RALEIGH – Critics of Wake County’s controversial forced-busing policies easily won three out of the four school board races in Tuesday’s balloting. In the fourth race, incumbent school-board member and busing proponent Horace Tart ran third behind critic John Tedesco (49 percent) and semi-critic Cathy Truitt (24 percent). At this writing, it’s not yet clear if there will be a runoff.
It was a clear defeat for the current board, the current administration of the school district, and much of the political establishment of Wake County. The Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce sent an increasingly desperate series of emails to its members, not-so-subtly encouraging members to vote the other way. Other groups and associations did, too. While covering both sides in its news pages, the Raleigh News & Observer printed a series of editorials and columns pleading with readers to vote the other way. The day before the vote, an array of civic and business bigwigs held a press conference warning of dire consequences unless Wake residents voted the other way.
Tuesday’s electorate shrugged all this off and voted decisively against the school system’s unpopular mix of constant reassignments, long bus rides, compulsory year-round schooling, and mendacious claims.
After the bigwigs sit down and recover their bearings, you can expect them to issue a jumble of excuses in an attempt to explain the result away and salvage their social-engineering program.
For example, they will say that Tuesday’s low turnout invalidates the vote as a true indicator of public sentiment. Of course, they had no problem with all the past low-turnout elections for school board as long as their favored candidates won. Will they also tell Charles Meeker, newly reelected the mayor of Raleigh, that he shouldn’t move forward with his agenda because too few voters showed up? Nope.
Charges of hypocrisy having lost their sting over the years, however, I’d respond more directly that Tuesday’s vote is entirely in line with public sentiment. In an early September poll of Wake County voters, the Civitas Institute found that only 28 percent favored the system’s current policy of assigning some students to year-round schools against their parents’ wishes. Nearly 70 percent of voters said parents should be given a choice. A similar percentage expressed opposition to Wake’s busing policies. So the voters who turned out Tuesday were, if anything, a little less critical of the school system than the ones who stayed home.
Excuse Number One fails.
Another excuse Wake’s aghast elitists will offer is that county voters were bamboozled by selective statistics and misleading rhetoric about the results of diversity-based assignments and forced busing. This is a classic case of projection – the defenders of the system having themselves engaged in a massive and expensive attempt to misinform voters about the subject.
The truth is that, as I wrote some time ago, once the test scores and graduation rates from Wake and other urban school systems across the state become available by demographic group, Wake’s extravagant claims about the success of its diversity policies were exposed as utterly without foundation. Disadvantaged students in Wake do not score significantly better than their counterparts in other districts that don’t use forced busing and mandatory year-round assignments. Indeed, on some measures Wake’s poor students score worse. It’s pretty much the same story with graduation rates.
In other words, to the rational and unbiased observer, the substantive debate was over long ago. Wake County’s unpopular assignment policies don’t work. They’ve been making parents and taxpayers angry for years for no good reason. Excuse Number Two fails.
On Tuesday, voters finally brought the electoral results in line with the academic ones. Rather than continuing to make excuses, the political and educational establishment of Wake County needs to get some inkling of a clue.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation