is not a good example to follow.

"Charlotte is not proving to be a good system," said Rosa Gill, chairwoman of the Wake school board. "They're still having problems. They're going back to a segregated school system. The citizens of Wake County aren't looking for that."

Molly Griffin, chairwoman of the CMS board, said the district is doing a pretty good job considering it has so many low-income students. Just over half of Charlotte's students receive federally subsidized lunches, compared with 28 percent in Wake.

"Our academic results are just as good," Griffin said. "I'll fight you on that."

Recent state "report cards" for the districts show very similar results on 2008 exams for minority and at-risk students.

Through the 1990s, both Wake and Charlotte-Mecklenburg based students' assignments on race to integrate schools. Wake did it by choice; Charlotte was following a federal court order.

But as federal courts raised more and more questions about race-based school assignments, Wake switched in 1999 to student assignments based on family income. The policy sprang from research that academic performance drops when a school has too many low-income students.

Race, income and equity

Charlotte continued with race-based student assignments until a lawsuit by parents led to a 2001 court ruling ending busing.

Rather than adopt Wake's approach of using family income, Charlotte in 2002 began to let students attend schools close to where they live.

That approach is similar to what Wake parents advocated at a recent meeting. Angry about the latest reassignment plan, the parents gathered to plan how to elect school board candidates who would help send students to neighborhood schools.

"How dare they use my children for a social experiment that has gone wrong and needs replacing?" said Dana Cope, a Raleigh parent of two reassigned students.

Charlotte's current approach has led to dramatic shifts, turning once-integrated schools into ones largely populated by minority and low-income students.

But Sharon Starks, a member of CMS's equity committee, said families now feel more connected to schools in their community. "The schools are different," she said. "The racial balance is different now. The suburbs where I live are extremely diverse, just not black-and-white diverse."

For Joni Trobich, an officer in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg PTA Council, the demographic shift has been ominous. She sees a growing gap between suburban PTAs with $100,000 budgets and those at poor schools that have little.

"The poor schools," she said, "are getting poorer."

Educating the poor

Wake schools aren't free from the battle between the haves and have-nots. But school officials do try to cap each school's percentage of students receiving subsidized lunches at 40 percent. Failing that, school officials try to keep schools in the same area at similar percentages.

"We in Wake County pride ourselves in that all our schools are good schools," said Ann Denlinger, president of the Wake Education Partnership, an advocacy group that backs Wake's diversity policy.

Charlotte targets high-poverty schools with more resources. Those schools receive extra supplies, smaller classes, hiring bonuses, annual teachers' incentives and priority for hiring teachers.

Says Griffin: "While I would personally prefer more racially and economically diverse schools, given the legal proceedings, we'll educate the high-poverty kids where they're at."

Even as CMS faces cutting tens of millions from its 2009-10 budget, extras for high-poverty schools remain a top priority for Superintendent Peter Gorman. A recent consultant's report said improving those schools is the only way for CMS to make big academic gains. Gorman just expanded a bonus program to bring star principals and teachers into the weakest schools, even as he was outlining massive cuts elsewhere.

Griffin said CMS leaders realize the need to protect high-poverty programs but that in making cuts it's hard to skip any part of the budget. For instance, Gorman has proposed cutting $3.6 million for four struggling high schools.

Leonard "Deacon" Jones, president of the Swann Fellowship, which opposed ending Charlotte's busing program, said the proposed cuts show the dangers of thinking that more money makes up for letting schools effectively resegregate. "My fear is that some people feel it's cheaper to build jails than to provide the schools what they need," Jones said.

Trouble recruiting

Even with the incentives, Charlotte has had difficulty recruiting and keeping veteran teachers in high-poverty schools. The CMS 2009 equity report found that "the rate of improvement is insufficient" in meeting staffing goals at high-poverty schools

Gorman's bid to send veteran teachers to high-poverty schools has been repeatedly nixed by the school board.

Denlinger, of the Wake partnership, argues that Charlotte's difficulties getting top teachers into needy classrooms help show why Wake's approach to reduce the number of poverty schools is better. Wake has a lower teacher turnover rate than Charlotte.

Wake doesn't offer teachers incentives to work in high-poverty schools. Wake does spend at least $8.7 million in local dollars to support state programs to help high-risk students.

When it comes to comparing how Wake and Charlotte are doing academically, perspective counts.

Lindalyn Kakadelis, a former CMS board member, says the gap among low-income students passing both the state math and reading end-of-grade exams is two-tenths of a percentage point. She noted that Wake's lead has shrunk since Charlotte ended busing.

"It's closing favorably for CMS," said Kakadelis, now president of the N.C. Education Alliance, a group that supports more charter schools and the use of vouchers for private education, "and not favorably for Wake."

Low-income scores

The similarity in the results for low-income students plays into the arguments made by critics of Wake's diversity policy. The Wake school board recently rejected a request to study whether the diversity policy is helping individual students.

David Holdzkom, Wake's assistant superintendent for evaluation and research, counters that Wake outperforms CMS among most individual student groups on state exams. He also noted that Charlotte has far more schools with lower passing rates.

Wake school board member Eleanor Goettee said Wake schools have avoided the extremes of academic quality found in Charlotte schools.

Charlotte has more high schools than Wake in Newsweek magazine's annual list of top public high schools. But in 2005, Wake Superior Court Judge Howard E. Manning Jr. singled out four CMS high schools for committing what he called "academic genocide" against mostly black, disadvantaged students.

Charlotte has "10 outstanding high schools, and they've got others that are awful," Goettee said. "We don't want to look like that. You don't want to fall to that."

But CMS's black and low-income high-school students each had pass rates of 55 percent on 2008 exams, compared with 53 percent for Wake black students and 52 percent for low-income ones.

Starks, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg parent, said it's a case of agreeing to disagree over the better approach.

"I think we sometimes get a bad rap from Wake County," Starks said. "In my opinion, I don't think you're doing anything superior to what we're doing in Charlotte. We're both trying to do the right thing. We're just doing it differently."