Achieving socioeconomic desegregation and diversity: One district's retrenchment from 21st century school integration

In his 2009 book, Hope and despair in the American city: Why there are no bad schools in Raleigh, sociologist Gerald Grant  compares two cities—his former hometown of Syracuse, New York, and Raleigh, North Carolina—in order to more closely examine the consequences of the nation’s ongoing school integration efforts.  Grant argues that the main reason for Raleigh’s educational success is the focus of their school integration efforts based on socioeconomic class that occurred when the city voluntarily merged with the surrounding suburbs back in 1976 to create the Wake County Public School System. By contrast, the primary cause of Syracuse’s decline has been the growing socioeconomic and racial segregation of its metropolitan schools, which has left the city mired in poverty.

With its sprawling 800 square miles, the Wake County Public School System includes a varied geographical landscape, ranging from urban public housing units in Raleigh, wealthy suburbs just outside the capital city, and booming towns being increasingly populated by newcomers to the area.  Traditionally, large areas such as Wake County would be broken down into smaller school districts with students assigned to public schools located nearest to them.  

Back in 2000, the Wake County Public School System shifted their school integration policy from one focused exclusively on race to socioeconomic desegregation, adopting a district-wide diversity policy that held that no individual school in the district should have more than 40 percent of its students qualify for free or reduced lunch.  In order to attract middle-class and wealthy students, the district implemented a variety of student assignments, choice policies, and quality magnet programs located in the district's poorer neighborhoods.   Amazingly, a majority of Democratic and Republican school board members supported Wake County's new diversity plan for improving the district's school integration efforts.  

In addition to achieving greater student diversity, Wake County experienced significant increases in state reading and math test scores.  In 2007, for example, EdWeek magazine ranked the Wake County Public Schools 17th among the nation's 50 largest public school districts in graduation completion rates.

In the last year, however, a newly elected majority school board has essentially abolished Wake County's diversity policy claiming it fostered a type of "social engineering".  Without a diversity policy currently in place, Wake County will likely return to an all too familiar pattern experienced by the majority of public school districts across the county-schools in wealthier neighborhoods often do well while schools located in poorer neighborhoods struggle.   

It is no surprise that the NAACP has recently filed a civil rights complaint arguing that recently approved student transfers under the new Wake County school board have already increased racial segregation in the district. 

It is my hope that increased national attention to the recent Wake County school board's retrenchment from a successful school integration policy centering on socioeconomic desegregation which has increased both student diversity and test scores will question why the district's successful diversity policy was abolished in the first place.   

In a recent “Disintegration” segment on the popular, The Colbert Report, comedian Stephen Colbert mocked the Wake County school board's controversial policy change of doing away with busing students for diversity in favor of neighborhood-based schools.  Hopefully, this type of national attention to the school integration issue in Wake County will result in more thoughtful and rigorous commentary and discussion relating to the direction of school integration policies in a 21st century global society.  Check out the video at this link:  http://www.wral.com/news/education/wake_county_schools/story/8963193/