Wake Schools

One speaker at yesterday’s Wake school board meeting who managed to speak before the theatrics began made an interesting point that goes to the root of the controversy over diversity versus neighborhood schools. While she said she supported the now abandoned diversity policy, she wanted the new board to succeed. All she wanted was for the board to “show me the money” and asked “where’s the beef.” In other words, she wanted to see the plan the board had to transition to neighborhood schools.

She has a point. After several months of demonstrations, counter-demonstrations, accusations and counter-accusations, the board majority has yet to reveal any details of its plan. Whether you support the diversity policy or neighborhood schools, wouldn’t it be nice to know exactly where the school board is going?

There is this theory that if you don't like your "neighborhood school," that you can just up and move to a place with a nicer school.

Going forward, we are likely to create a series of rich schools and poor schools. So, I wanted to see what happens when low-income borrowers, particularly minority borrowers, try to buy into the more expensive neighborhoods in Wake County.

It seems that it isn't always so easy.

The location of affordable housing is driven by land-use planning. My new BankTalk entry puts the context of the Wake County school board decisions in a national context. A new study shows that more and more schools are increasingly constituted as private-public schools. These schools have very few poor children. Those districts exist even when a larger MSA is well-off. Certainly, Boston and San Francisco harbor plenty of wealth. Drilling down, it is easy to see that these are places without enough affordable housing. Wake County is ready to go to "neighborhood schools." Does that mean that soon, we'll witness a community that allows its schools to filter opportunity based on class and race? In 2000, Wake had 25 census tracts where fewer than 3 percent of its school-age children lived in poverty. Elementary schools often draw from just a handful of tracts.