RALEIGH – The rhetoric is getting increasingly strident in Wake County right now, where the establishment has long fancied itself to be both the pacesetter and the conscience of education policy in North Carolina. Now, faced with the very real possibility of a political backlash against the forced-busing policies of the state’s largest school district, Wake officials are thrusting their fists defiantly into the air.
I hope they don’t sprain anything. Clearly, though, Wake officials and their apologists in local lobbying groups and editorial boards are straining.
They are straining passionately to preserve an unpopular busing policy that jerks thousands of students and their families around from year to year, treating children as a means to some social-engineering end rather than as ends in themselves.
They are also straining mightily to recover from the past couple of weeks of news devastating to Wake County’s case. First it was reporting by The Charlotte Observer and News & Observer of test score data showing that despite very different assignment policies, students in Wake and Charlotte-Mecklenburg don’t differ much in achievement level when demographics are taken into account. (This wasn’t exactly news to those paying close attention to the issue over the years, but it had never gotten such prominent placement on the front pages.) Shortly thereafter, a new study by a Queens University researcher showed that Wake students don’t show greater improvement than CMS students do over time – and indeed that in some categories the CMS kids posted larger achievement gains.
Finally, Wake officials and their apologists are straining desperately to keep the public from drawing an even-broader conclusion from the available data: that massive school districts such as Wake and Charlotte-Mecklenburg may simply be too large to manage effectively. After a decades-long trend of merging city and county schools into unified systems – sometimes justifying the mergers on diversity grounds, other times on financial ones – there is scant evidence of overall advantages in efficiency or performance.
Indeed, as I have previously noted, the major North Carolina school systems with the highest achievement levels for disadvantaged students happen to be Chapel Hill/Carrboro, Asheville City, and Buncombe County – which are precisely the urban systems that have yet to be merged into countywide behemoths (although Sen. Tony Rand is again trying to force them to). Along with raising academic standards and increasing parental choice, a key element of any sensible education-reform agenda should be to downsize schools and school districts, moving power and decisions closer to the families and communities they serve.
In the face of all this public anger and empirical evidence, it must indeed be quite a strain to keep defending Wake County’s indefensible student-assignment policy. My advice is that the defenders move on to a more worthwhile cause. Probably won’t, though.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation