Quote :

"Part of living in a society, and using a socially supported system (such as public schools) is accepting policies that promote the benefit of the society as a whole."

OK, so:

Quote :

"A recent SAS Institute report found that the way Wake analyzes school performance "tend[s] to camouflage schooling inadequacies for disadvantaged populations." It found that the achievement gap between Wake's low-income and non low-income students was greater than observed in other North Carolina districts.""

10/6/2009 9:31:27 AM

Quote :

"Does this question need answering? It seems like it would be like asking why they didn’t use SES to determine who should have been slaves back in the days."

Are you truly being this dense? The point is obvious: if the original goal was integration by SES, we've had metrics for decades to do it by that. The fact that we did not, and only switched when the courts declared the policy unconstitutional, indicates that the chief motivating factor was historically something other than SES, despite proponents' claims.

Again, if you're trying to integrate by SES, why then make an end-run around that by using race, which even proponents admit is a crude marker at best? Why not just use a more direct marker? Unless, of course, integration by SES is simply a secondary goal - which, I contend it was, contra the claims of the proponents. The only reason it was changed is because the law no longer allowed an explicitly race-based policy - were it not for that, it is unlikely we would even use the SES criteria.

Now, proponents may claim that the goal changed - from racial to economic integration. Why, then, did it take an adverse court decision to force a change in policy, and from there, why is it that supporters still are regularly quoted with the goal of racial integration? Again, the idea that race is somehow "not a factor" in this, that it's strictly SES, seems somewhat ludicrous.

[Edited on October 6, 2009 at 9:45 AM. Reason : .]

10/6/2009 9:43:13 AM

^I believe I adequately answered those questions.

But the answer to why it took a court case to change the system up is that we had a fairly decent standard, and our schools were good. Plus, due to history, thinking was still largely rooted in racial terms--the whole notion of integrated schools was born out of race...it defined the framework. And It normally takes a drastic situation for folks to get around to changing something that seems to work okay.

^^A gap is to be expected. The fact that our gap is wider means only that our more affluent students do better, not that are less affluent students do worse. In fact, based on test scores, our less affluent students do better than less affluent students in other parts of the state.

The wide gap between more affluent and less affluent students could be explained by the fact that all of our more affluent students have access to good schools. In other counties, there are schools that are 80 or 60 percent free and reduced...what do you think happens to the other 20 or 40 percent? Do you think they maybe they do a little bit worse at that school and maybe that could contribute to a shrinking of the achievement gap between the two groups?

It's not fair for counties to support policies that drag their unlucky middle and lower-middle class students down into high-poverty schools...and then turn around and say, "Hey, look, our achievement gap is much smaller than yours!"

[Edited on October 6, 2009 at 1:54 PM. Reason : ]

10/6/2009 1:35:26 PM

No.

Quote :

"It [teh SAS report] found that students in Wake's higher-poverty schools did worse than expected compared with similar schools statewide. The report also questioned why Wake had a lower percentage of minority students taking Algebra I in eighth grade compared with other school districts."

10/6/2009 2:02:52 PM

http://www.newsobserver.com/content/media/2009/10/5/WSCASAS.pdf

There's a link to the SAS report if you want to read it.

10/6/2009 2:38:48 PM

Neither of the candidates answered my question about Intelligent Design, btw.

10/6/2009 3:32:31 PM

^^^Yes.

EOC Scores for F/R Students in Similar NC Districts:

Wake County: 53, 58, 55, 49, 48, 46, 59, 67, 51, 53
http://www.greatschools.net/cgi-bin/nc/district-profile/171

Guilford County: 52, 45, 54, 46, 47, 36, 54, 45, 50, 47
http://www.greatschools.net/cgi-bin/nc/district-profile/110

Forsyth County: 45, 31, 53, 44, 41, 32, 49, 44, 41, 34
http://www.greatschools.net/cgi-bin/nc/district-profile/103

Charlotte-Meck: 55, 52, 60, 57, 61, 47, 51, 51, 55, 49
http://www.greatschools.net/cgi-bin/nc/district-profile/133

Wake County was the highest in Algebra II (by 6), Physics (by 8), Chemistry (by 16), and Geometry (by 4). Charlotte-Meck is the only system that beats us on any test: Algebra 1 (by 2), English I (by 5), Biology (by 8), US History (by 13), Physical Science (by 1), and Civics (by 4).

You look at that and think that Charlotte’s magnet-only diversity policy is working, and they really got their shit together…however, as of 2006, Charlotte-Meck’s graduation rate was a pitiful 56 percent and Wake County’s graduation rate damn near topped the nation at 82.2 percent.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2006-06-20-dropout-rates_x.htm#grad

Wake County’s dropout rate was 4.17 percent in 2007-2008 while Charlotte-Meck’s rate came in at 6 percent in the same year.
http://www.wcpss.net/news/2009_feb6_dropout_rate/
http://tinyurl.com/ybr68de

So not only are more students dropping out of CMS schools, but the ones who stick around aren’t graduating (possibly because they didn’t drop out but they’re not showing up for the EOCs and are not included in Charlotte’s figures…hmmm). To be clear though, graduation requirements for Wake County are 26 credits for three tracks and 22 for the occupational track. Charlotte requires 24 credits for all tracks.

To sum up the tone at high-poverty schools in Charlotte, let’s listen to one of its school board members in 2008:

Quote :

""What do you do?" Gjertsen said. "You've got teachers, schools and books. We spend $18,000 a year on each student at Garinger and only get a 40 percent graduation rate. If you've created an opportunity and the kid doesn't want to learn, spend the money elsewhere. Let's put the money where the kids are trying to get an education and focus on them. Let's focus on the ones making Bs and Cs and struggling to get an education. Let's bring them up and not worry about the people who absolutely refuse to take advantage of the opportunities presented to them.""

http://tinyurl.com/ybrs4zn


I can't wait to send my kid to Garinger!


With regards to the SAS report, they're questioning the way Wake County reports and analyzes data. I'm going on raw data: test scores, graduation rates, and dropout rates. What the actuaries and auditors do to make things look better than they really are is not important to me...that's just politics. Also, I question any report that suggests poor students may do better in Guilford County than Wake County...that's gotta be a joke.

[Edited on October 6, 2009 at 4:03 PM. Reason : sss]

10/6/2009 3:41:06 PM

Quote :

"I believe I adequately answered those questions. But the answer to why it took a court case to change the system up is that we had a fairly decent standard, and our schools were good. Plus, due to history, thinking was still largely rooted in racial terms--the whole notion of integrated schools was born out of race...it defined the framework. And It normally takes a drastic situation for folks to get around to changing something that seems to work okay."

My point is simply this: that socio-economic integration has historically been a secondary priority to a primary policy interest of racial integration/equality. This was the outwardly stated goal of the policy up until 1999, it was the metric by which we measured by then, and so forth.

Hence, SES integration, and attributing success to this, seems like a bit of a post-hoc rationalization. The fact is, race is at best a blunt instrument for achieving SES integration, and wasn't even the metric they were using to measure the policy's success until race-based integration was barred. Even now, we see proponents of the policy pointing toward racial integration as an explicit goal of integration by SES.

Thus, my argument is that given both the history and the arguments given by the policy's proponents, saying that race has "nothing" to do with the current policy is entirely disingenuous. Race has everything to do with it. The sorting is now done by a socio-economic indicator, but the fact remains - this is only after a race-based policy was outlawed. There is a very present wink-and-a-nod attitude toward the idea of the converse - SES being a crude marker for race, one that can prevail upon a court challenge.

If we were trying to integrate by SES from the beginning, the metrics have always been there. But we weren't - any SES integration was basically a happy side-effect of a more prominent goal of racial integration, and as you describe, trying to head off "white flight." Again, if they were somehow co-equal priorities - economic and racial integration, one could easily make a combined metric - but this is not what the policy did.

This says nothing to the policy's claimed efficacy - of which I think the statistical analysis is a bit lacking, but this is a separate argument. The issue here is to put to rest the idea this has "nothing" to do with race, when in fact this seems very, very implausible, particularly given the history of the policy.

As far as the policy's efficacy, comparing raw scores by sub-group tells us nothing of the causes of higher performance. There are several confounding variables that have already been pointed out, and simply concluding that a policy of racial, and only later economic integration is chiefly responsible cannot be supported from the data as it stands. To support this conclusion, one would need to draw out and normalize for such variables as median income, family structure, quality of teachers, school resources, etc.

Furthermore, the argument that somehow this policy attracts highly-qualified teachers has not been backed up with data. It is basically a hypothetical at this point. What's to make it to the converse - successful schools attract highly-qualified teachers, or highly-qualified teachers make successful schools, or something else entirely? Other factors may make it easier for Wake to attract top talent (Wake actually recruits nationally, unlike many counties - meaning it's getting some of the best teachers around. Could this have anything to do with other, exogenous variables to the schools entirely - such as quality of life in Raleigh-Durham, etc.?)

Basically, these conclusions cannot be drawn from comparing the raw scores alone, which is what proponents of the argument are trying to do - turn a correlation into a causation. And we all know the story about rocks that keep tigers at bay.

10/6/2009 3:58:28 PM

http://disag.ncpublicschools.org/2009/

Guilford, 07-08 and 08-09 EOG results Percent of Students At or Above Achievement Level III, grades 3-8

57.7%, 69.9% Math
36.9%, 50.0% Reading

Wake
54.7%, 66.3% Math
37.3%, 48.9% Reading

Guilford is doing better than Wake. Yay links and statistics fight!

[Edited on October 6, 2009 at 4:26 PM. Reason : []

10/6/2009 4:21:13 PM

Quote :

"With regards to the SAS report, they're questioning the way Wake County reports and analyzes data. I'm going on raw data"

If you're posting data provided to greatschools.com, you're not going on raw data, are you?

10/6/2009 4:38:57 PM

^It's definitely not raw, and I used that word improperly. I'm not looking at individual test scores of every student, you're right.

It's from NC Department of Public Instruction, and it's recorded, analyzed, and reported the same for all counties.

I'm not interested in getting into specific arguments about specific statistics with the clearly superior folks at SAS. There are people on both sides who get paid a lot of money to come in and make things look better or worse than they really are, and I can't even begin to argue with any of them.

I've got is the results of the 2007-2008 EOC exams broken down by subgroup. The data for students receiving F/R lunch:

Wake County: 53, 58, 55, 49, 48, 46, 59, 67, 51, 53
http://www.greatschools.net/cgi-bin/nc/district-profile/171

Guilford County: 52, 45, 54, 46, 47, 36, 54, 45, 50, 47
http://www.greatschools.net/cgi-bin/nc/district-profile/110

A larger percentage of students receiving F/R lunch in Wake County scored at or above grade level than students receiving F/R lunch in Guilford County on every single test.

I don't wanna totally talk shit about other school districts. Guilford County is undertaking promising programs to improve their struggling schools that include things like $10,000 bonuses to teachers who teach certain subjects at certain schools. And I really want these initiatives to be successful. However, the success is not evident yet (our kids are still doing better), and there's no guarantees we would undertake similar measures in Wake County if we were to deintegrate... It's a big mistake to throw away a system that is still producing the best results just because other systems are improving (but still doing worse)...y'all just don't have the results yet.

I mean, oooo, Wake County has been flat in math scores over the past three years...looks like neighborhood schools are our only option!

[Edited on October 6, 2009 at 5:19 PM. Reason : ]

10/6/2009 5:16:21 PM

Quote :

"DrSteveChaos: My point is simply this: that socio-economic integration has historically been a secondary priority to a primary policy interest of racial integration/equality. This was the outwardly stated goal of the policy up until 1999, it was the metric by which we measured by then, and so forth. Hence, SES integration, and attributing success to this, seems like a bit of a post-hoc rationalization. The fact is, race is at best a blunt instrument for achieving SES integration, and wasn't even the metric they were using to measure the policy's success until race-based integration was barred. Even now, we see proponents of the policy pointing toward racial integration as an explicit goal of integration by SES. Thus, my argument is that given both the history and the arguments given by the policy's proponents, saying that race has "nothing" to do with the current policy is entirely disingenuous. Race has everything to do with it. The sorting is now done by a socio-economic indicator, but the fact remains - this is only after a race-based policy was outlawed. There is a very present wink-and-a-nod attitude toward the idea of the converse - SES being a crude marker for race, one that can prevail upon a court challenge. If we were trying to integrate by SES from the beginning, the metrics have always been there. But we weren't - any SES integration was basically a happy side-effect of a more prominent goal of racial integration, and as you describe, trying to head off "white flight." Again, if they were somehow co-equal priorities - economic and racial integration, one could easily make a combined metric - but this is not what the policy did."

We weren't trying to integrate by SES from the beginning. The entire legal framework that provided scaffolding for integration was based on race...black people sued the schools and the state. That's why it was based on race for so long. I still don't see why you're so obsessed with this point. It's just history.

When people say it's not about race today, they are correct because we distribute based on SES, not race. They can get away the statement that it's not about race. But, of course, there are still people monitoring policy and how it affects racial minorities. Again, just because the courts said we couldn't bus based on race, it doesn't mean people stopped caring about race and racial equality.

Quote :

"DrSteveChaos: This says nothing to the policy's claimed efficacy - of which I think the statistical analysis is a bit lacking, but this is a separate argument. The issue here is to put to rest the idea this has "nothing" to do with race, when in fact this seems very, very implausible, particularly given the history of the policy. As far as the policy's efficacy, comparing raw scores by sub-group tells us nothing of the causes of higher performance. There are several confounding variables that have already been pointed out, and simply concluding that a policy of racial, and only later economic integration is chiefly responsible cannot be supported from the data as it stands. To support this conclusion, one would need to draw out and normalize for such variables as median income, family structure, quality of teachers, school resources, etc. Furthermore, the argument that somehow this policy attracts highly-qualified teachers has not been backed up with data. It is basically a hypothetical at this point. What's to make it to the converse - successful schools attract highly-qualified teachers, or highly-qualified teachers make successful schools, or something else entirely? Other factors may make it easier for Wake to attract top talent (Wake actually recruits nationally, unlike many counties - meaning it's getting some of the best teachers around. Could this have anything to do with other, exogenous variables to the schools entirely - such as quality of life in Raleigh-Durham, etc.?) Basically, these conclusions cannot be drawn from comparing the raw scores alone, which is what proponents of the argument are trying to do - turn a correlation into a causation. And we all know the story about rocks that keep tigers at bay."

Excellent point. However, not all proponents are pointing to raw scores--I just prefer this simple method. There's plenty of sophisticated research out there on this issue though.

A few things you should know or at least acknowledge:

1. Research in education is particularly lame. We've wasted millions of dollars on programs that were supported by studies that completely ignored basic concepts like regression toward the mean.
2. Research in education is political and emotional. After all, it's about the children!
3. Research in education is just like research in any other social science. Variables can be manipulated to produce all sorts of outcomes.

Good luck!

10/6/2009 6:08:27 PM

Quote :

"I still don't see why you're so obsessed with this point. It's just history. When people say it's not about race today, they are correct because we distribute based on SES, not race. They can get away the statement that it's not about race. But, of course, there are still people monitoring policy and how it affects racial minorities. Again, just because the courts said we couldn't bus based on race, it doesn't mean people stopped caring about race and racial equality."

The reason I pick on this so much is because of the fact that one cannot idly dismiss the objection that race plays a role in this. Yes, the distribution is done by an SES metric. But race plays a huge role in both how we got to the current policy and it is an unspoken premise in why we maintain it. It cannot be simply swept away by saying, "We don't bus by race, therefore race is irrelevant!" Some objections make this point less eloquently, but my point in harping on this matter has simply been to emphasize that the politics of race play a huge role in this policy. It cannot simply be dismissed.

Quote :

"Excellent point. However, not all proponents are pointing to raw scores--I just prefer this simple method. There's plenty of sophisticated research out there on this issue though."

Fair enough. My point is not to dismiss the idea of economic integration's efficacy (it's an interesting theory); I just think the evidence presented thus so far lacks the depth required to demonstrate a causal relationship. That's all.

10/6/2009 6:28:57 PM

We lost.

It's not surprising considering the amount of money that was poured into the opposition or, I admit, the growing numbers of concerned parents.

Horace Tart was for neighborhood schools before he joined the board, but he wised up pretty soon. Hopefully, some of these new guys will follow suit, but I doubt it.

Here's to inequality!

10/6/2009 8:35:44 PM

28,000 voters. That abysmal but I guess to be expected in an off-season election.

10/6/2009 8:46:44 PM

Quote :

"We lost. "

Hopefully Wake County Children Won.

Looks like we'll have a run-off vote in District 2. There will still be busing because of population growth...but no more of this diversity nonsense.

Time will tell if these new board members can stick to the positions that got them elected tonight.

10/6/2009 8:59:46 PM

Oh snaps! A run-off! I called it too soon.

There's still a chance yo!

10/6/2009 9:57:19 PM

can you vote for a district you don’t live in or does everyone vote for all the districts?

10/6/2009 10:08:49 PM

Apparently voters in this county aren't as stupid as I first assumed.

10/6/2009 10:14:49 PM

^^You have to live in the district.

It is but then when you look at the people who actually vote.


I called a run-off too soon, too. Truitt hasn't pushed for one yet.

[Edited on October 6, 2009 at 10:26 PM. Reason : ]

10/6/2009 10:16:12 PM

You only vote for the district you live in.

10/6/2009 10:16:45 PM

Yeah, my bad, moron...Truitt (the runner-up to Tedesco) is anti-integration (for neighborhood schools).

So a run-off or whether or not we can vote in it doesn't even matter.


Now it's settled in, and it sucks.


If this goes through the way it has all over the country, I'm not going to be able to afford the best neighborhoods and thus the best schools. Looks like I'm going to have to use my rich parents' address for my future kid's school-related matters...

10/6/2009 10:49:37 PM

Quote :

" It's not surprising considering the amount of money that was poured into the opposition or, I admit, the growing numbers of concerned parents. "

The shift to the right really started in the summer of 1999 when a school bond referendum was rejected! However, candidates backed by groups like the John Locke Foundation failed to capitalize on the momentum later that year.

Flash forward a few years to the abstinence policy uproar (the school board decided to replace abstinence until marriage in 2002, and lots of parents were upset). During the '03 election, abstinence and school assignments were major topics. There was a group called Assignment By Choice that more or less backed neighborhood schools. Their candidates went 1-2 (excluding District 3, where a fourth dropped out of the race and the group was forced to back the lone remaining candidate), but Margiotta was their man who won.

In essence, the shift to the right on the Wake County School Board was gradual, but did not happen overnight. It took a decade of various groups--JLF, ABC, Called2Action, WCTA, WSCA--to raise all kinds of hell over certain issues and eat away at the left of center majority. What's even more amazing is that they've done it in an area that they did it without any real media support.

[Edited on October 7, 2009 at 12:38 AM. Reason : typo]

10/7/2009 12:35:29 AM

^^ don't worry - it won't be the end of the world... conservatives are pissed that Obama is spreading the disease of union thuggery throughout the nation, but we'll even survive that. We can survive just about anything. You shall see! Doom and Gloom is a good campaign strategy but don't mistake it for a legitimate forecast.

10/7/2009 8:31:23 AM

^^No, I'm familiar. We've been fighting these creeps off for a while now.

Fuck you?

10/7/2009 11:38:03 AM

Wait, Wake is an abstinence only county?

10/7/2009 11:46:14 AM

^Sort of. The state was abstinent-only, and counties could make changes to that if they got all the votes and meetings and shit together, and Wake County kind of made changes, but they were never meaningful and they never stuck.

Anyway, we just passed the Healthy Youth Act statewide, which will move us away from abstinence-only education:

http://news14.com/charlotte-news-104-content/local_news/charlotte/614187/healthy-youth-act-has-educators-preparing-for-new-sex-ed/

[Edited on October 7, 2009 at 12:53 PM. Reason : ]

10/7/2009 12:52:12 PM

from that article:

Quote :

"Parents can opt to take their children out of class when the more detailed information is taught. But educators don't think many parents will choose the abstinence-only curriculum."

lolwut?? What kind of parents do this?

10/7/2009 2:24:37 PM

Where are you from?

You seem totally new to all the backwards nonsense we got going on around here. I mean, just a few years ago, those "kind of parents" got a rule pushed through that required teachers to stop their lessons and teach about abstinence whenever the topic of sex came up in class.

We're crazy!

10/7/2009 2:44:25 PM

Oh, don't worry, I was in Franklin County my last year of high school and they physically tore the pages out of the health book that dealt with sex education. It was ridiculous. I guess I thought nice modern affluent Wake County would be different.

I had sex education in the 5th grade in Denver. It didn't really matter though because my parents filled me in a long time before that. Which I definitely will do the same for my daughter.

10/7/2009 3:40:11 PM