RALEIGH – For more than a year, the Left has made defending Wake County’s forced-busing program a cause célèbre – not just within North Carolina but among liberal activists across the nation. The effort has been an utter failure, much like the program it was designed to defend.
First the Left fought tooth and nail last fall against the election of four new conservative members to the Wake school board. But the voters elected a new majority, anyway, turning out in record numbers to vote against unpopular policies such as mandatory year-round schools, frequent reassignments, and forced busing for diversity (as opposed to voluntary busing to satisfy parental demand).
And last winter, when the newly elected members began to follow through on their promise to end the system’s busing policy in favor of parental choice and community schools, the Left launched an even more strident defense of the status quo – featuring protests, personal attacks, and not-at-all-civil disobedience.
This effort has also failed. There is no groundswell of support for forced busing, no realistic prospect of defending it through litigation, and no indication that the conservative majority on the Wake board has changed its intentions.
Why did the effort fail? It was not for a lack of resources. The Left has received copious and largely favorable press coverage, assistance from well-funded interest groups, and widespread support within North Carolina’s education establishment and political class.
The Left’s problems are both substantial and stylistic. Liberals have tried to convince the public to embrace a policy that hasn’t achieved its stated goal of improving achievement among disadvantaged students. And in doing so, liberals have disregarded the public’s opinions, insulted the public’s intelligence, and questioned the public’s moral character.
Not surprisingly, their strategy has backfired.
The substantial problem is the big one. When Wake County converted its race-based diversity program into a poverty-based diversity program a decade ago, in response to the court-ordered end of forced busing in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, county leaders said the goal was to help low-income students succeed by avoiding the neighborhood-based assignment policies that Mecklenburg and other counties were implementing.
Wake officials got it wrong. Districts that adopted policies allowing parents to choose community schools made impressive gains. Wake’s performance stagnated.
The 2009-10 test scores released earlier this month tell the story plainly. Wake’s poor kids have lower reading and math scores than in Charlotte-Mecklenburg or the state as a whole. Wake County’s black kids have lower reading and math scores than in Charlotte-Mecklenburg. And the graduation rates for Wake County’s poor kids and black kids are below the state average.
No amount of spin can convert these results into success. No other district in North Carolina uses diversity-based student assignments the way Wake does. And most schools in North Carolina outperform those in Wake at teaching disadvantaged students.
Faced with a basic message problem, the Left chose to emphasize emotional appeals, adopting the language and tactics of the civil-rights movement. But these were appropriate two generations ago, when government school districts assigned children by the color of their skin and enforced racial segregation by law and, sometimes, bully club. To assert that today’s conservative politicians and activists – and the majority of North Carolina voters, of all backgrounds, who agree with them on this issue – are little more than modern-day Klansmen is to seek to offend and provoke, not to persuade.
Furthermore, the public can spot the Left’s phony-baloney inconsistencies:
• Liberals claim that Wake only buses three percent of its students on diversity grounds. If true, what’s all the hullabaloo about? A shift of three percent of students couldn’t possibly affect the socioeconomic balance of schools enough to be consequential, much less calamitous.
• Liberals claim that conservative school board members who grew up outside North Carolina don’t understand the history and share the values that led to Wake’s assignment policy. But liberals don’t hesitate to cite the approval of newspapers and left-wing groups in New York, Washington, and elsewhere as evidence that Wake’s assignment policy is “nationally acclaimed.”
• Liberals try to explain Wake’s poor performance on recent state tests by arguing that, despite efforts to the contrary, the county has already begun to fall short of its diversity goals. This explanation makes no sense. North Carolina school systems with greater concentrations of high-poverty schools are doing better than Wake!
To make these kinds of arguments, liberals must possess either an ignorance of logic or a belief that voters are ignorant and illogical. Neither possession is worth much in political debate.
Why has the Left failed in its defense of Wake’s busing policy? Because the policy is clearly unsuccessful and unpopular. Why have its defenders become increasingly angry? Because their failure is obvious, even to themselves.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.