Blue Plan--What's Missing?

Before the BOE votes on which of the two plans to pursue, they really need to take some time to think about what information is missing from these plans. There are several pieces of information that I would like to see released and questions answered so we can better understand how the plan will affect each of us.

Proximity & Capacity

• How many students live within 1.5 miles of each school?
• Maps showing each school's 1.5 mile assignment area.
• How many students have each school as their 'closest' school?
• Maps showing each school's 'closest school' assignment area.
• How many seats are available in each school? How is that capacity determined? Will capacity be manipulated to ensure achievement balance?
• How many 'achievement choice' seats are being set aside in each school?
• Maps for each achievement school showing which low performing nodes have that school as an achievement option.
• Maps for each school showing which nodes have that school as one of their base options.
• Which schools have enough capacity (after the achievement seats are set aside) to accommodate all the children living within 1.5 miles? Which can accommodate all children who have each school as their closest? How many seats are left over at each school after accommodating all 'closest' and 'achievement' students?
  

Magnets

• What is the percentage of magnets seats set aside for magnet application students? Will it be the same percentage for each magnet school? If not, how will the percentage be determined for each magnet? Currently, magnets range from about 7% to 73% magnet application students.
  
• How will the magnets located in higher wealth areas be handled? We currently have several magnets that have their low income students bused in from outside the surrounding base nodes. Those are also the magnets that have experienced overcrowding and lowered the number of magnet acceptances to deal with that crowding.
• How will magnet seats be doled out? Will it be a true lottery? The green plan mentions using achievement as the criteria but there is no mention of any criteria at all in the blue plan. (Unless I am missing something--I looked and looked. If I'm wrong, somebody please point it out to me!)
  
• "In addition, a set percentage of non-magnet school seats will be reserved to accommodate calendar and achievement choices for students living in close proximity to magnet schools". What exactly does this mean? Are there seats set aside in each of the non-magnet choices on their list? What percentage?
• Is there enough room for all students who live near magnet schools to get a traditional calendar? Is there enough room in their proximate school options for all who want to stay close to home? Washington Terrace students (node 76), for example, are given the following elementary school choices (in proximity order): Hunter, Powell, Olds, Green, Dillard & Weatherstone. Hunter and Powell are both magnets with a limited amount of seats available to area students and Olds is one of our smallest elementary schools. How many students living in node 76 can be placed in those 3 schools? Green is Year Round, which has proven to be unpopular with lower income families. That leaves Dillard and Weatherstone as their remaining 2 traditional options; Dillard is about 6 miles away and Weatherstone is 16 miles away. I fear that low income children will still be bused far away for 'balance' whether they want to be or not.

Calendar

• What will be done to ensure calendar choice for people who only have one traditional or year round choice in their list of schools? If the only school with the calendar you desire is not your closest school, what are the chances you will get in?
• Will track continuity be guaranteed for elementary and middle school? The plan states ". . . track preferences will not be guaranteed other than the assurance that families with more than one student in a year-round school will be guaranteed track continuity within the family." Does that mean more than one student in a particular year round school or more than one student on the year round calendar? I would assume that it would be the latter but I have learned over the years that you can't assume anything.
  

Achievement

• Will we have access to achievement scores for all schools, with the data for each component of the calculation? Is it possible that an achievement school can be failing its low achieving students?
• Will feeder patterns be logical or will they be developed with achievement balance in mind? For instance, will a high performing, sought after elementary feed into a lower performing under enrolled middle school to increase achievement? Will a low performing elementary school feed into a high achieving middle school for balance?
• If parents do not participate in the choice process, where will they be sent? The plan states "Families who decline to make selections will be assigned to a school by the school system based on available seats consistent with the overall intentions of the plan". Will they be assigned to one of the base schools on their list or could they be placed anywhere the system wants to send them for achievement balance? If the latter is the case, then there isn't much incentive for WCPSS to promote parent participation.
  

How Does F&R % Affect EOG Passing Rates? Updated

As I was updating my spreadsheets with EOG passing rates from the 2006-07 NC Report Cards, I noticed that I made a mistake the first time I posted these figures. I used the F&R percentages from 2006-07 but the EOG passing rates from 2005-06. So I redid the tables with the F&R and EOG rates from the same years. Not much changed--the results still show that the Non-Economically Disadvantaged (NED) children's EOG scores went down as F&R went up while the Economically Disadvantaged (ED) children's scores didn't seem to follow any pattern.

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.

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%.