Seeking integration, whatever the path

02-28-2011

By Michael Winerip/New York Times

For decades, the Wake County Public School System — the nation’s 18th largest — has been known as a strong academic district committed to integration. From the 1970s to the 1990s, that meant racial integration. In 2000, after courts ruled against using race-based criteria, Wake became one of the first districts in the nation to adopt a system of socioeconomic integration. The idea was that every school in the county (163 at present) would have a mix of children from poor to rich. The target for schools was a 60-40 mix — 60 percent of students who did not require subsidized lunches and 40 percent who did. Then in 2009, a new conservative majority was elected to the Wake school board, and last spring it voted to dismantle the integration plan. Instead, families would be assigned to a school nearer their neighborhood. This meant a child who lived in a poor, black section of Raleigh would be more likely to go to a school full of poor black children, and a child living in a white, upper-middle-class suburb would be more likely go to a school full of upper-middle-class white children. In most places that would have been it. Not here. (more...)

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