Vote Oct. 6 for Tedesco, Prickett, Goldman & Malone for School Board!

Election day is drawing near and we have the opportunity to make positive changes to the Wake County School Board. Four seats are up for election this year and there is a clear choice for each of those seats. If you are unsure if you live in one of the districts up for election, you can find out at www.sboe.state.nc.us. As a member of the Wake Schools Community Alliance, I am proud to endorse the following candidates:

District 1 (Wake Forest, Rolesville, Knightdale, Zebulon & Wendell): Chris Malone
Chris Malone is the only candidate in this 3 person race who has a real grasp of the issues. Malone supports community based schools but recognizes that they aren't a magic bullet to fix all of our system's problems. He wants to implement new approaches to reachstruggling students because merely busing them around hasn't worked. He supports expanding magnet opportunities and believes that the current discriminatory magnet selection process is wrong. He also believes that year round schools should be voluntary.

Malone's opponents are Debbie Vair and Rita Rakestraw. Although Vair agrees with Malone on many issues, her entrance into this race seems to be motivated mostly by her oppposition to the proposed high school on Forestville Road. Rakestraw doesn't seem to understand the issues of her district at all. She believes that there are no mandatory year round schools--that everybody has a traditional and a year round option and they go to the one they want. She is a supporter of the current diversity policy even though it has actually harmed Eastern Wake county. Eastern Wake has a high percentage of low income students yet WCPSS has stated many times that there's little they can do to lower the poverty percentages at Eastern Wake schools. The two solutions suggested by WCPSS so far have been to 1)wait for I-540 to bring higher income residential development to the area and 2)further reduce the number of magnet seats available to children in the area. Rakestraw is heavily supported by central Raleigh politicians and business leaders who are concerned with the health of central Raleigh schools and care little about Eastern Wake. Its easy to brag about the health of Wake County's 'urban' Raleigh schools if you keep the red-haired stepchild out of view. Rakestraw's support of the current diversity policy will further harm her district and will keep Eastern Wake 'left behind'.

District 2 (Garner, Fuquay-Varina): John Tedesco
John Tedesco is a dynamic man with fantastic ideas who can also bring those ideas to fruition. John grew up in poverty and changed schools frequently so he has a real understanding of what our lower income students need in order to achieve. He also works in a leadership role with the Big Brothers/Big Sisters organization and mentors at risk youth. John supports the community schools model which is advocated by Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Most importantly, John believes that low income students CAN achieve and that their families can be engaged.

Tedesco's opponents are Horace Tart, Carlene Lucas, and Cathy Truitt. Tart, the incumbent, is not troubled by the long distances traveled by many of our low income students. He believes that distance is not a factor in parental participation for low income families. They just won't participate no matter how close they are to a school so it doesn't matter how far we bus their children. This elitist attitude is also shared by Chuck Dulaney, director of Growth Managment for WCPSS. Instead of looking for ways to actually engage low income families and improve academic achievement, he's satisfied with just busing their kids around and wiping his hands clean of them. Low expectations for low income children are the norm for WCPSS and Tart will do nothing to change that. Lucas's controlled choice model is really just more of the same that we have now. Parents can apply for the school they want but acceptance is still based on low income percentages. When I first heard Truitt speak, I thought that if Tedesco wasn't in the race she'd be my pick. Since then, however, she has engaged in attack ads on her opponents that make me question what her primary motivation for seeking this office is.

District 7 (Northwest Raleigh and Morrisville): Deborah Prickett
Deborah Prickett is a Raleigh native and former teacher and school counselor who supports community based schools as a way to provide stability and increased parental involvement. Prickett supports voluntary year round, which is a big issue in this district which includes the Leesville schools. She is also in favor of getting the school board out of the land buying business so they can concentrate on actual education issues.

Prickett's opponent, Karen Simon is backed by the status quo and it shows. Much of what she says is just parroting what WCPSS's PR department says about itself. We're one of the top school systems so let's keep doing what we're doing, blah blah blah. Simon supports mandatory year round assignments and claims that they are necessary because of growth. Considering that Leesville ES is located right between 2 very underenrolled year round schools (Brier Creek & Sycamore Creek) and near 2 underenrolled traditional schools (York & Hilburn), I think she should rethink her answer. Simon would also make no changes to the magnet system as it currently exists. I guess that giving kids who live in the right neighborhoods and attend the right schools better access to the best WCPSS has to offer is ok with her.

District 9 (Cary): Debra Goldman
Debra Goldman understands that students need stable assignments in community schools in order to succeed. Like the other candidates I endorse, she favors placing resources where they are needed rather than just busing children around. Goldman also favors voluntary participation in year round schools and believes that WCPSS is too top heavy.

Goldman's opponent, Lois Nixon is clueless when she states that mandatory year round schools have saved the taxpayers $350 million dollars so far. Year round schools don't save any money unless they are at capacity and most of our newly built and converted yr schools aren't anywhere near capacity. She is even more clueless when she states as she did in one forum, that the children in her neighborhood have 27 different schools they get to choose from. She obviously doesn't understand how the magnet selection process works. Her neighborhood is assigned to Reedy Creek middle school so they actually have the least likely chance of getting into a magnet middle school. Nixon also touts the use of our schools as an 'economic tool' and how we don't want to "kill the goose that laid the golden egg". This is particularly disturbing to me and is a trend of all 4 candidates who are supported by the status quo.

Business leaders are very much behind the diversity policy not because it actually helps disdvantaged kids (it doesn't) but because it is good for business. It gives them bragging rights to say that all of the schools in the 'urban' core are good, but they ignore the fact that we still have those not so good schools. Since they are not in central Raleigh, however, it doesn't matter. They are invisible to companies looking to do business here. When the status quo candidates refer to the schools as economic tools it shows us that their number one priority isn't student achievement, it is about appearances. We all deserve better than that.

What Are Segregated Schools?

I asked this question in my last post. What exactly are 'segregated' schools? As I mentioned in my previous post, Wake County today looks much different from Wake County 30 years ago. We have a growing Hispanic, Asian, and multi-racial population. It is not enough to talk about segregation in terms of the black population. I did a little poking around the internet to find a 'modern' definition of segregated schools and found that the term 'racially identifiable' is most often used. I could not find any NC definitions of either term but I did find a few.

A 1999 Minnesota state rule labels a school segregated, or racially identifiable, if the minority enrollment is more than 20 percentage points above the district minority enrollment. The Civil Rights Project defines segregated schools as those where the percentage of minority students deviates by more than 15% from the district wide percentage. In Chicago, schools are considered integrated if the white population is between 15-75%. A school is out of compliance if 70% or more of the students are white, and a racially identifiable school is one which is 85% or more non-white. (Of course, 'racially identifiable' is interesting because it sets everything up as two races: white and non-white, but that's an whole other discussion.)

I always get frustrated when people claim that the diversity policy keeps WCPSS from having schools over 40% F&R. Yes, that's the goal and it sounds terrific. Except nobody ever mentions the fact that 30% of our elementary and middle schools are over 40%. I think that most people aren't even aware of this--they just repeat the policy as fact. I've been thinking about this argument that without the diversity policy, we would go back to segregated schools. I wondered how many segregated schools we currently have and if we do have any, why is it never brought up?

I used Civil Rights Project's guidelines to determine which schools were segregated or racially identifiable. I thought that a 15% deviation seemed too strict, so I used Minnesota's '20% rule' but also added the schools that would qualify under the CRP guidelines. White students make up 51.8% of WCPSS's total student population.

Re-segreation and the Diversity Polilcy

If we stop busing for diversity or move towards neighborhood schools, we will re-segregate our schools. That is a common argument from those who favor WCPSS's diversity policy. On one hand, I do understand where those people are coming from. If we did move to strictly neighborhood schools (which I don't think most people are proposing), we would see largely minority schools in certain areas of town and largely white ones in others. On the other hand, I have a few problems with this argument.

First, it isn't truly segregation, or at least not the legal segregation of the past. Segregation was the deliberate and forced separation of blacks from whites. Are we living under segregation now because blacks and white don't live together for the most part? Its no secret that the 'projects' in downtown Raleigh are largely minority and that the suburban areas of far North Raleigh are largely white. Does that mean we are segregated? Is it segregation when high school students sit together by race in the school cafeteria? Or is it just human nature to want to be around those who look like you? It's definitely a topic worth discussing, but to use the term 're-segregation' is inflammatory. For the most part it serves only to invoke imagines of a racist past and to scare the general public.

Second, if it is illegal to consider race when making school assignments then how does the re-segregation argument fit in? Its widely known and admitted even by WCPSS's supporters that Wake County is unique. Assigning students by socio-economic status instead of race works here because most of Wake county's poor are minorities. But what is the true purpose of the diversity policy? It seems that avoiding 'segregated' schools is the real intent because that is one of the first arguments that gets made against changing the diversity policy.

Third, what are segregrated schools? Back in the days of segregation, Raleigh and much of the south were pretty much black and white. Now we have significant Hispanic and Asian populations. So what does segregation mean? Is it a school that is largely black? Or one that is largely minority with very few white students? Further complicating this question is the fairly large economic differences between Wake County's minority populations. Cary is probably the most diverse community in Wake when it comes to race, but these minority families aren't poor for the most part. Many are highly educated and employed in high tech industries. Does WCPSS value that type of diversity, or is it only about black and white or rich and poor?

I think that its time for WCPSS and Wake County as a whole to have real discussions on race, diversity, and what the goals of the diversity policy truly are. Demographics have changed significantly in Wake County yet we still seem to be operating with a 1950s or 1970s mindset. Of course we must respect and be mindful of the past but we will never get anywhere if we don't start looking towards the future.

Just For Fun--Davis Drive Real Estate Sales

Most of us probably think of Davis Drive families as fairly wealthy and many of us think they are elitists who don't think their school should be 'burdened' by high needs children. I have even heard a staff member from WCPSS say in response to a comment about DDE's high achievement, "Well, there's a reason why Davis Drive is a School of Excellence". The dedicated teachers and parents? No, this staff member was referring to Davis Drive's low F&R percentage. At 9.8% (2007-08 school year), it is one of the lowest in the county. And since non-economically disadvantaged students pass the EOGs at a rate significantly higher than economically disadvantaged students, it follows that Davis Drive's overall test scores will be higher. But does this necessarily mean that Davis Drive deserves the image that it has?

First of all, although Davis Drive's F&R is well below the county average of 31.6%, the school's percentage of ESL and LEP (Limited English Proficiency) students are slightly above the county average. And while Davis Drive has a much smaller percentage of black students than the WCPSS average for elementary schools, the percentage of asian students is much greater. So while the racial makeup of the school is probably not what WCPSS would like to see, it is nonetheless a racially diverse school.

Second, does the fact that a school has a very low F&R mean that the rest of the population is high income or wealthy? When Davis Drive parents protested reassignment last year, we saw footage of beautiful homes and manicured lawns. I'm sure that many of us made assumptions about how much those houses cost and the types of families who live in them. But were we correct?

I was meeting with a group of Davis Drive parents last month when I mentioned that I was thinking about researching home prices in some of the ITB magnet base nodes. I wanted to show that many of those reaping the benefits of magnets weren't in low income neighborhoods . One of the women had already done that research for one of the neighborhoods assigned to Davis Drive for the opposite reason--to show that Davis Drive wasn't composed of elite, expensive subdivisions like the image suggests. So I thank her for giving me the idea for my research and for the google documents spreadsheet setup. :-)

While the homes in these Davis Drive nodes are not inexpensive by any means, they are also not as expensive as some people might think. And especially not as expensive as homes in western ITB as noted in my previous posts on Underwood, Joyner & Martin. I've included all of DDE's nodes except for the 2 low income nodes that are bused in.

One other stat that I noted to myself: Of the 87 homes that sold in the Davis Drive nodes in the last year, only 14 of them were more than the lowest median price for the Joyner and Underwood base nodes. Underwood's node 92 had a median Single Family Home sales price of $386K.

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.

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.

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%.