Friday, December 7, 2007

Reassignment Countdown

Like many of you, I am anxiously awaiting the release of the reassignment plan. Unlike many of you, this is the first year that I've had to worry about it affecting my children directly. This is our first year at our base school, having been at a magnet the previous 4 years. So here I am with that same feeling of dread that so many of you across the county are feeling right now. Except now I have the added guilt of having taken my children out of their protected status and throwing them into this mess.


I've been thinking a lot lately about the desire for stability and what lengths parents will go to achieve it. Private schools, charter schools, homeschooling, and the magnet schools. A good friend of mine said something last year that really struck me. I asked if she had seen that some nodes near her had been reassigned to a year round school and her response was "Well, that's why we were smart enough to go to a magnet school".

I have two big problems with this statement. First, what about all the people who applied for magnet schools but were denied? We were LUCKY enough to get into the magnet system. What about people who would like to go to a magnet but can't make it work with their family's schedule? After school care is a different issue when you don't live or work anywhere near the school. A few magnet schools have regular 'neighborhood' buses, but most offer express buses or no bus at all and that makes it more difficult to arrange child care.

Second, my only reason for applying to a magnet school was because I wanted the special program (in my case, daily Spanish instruction) that only a magnet could provide. After hearing my friend's comment, I started to pay more attention to people when they talked about the magnet they were in and why they chose to attend a magnet. Many people attend a magnet mainly to escape reassignment or to escape their assigned base school for whatever reason. The special programs are secondary to them and that frustrates me.

I don't fault them for seeking a better situation for their children, but I am frustrated that at least some of them got chosen in the 'lottery' instead of somebody who really wanted the magnet programs. Programs that WCPSS is not willing to fund for everybody. If WCPSS is going to hold special academic programs hostage in the magnet schools then families who actually want those programs should be able to get them. Of course there is no answer to this because nobody is going to admit at application time that they are just there for the stability and not the program. But it still makes me angry that withholding academic programs is used as a weapon against families in Wake County.

Only 4.5 more hours until the assignment plan is released. Some of us will be cautiously relieved and some of us will be angry and frustrated. I know that whichever side I fall on I'll be hoping for the best for all of you. Good luck everybody.

Thursday, December 6, 2007

Updated F&R Numbers

I've been MIA for a while and hopefully that will change starting with this post. Now that the F&R figures are out for the current year, I'm updating my list of schools that are over 50% F&R. The table below shows the schools currently over 50% along with their F&R% from last year. All schools are elementary unless there is an MS after the name.

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

The Magnet "Lottery"

I was talking to an acquaintance a few weeks ago about school issues and something really surprised me. She had no idea that the magnet lottery wasn't a 'true' lottery. She thought that everybody had an equal chance of getting in--that they just drew the names out of one big "pot". This woman is highly educated and very involved in her childrens' lives and she didn't know this. It made me wonder how many other people don't know this simple truth about our system. I suspect that its a lot.

How do they choose the 'winners' of the magnet lottery if they don't just draw their names out of a hat? First, any siblings are given preference, as are students moving from a magnet elementary or middle to a magnet middle or high school. Those two criteria make sense and although it can make it harder for newcomers or students transfering from a non-magnet to get in, it is understandable. Diversity is the next and most significant criteria in choosing who gets the coveted magnet and voluntary year round seats. Higher income students coming from low poverty schools have a much better chance of getting a seat than higher income students coming from high poverty schools. Under our system, higher income students (and their families) are far too valuable to high poverty schools to let them out. If the low poverty school is overcrowded, then that's an even bigger advantage for the higher income student.

The converse is true as well. If a lower income student wants to leave a low poverty school to attend a magnet, his chances are pretty low. Not only do they need him to 'diversify' the low poverty school, but chances are that the magnet he's applying to has enough of his kind already. (Unless its a western ITB magnet, but that's a different issue altogether and one that's been addressed somewhat by the demagnetization of Root and Olds). Actually, low income students get treated the worst under this system.

Low poverty schools need low income students to diversify their student populations and it doesn't matter how they get there. If they already live in a base area near a low poverty school, they have a lower chance of being granted admission to a magnet and if they live elsewhere they can be bused into a low poverty school from as far as 15 miles away. If they live near a magnet school like Hunter or Ligon they are likely bused out to make room for the suburban/higher income students. If they do remain at the magnet school, they are often segregated from the higher income children by virtue of the special programs that are offered. The final 10% of magnet seats are drawn as a true lottery and I have talked to one BOE member who mentioned being surprised that a higher income student was let out of a high poverty school until s/he realized that the student got into the magnet under the '10% rule'.

As awful as the above instances are, the most distressing thing to me is that nowhere is the welfare or academic achievement of individual students taken into account. Diversity in our school system is a good thing, but when it is taken to the extreme it becomes a liability. When we think of our students solely as F&R numbers and not as children with individual academic, family, and social needs it is a travesty.

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Now What?

Well now that the BOE voted to demagnetize Root, Olds, Lincoln Heights, and Wake Forest Elementaries what's the next step? Obviously they will be looking at other schools at which to place the magnet programs, but how will they decide which schools? Beverley Clark has suggested Fox Road as a school to consider and it indeed has had a rocky history. Its doesn't have one of the highest F&R percentages in the county, but it has had trouble retaining its higher income base families. In the most recent reassignment plan, several nodes from North Raleigh were moved in to Fox Road, partly to lower the F&R percentage there. Many of those families objected to the move and it will be interesting to see how many will actually attend the school. In addition, I think that Fox Road is fairly underenrolled at the moment (I am operating without my laptop right now, which has all of my spreadsheets and documents on it).

It seems like a logical place to put a magnet program. Offer special academic opportunties and not only will the middle class base families will attend but more middle class families will enter through the magnet process. It's a win-win situation, right? It appears so, but it gets me thinking of other, unintended consequences. What does it say to the lower income families at the school? That the school is good enough for them but its only good enough for the middle class families if there are 'extras' available? That they don't deserve extra programs unless its to attract middle class students?

Perhaps all magnets should only have a low income base and then the rest of the seats can be filled by magnet applicants. That way, we won't have some groups of middle or upper class parents who get the magnet programs for 'free' while somebody who lives directly across the street from them but is in a different assignment node has to apply and hope that they get in. Of course it also begs the question "Why does anybody deserve the programs for 'free' while the rest of us must sacrifice"?

Removing the magnet programs from the 4 above mentioned schools was the right thing to do and it is a good first step. I'm not sure what the next step should be but I am hopeful that the decision process will open up the door for some honest discussion about fair access to magnet programs for all students in the county.

Friday, July 27, 2007

Magnet Status

As you may know, the school board decided back in May to eliminate the magnet programs at 4 elementary schools: Root, Lincoln Heights, Olds and Wake Forest. A final vote was scheduled to take place at the June 5th board meeting, but upset parents persuaded the BOE to delay the vote. What for? Magnet programs have been under review for a while now and with good reason. The magnet office did a study (although it has some flaws in my opinion), presented that information to the BOE, then the decision was made. In typical wishy washy fashion, the BOE let themselves be influenced by parent groups. The same thing happened with the original mandatory year round plan--we went from everybody converting to some form of year round to 30 schools to the final 22, all in an effort to placate some parents.

So why am I for the 'demagnetization' of these schools? Because they no longer meet the criteria for magnet schools--they are neither underenrolled nor in high poverty areas. Root has an F&R rate of 27.1%, Olds is 23%, and Wake Forest is 14.3%--well under the overall Wake County F&R rate of 32%. Admittedly, I do not know enough about Lincoln Heights and its base area to make a judgment, but I do know enough about the other three. Wake Forest Elementary is an Equity Magnet, meaning that nobody can apply to attend. It is only comprised of a base population that is 14.3% F&R, which is the 12th lowest F&R rate for Wake elementary schools. WFE students enjoy electives such as dance, foreign language, and orchestra in their own neighborhood school--no long bus rides downtown like the rest of us.

Root and Olds are true magnets, but they have large neighborhood base areas and actually bus low income children into their schools from downtown. So not only do they have low F&R rates, but many of the F&R children don't even live in the area around the school. This would be the equivalent of putting a magnet program in at Wakefield Elementary. You can take a look at their base attendance maps here:
Root Attendance Map

Olds Attendance Map

There has been some talk of Olds and Wake Forest finding their own funding so they can keep some of the magnet programs at their schools. Sounds reasonable, right? But what about the other schools that would like to offer extras to their students but are prohibited from doing so? Will the BOE and WCPSS allow any school to offer band, orchestra, or other extras if they come up with the money themselves? No, because then not enough families from those schools will apply to magnets and they want those higher income 'suburban' families to attend magnets. Although I can sympathize with the base families at Root, Olds and Wake Forest, if WCPSS allows them to keep their programs then all schools should be allowed to offer special programs.

Friday, July 20, 2007

Decision Time

Are we in a capacity crisis in our schools? WCPSS and the BOE say yes, but their actions say no. Sure, they converted 22 schools to the year round calendar, but even before Judge Manning's ruling they denied applicants to voluntary year round if it didn't suit their diversity goals. After Manning's ruling, when families could opt out of year round and WCPSS found many of their year round schools underenrolled, they still refused to allow students into the year round seats.

My husband and I applied for year round for our two elementary age sons. After being initally rejected, we pursued it all the way through the appeals process. We offered to attend any track at any of the four year round schools located within five miles of our home. We were denied those schools but were offered one 11 miles away, which we turned down. After the latest figures were released showing two of our choices at less than 80% capacity we made some additional phone calls asking them to please reconsider our applicantion, but they still turned us down. I asked Growth Management why and the answer was "We're leaving those seats open for new growth".

Only 13% of applicants were accepted this year at our year round option, Durant Road Elementary, which is severely overcrowded. Even though Durant has been overcrowded and hard to get into for several years now, the BOE voted to assign a new higher income node there for next year. Why would they do this when that means there are even fewer seats available to applicants? I asked Growth Management when they were going to offer families in my area a true year round option. The answer? If we do that, then too many higher income families will apply and the F&R numbers will increase at surrounding schools.

WCPSS and the BOE caused upheaval and lost the trust of some families with the year round conversions, but now they are blatantly squandering this new resource that they've fought so hard for. They continue to whine and blame Judge Manning's decision for the underenrolled year round schools and overcrowded traditional schools, but they only have themselves to blame. Its decision time, WCPSS. Which is the most pressing issue, finding seats for all of our students or trying to balance the F&R rates? It seems you can't do both.

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Some Interesting Reading

I found this article online today and thought it was a fairly balanced look at our school issues even though its a bit dated. Its not too long and its quite readable. Enjoy!

Wake County Schools: A Question of Balance

Equal Representation?

We all know that the WCPSS is split into 9 districts, with each electing a member of the Board of Education. Most of us assume that those districts are fairly drawn and that we are adequately represented. However, the districts are only redrawn after each major US Census--every 10 years. So with all of the 'explosive growth' we've experienced in Wake County since 2000, I wonder how well these districts are representing us now.

I haven't quite figured out exactly how they decide where to draw the district lines, but I did find some comments on the WCPSS website about how the lines are redrawn. From here

ATTORNEY BRIEFS BOARD ON REDISTRICTING
Attorney Michael Crowell talked to the Board of Education at its Monday (March 19) meeting about redistricting the Board of Education seats. Crowell told the Board after each federal census, election districts must be redrawn to meet the standard of one person, one vote. Crowell said that means the districts must not differ in population by more than ten percent. Crowell noted that there is no secret that population growth over the last ten years has shifted to the county's west. He said computer software will help advise on changes that need to be made. He offered a series of guidelines for use in redistricting based on the 1990 redistricting.
· To comply with one-person, one-vote, no district should be more than five percent above or below the population of the ideal-size district.
· Districts should not split precincts.
· Each district should retain their present configuration to the extent feasible.
· Districts should be reasonably compact.
· Outside Raleigh and Cary, incorporated municipalities should not be split.
· The area of concentrated African-American population centered in Southeast Raleigh should not be divided unnecessarily.
· To avoid questions about adequate representation, new boundaries should not be drawn to take incumbents out of their districts.
· In analyzing district population balance, political party registration should not be taken into account.
· Areas that expect the greatest population growth should have districts with the lowest population, and areas that expect lower growth should have districts with the greatest population.
Board chairman Bill Fletcher said the public would be offered the opportunity to comment on the guidelines in the public hearing at the April 2 board meeting.


I also found a brief follow up on how the districts were adjusted. From here

BOARD APPROVES REDISTRICTING
A new redistricting plan for Wake school board seats was approved by the Board of Education at its Tuesday night meeting (May 29). The board used data from the 2000 Census and advice from its legal staff to draw districts equal in population. The nine districts had to include between 66,723 and 73,249 voters to meet legal requirements. Growth in the past decade has occurred in western and Southwest Wake, and those two districts shrunk. Central and Southeast Raleigh had the least growth. Those districts grew. Fuquay-Varina and Willow Springs moved from District 8 in Southwest Wake to District 2, which now primarily consists of Garner. Some precincts in South Raleigh shifted from District 2 to District 4.


I was not able to find current population numbers for each district, but I did take a look at how many students are in each district. While its not an accurate look at district representation, I found it interesting nonetheless. If nothing else, I think it gives us an additional criteria to consider when redrawing the district lines in 2010: number of students in each district should be more equal. Eleanor Goattee represents less than half as many students as some of her colleagues, but her vote carries the same weight.



Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Another Look

The data in my last post seemed to show that Economically Disadvantaged (ED) elementary students aren't affected as strongly by rising F&R rates as Non-ED elementary students are. Actually, it didn't seem to indicate that F&R rates made much difference at all on the passing rates of ED students, which honestly surprised me. I decided to look at the same information in another way to see if it yielded different results.


Remember that the Wake County average for elementary students passing both the reading and math EOGs are 45.9% for ED students and 83.9 for NED. The passing rates for elementary ED students ran from a low of 19.7% at Poe to a high of 76.9% at Cedar Fork. For elementary NED students, they ranged from a low of 50% at Brentwood to a high of >95% at Washington, Apex and Dillard Drive.

Again, I am not a statistician and I'm not intending to prove or disprove anything. I do not know what the answers are nor how I would change the diversity policy. What I do know is that I am not willing to simply shuffle children around to make F&R numbers look good and call it a success. Academic achievement of all children should be the number one goal of WCPSS and we need to seriously question whether or not this particular policy is raising achievement.

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Does the Diversity Policy Make a Difference?

Surrounding lower income children with higher income children is supposed to help them achieve. It makes perfect sense, really. Children from higher income families often have higher expectations placed on them by parents and teachers alike. Being surrounded by children who have more expected of them will rub off on the low income/low achieving children. Those from bad home environments can see a different way of life that may inspire them to work towards a higher goal. I have always believed this theory because it makes logical sense to me and because I really want it to be true. I want to believe that something so relatively simple can make a positive difference in these childrens' lives.

As I mentioned in my first blog entry, the distance that some of the low income children are bused has been a concern of mine. After spending four years sending my children to a magnet school that is 11 miles from our home, my husband and I made the very difficult decision to leave. The distance, and more importantly, the amount of time we spend taking our children to and from school has gotten to be too much to bear. We have no bus service offered to us, although for the past 2 years we have been 'illegally' using an express bus stop that is about 7.5 miles away from home. Using that stop brought our commute time down from almost 2 hours a day to about 1 hour and 40 minutes a day.

I realize that the low income nodes assigned far from home are given bus service to and from school, but what about parent/teacher conferences, volunteering, attending special programs or even picking up a sick child from school? Most of us take these things for granted but when you attend school that far from home it becomes a real issue. When you don't have a car and/or work a job with inflexible hours it is more than an inconvenience, it is a burden. When the assignment plans are announced each year, the public is given the opportunity to make comments online. Anybody can request to see those comments, which I did this past year. One comment in particular really put things in perspective for me. A single mother who was also a student at NCSU requested that her child not be assigned to the proppsed school, which was fairly far away. She stated that if her child missed the bus or needed to be picked up for some reason, she could not afford the cab fare to get to the school. Like I said, most of us take it for granted that we can get to our childrens' school if we need to. What about those who can't? Does WCPSS take this into consideration when they assign children so far from home?

WCPSS and some groups claim that busing these children to higher income schools is for their benefit, but I've yet to see any proof of this. Wake does not track the performance of these children before and after they are moved so all we have to go on is the good hearted belief that this will work. So I decided to do a little research on my own to see what I could come up with. I do not have information to track the performance of students who are bused a long way vs those that aren't, but we can look at the theory that lower income children perform better in higher income environments.

I freely admit that I am not a statistician, nor am I a professional researcher. I relied upon data from WCPSS and the NC School Report Cards. Performance on the End Of Grade tests (EOGs) is really the only reliable statistic that I had available to me, and I looked at the rates at which both Economically Disadvantaged (ED) and Non Economically Disadvantaged(NED)students passed both the reading and math EOGs. I have only looked at the scores for elementary age students so far, and only at grades 3-5 since EOGs are not given to K-2 students. 5 new elementary schools opened for the 2006-07 school year and therefore did not have scores available.


The state average for Economically Disadvantaged students passing
BOTH the math and reading EOGs is 45.1%. Wake County average is 45.9% with individual schools ranging from 19.7% to 76.9%



The state average for Non Economically Disadvantaged students passing both tests is 75.4%. Wake's average is 83.9%, with individual schools ranging from 50% to more than 95%.


Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Exceeding the Limit.

We all know that WCPSS's diversity policy calls for no schools to have more than 40% of their students receiving free and reduced lunch. Most people know that we have some schools that exceed that upper limit. What most people do not know is how far out of compliance some of the schools are or where they are located. These figures are not publicized by WCPSS and it is never reported by the local or national media. Wake County receives accolades for its diversity policy but it is never held up to any scrutiny.

In the 2006-07 school year WCPSS had 16 elementary schools with more than 50% F&R.

Vandora Springs51.8%
Powell52.6Gifted/Talented Magnet
Fox Road53.8
Zebulon54.8Gifted/Talented Equity Magnet*
Aversboro56.4
River Bend56.9
Knightdale58.1
Millbrook58.3International Baccalaureate Magnet
Barwell Road59.3
Wilburn60.9
Creech Road61.8
Hodge Road64.0
Carver64.9
Brentwood66.7
Smith69.4
Wakelon71.4



*Equity magnets do not allow applications. Equity magnets were put in place to keep middle class families from fleeing those schools.

Note that these are the figures for this past school year, before Judge Manning's ruling. His ruling may make it harder for the school system to distribute F&R students evenly, but they weren't doing so well at it in the first place. I will update with the figures for the 2007-08 school year when they are released.

My Voice

I’m about as liberal as they come. Not Chapel Hill liberal, mind you, but liberal none the less. When we moved to Raleigh in 1998 I was surprised and delighted to learn that Wake County Public Schools had a diversity policy in place. I was proud to live in a community that wanted to prevent inner city schools full of low income, mostly minority students that nobody wanted to teach at or send their children to. Coming from Illinois, I had witnessed this very thing in the Chicago area and it wasn’t pretty. I was concerned about the distance that some of the low income children were bused but I felt that the payoff was worth it.

I always rode a bus to school, so I don’t wax nostalgic for neighborhood schools within walking distance. I know it is not feasible in the quickly growing, sprawling areas of Wake County, but I do think it makes sense for students to attend a school within a reasonable distance of their homes. They should not be traveling 10 miles from home and passing by 4 or 5 other schools to get to their own. Not only is it wasteful in terms of busing, but local schools foster community in a way that distant schools cannot. I also think that special academic opportunities should be available to everybody in Wake County, not just a select few.

I had always believed, as do most people I know, that schools in central and southeast Raleigh would be in dire straits if it weren’t for diversity busing and magnet programs. That poverty in the county was concentrated in central and southeast Raleigh and offering magnet programs was the only way to ensure those schools’ health. I also believed that the rest of the county was fairly well off in comparison and attending magnets in order to get special programs was a necessary and fair sacrifice for us to make. After a few years of driving my children 11 miles each way to and from a magnet school in a neighborhood that I cannot afford to buy a house in, I really started to question the school system’s policies. Who is benefitting from them and who is being hurt? I began looking up facts for myself instead of relying on what WCPSS and the media were reporting. I’ve decided to share what I’ve found with others so we can all be more informed about what is really happening in our school system and to ensure that we all receive equal access to a quality education.