Chamber of Commerce vs. Tea Party over Wake County schools

I have been meaning to post on this topic for some time but attention has been focused on SB 1.  At a SPSDEC, now Keystone State Education Coalition meeting last year in the Tredyffrin/Easttown School District, a handout by Richard Kahlenberg entitle “Turnaround Schools That Work: Moving Beyond Separate but Equal”   http://tcf.org:8081/Plone/publications/2009/11/pb700/pdf   generated considerable interest.  That report considered economic integration as a key factor in creating a scalable model for turnaround schools that work.

A related recent post by Mel Riddle ( “PISA: It’s Poverty Not Stupid”)  of the National Association of Secondary School Principals on The Principal Difference Blog reviewed the PISA results disaggregated by the level of poverty in schools.

Washington Post Answer Sheet Blog

Posted at 5:00 AM ET, 02/17/2011

Chamber of Commerce vs. Tea Party over Wake County schools

By Valerie Strauss

My guest is Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a nonprofit public policy research organization, writes about education, equal opportunity and civil rights.

By Richard D. Kahlenberg
Wake County, North Carolina, which includes the city of Raleigh and the surrounding suburbs, has made headlines in recent months as a new Tea Party-backed school board majority has sought to dismantle the district’s longstanding and nationally acclaimed school integration plan.
The policy had the goal of limiting the proportion of low-income students in any given school to 40 percent and was based on decades of research finding that concentrations of school poverty are bad for education.

As Stephanie McCrummen noted in a front page story in The Washington Post last month, one tea party school board member argued that a new plan that would allow much higher concentrations of poverty could actually improve the prospects of low-income kids.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/guest-bloggers/chamber-of-commerce-vs-tea-par.html?wprss=answer-sheet