POL: Victory for the little guy in Wake County NC

[gstelmack]

Voters call for end to Wake schools diversity policy :: WRAL.com (http://www.wral.com/news/local/politics/story/6150533/)

This is huge because all the political big-wigs and head of media companies in this area are all for the diversity/busing policy and have control of the news outlets, which means it is very difficult to get the facts out about the issues with the diversity policy, notably that it is miserably failing the kids it is supposed to help while constantly reassigning kids to new schools. A good example is Battle wages over school diversity policy on election eve :: WRAL.com (http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/6139279/), where they talk about all the local leaders worried about the election destroying the policy, while the bottom of the article presents a recent study by SAS that points out that Wake County is doing the worst job in the state at educating its poor. And getting that study mention required an uproar here when the local news outlets glossed over and ignored it in favor of their pom-pom waving.

So a big deal to stuff it in the face of the power elite and the media to get folks in that care about stability in education.

[albionmoonlight]

Leaving aside the merits of diversity in schools, I will say that the implementation of the Wake policies has been really bad. I work with people who have put their kids into private school, not because the quality of the public schools were bad but because they didn't have any sense of where their kids would be going to school from year to year.

That said, I hope that the piss-poor implementation of Wake's diversity policy does not turn people off to diversity in education generally. The overall idea is good. It was just being done horribly.

[JPhillips]

So students are assigned schools each year? That does sound terrible.

[M GO BLUE!!!]

Blame Obama.

[gstelmack]

So students are assigned schools each year? That does sound terrible.

No, they are changing which school a child is assigned to regularly. There are neighborhoods assigned to different schools every 3 years or so. Each year around 8 - 10% of students in the county are assigned to a different school than they would have gone to the year prior, which means within a fairly short number of years nearly everyone has switched, and some multiple times. Basically what albion said: you may start a child at one school, only to have them switched to another partway through. You cannot buy a house knowing what school kids will go to. Kids can't make friends at school.

They also are using hit-or-miss year-round schedules, mostly at the elementary level, some at the middle school level, and none at all at the high school level, which means there are families with children on 3 different school calendars.

Plus they use busing to implement the diversity policy, which has kids as young as elementary school getting up at 5AM to catch a bus and not getting home until early evening because they are being sent across the county. Not to mention the difficulties this causes for after-school activities, sports, and other extra-curriculars.

With grandfathering, you can actually have kids in the same house going to different schools at the same level: one child doing their senior year at one high school, while another is doing their freshman year at a different one.

Then there is the hypocrisy in the system: addresses near school board members never seem to get reassigned, they'll claim the size of the reassignments is because of growth when over half of the reassignments can be directly tied to the diversity policy, a strong push for mandatory year-round schedules when they can't find seats for half the kids that WANT a year-round schedule, ignoring strong evidence that the policy is not actually improving education for the poor kids they are so concerned about to the point of refusing to study it or provide numbers to back up their claims, a complete lack of planning ahead, etc. It's become blindingly obvious that they are more concerned about diversity for diversity's sake than they are about actually educating the children.

It's all a trainwreck for parents, at least those that actually care about their kid's education.

[JediKooter]

Hmmmm...school boards...Where reason and competence take a year round vacation.

[Celeval]

Really big deal here, and a strong statement made. There was an 8-1 split in favor of the diversity policy (which, to be clear, is diversity by socioeconomics and not race), with four seats up for election - all of which were previously held by supporters of the policy. The three who won outright won big - 58% to 35%, 64% to 35%, 59% to 40% to make it a 4-4 split. The remaining seat is going to a runoff, with the candidate opposing the policy taking 49.38% of the vote (3289 votes for 50%+1, he got 3247), the candidate in favor of the policy out of the running with 22.83%, and a candidate who "supports diversity but doesn't like the policy" having 23.72% of the vote. Lots of attention there in the coming weeks.

[JonInMiddleGA]

Sounds like the process is a major cluster**** but some of the things don't sound all that unusual to me.

There are neighborhoods assigned to different schools every 3 years or so.

Have seen that here in Athens-Clarke, most recently this year.

Each year around 8 - 10% of students in the county are assigned to a different school than they would have gone to the year prior, which means within a fairly short number of years nearly everyone has switched, and some multiple times.

That's a cluster.

you may start a child at one school, only to have them switched to another partway through. You cannot buy a house knowing what school kids will go to.

Now that's pretty common as far as I can tell. Anybody who moves into an area in Georgia with more than a couple of schools in a grade level thinking they aren't subject to being switched hasn't been paying attention at all. And even in places with, say, only 2-3 middle schools system wide get switched at least once pretty regularly I believe. Take my niece as an anecdote, only three middle schools in the county, and she saw 'em all in a four year period (one of them started with 5th, the others with 6th)

Kids can't make friends at school.

Meh. Might as well teach 'em now that with the transient nature of US society today, pretty much everyone they meet in K-12 and especially in K-8 is temporary. Even without redistricting schools, there aren't all that many kids who spend K-12 with each other any more, public nor private.

The rest of the stuff does indeed sound totally FUBAR.

[Logan]

New Jersey would require the National Guard to deal with the parents if this ever happened there.

[Celeval]

Now that's pretty common as far as I can tell. Anybody who moves into an area in Georgia with more than a couple of schools in a grade level thinking they aren't subject to being switched hasn't been paying attention at all. And even in places with, say, only 2-3 middle schools system wide get switched at least once pretty regularly I believe. Take my niece as an anecdote, only three middle schools in the county, and she saw 'em all in a four year period (one of them started with 5th, the others with 6th).

Sure, but aren't those generally still somewhat local? I mean, I live between two schools and if I get bounced back and forth between them... well, whatever. But going local, then 40 minutes away, then 20 minutes in another direction?

[JonInMiddleGA]

Sure, but aren't those generally still somewhat local? I mean, I live between two schools and if I get bounced back and forth between them... well, whatever. But going local, then 40 minutes away, then 20 minutes in another direction?

Eh, probably 20 minutes apart for my niece I guess, although generally in the same direction; i.e. one was 10 minutes from home, the second was maybe another 15 more minutes further away, the last was kind of 15-20 minutes in a different direction. But that's in a small exurban county without much in the way of traffic.

I will say that in Athens-Clarke, most of the shuffle didn't change travel times by much at all. The only two HS are actually fairly close together, and the redraw was ostensibly geographical so if you changed schools it was mostly different direction maybe 10 minutes +/- change vs the original.