Is segregation back in U.S. public schools? Busing Isn’t the Answer, Choice Is (Sounds like HIS answer is "yes."

Busing Isn’t the Answer, Choice Is

Terry L. Stoops is the director of education studies at the John Locke Foundation, a public policy organization based in Raleigh, N.C.

UPDATED MAY 21, 2012, 11:25 AM

About a decade ago, North Carolina’s two largest school districts launched something akin to a natural experiment in student assignment.

In the late 1990s, income-based student assignment policies had emerged as an alternative to unpopular race-based busing schemes long abandoned by the nation’s school districts. A handful of districts instituted busing policies devised to raise student achievement by limiting the concentration of economically disadvantaged students assigned to a given school.

School districts cannot bus their way to success.

And no district in the nation received more external praise for its income-based assignment policy than North Carolina’s largest school district, the Wake County Public School System. One zealous academic, perhaps caught up in the perpetual hype, proclaimedthat there were “no bad schools in Raleigh.”

At the same time, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, the state’s second-largest school district, discontinued its race-based busing program and implemented a policy that combined parental choice with neighborhood school assignment. It was a sea change for the district that had been at the center of a 1971 U.S. Supreme Court decision that led to the widespread adoption of forced busing in the South.

So, how do low-income students in the districts compare? The performance of disadvantaged students in Wake County has stalled. In contrast, Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s reading and math test scores, as well as graduation rates, have surged. Over the last three years, Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s low-income studentsoutperformed their Wake County peers on most measures of student achievement. What makes this more impressive is that Charlotte-Mecklenburg has a far largerpopulation of disadvantaged students – well over 17,000 more – than Wake.

The failure of the Wake County student assignment experiment suggests that school districts cannot bus their way to success. Likewise, it would be a mistake to attribute Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s recent academic success to its assignment policy alone. Doing so would obscure the district’s innovative approaches to the recruitment and retention of effective school-based personnel, strategic deployment of financial and human resources, data-based decision-making and strong accountability system.