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%.