Educators, business and community leaders gathered at the Raleigh Convention Center Monday to show support for the school system's diversity policy, while opponents say new evidence shows socioeconomic method is not working.

Newly-appointed Wake County School Board member Keith Sutton, who represents District 4, said the group of about 50 people, who he called the "friends of diversity," represented a belief in the policies of the Wake County School System.  Among those present:  former Wake Schools Superintendent Bill McNeal, Raleigh Mayor Charles Meeker, former Raleigh Mayor Smedes York, Raleigh Chamber President Harvey Schmitt and former school board members Susan Parry and Rosa Gill.

"While no system is perfect, we that are gathered here today firmly believe that the system's socioeconomic diversity policies are working and are the bedrock of the system's success," said Sutton.

"I think the diversity policy brings our county together," said Knightdale Mayor Russell Killen. "I don't want to see us be divided at a time like this. I don't want to see us build walls around neighborhoods."

Opponents of Wake's diversity policy attended the news conference and said their views are being misinterpreted.

"We're here because we're friends of diversity," said Sarah Redpath, of the Wake Schools Community Alliance. "We're not saying that we should throw the baby out with the bathwater, but we should understand what the truth is before we go forward with deciding what kind of solutions we're looking at."

Redpath said a newly-released Educational Policy Brief by SAS Institute researchers supports the Wake Schools Community Alliance claim that low-income students are not being served by the school system's socioeconomic diversity policy. She and others claim the report was intentionally withheld from school board members.

SAS researchers submitted the brief to Wake Superintendent Del Burns in June. In it, they suggested that Wake County was lowering its expectations of poor children and not doing as much as other school districts to encourage them to make academic progress.

According to the brief, "WCPSS black and Hispanic students are less often represented in 8th grade Algebra, the subject identified by many, including the authors of this report, as one of the gatekeepers for college success in technical majors."

David Holdzkum, Wake Schools' Assistant Superintendent for Evaluation and Research, said the information in the brief was not new.

"For about the past two and a half years, we've had a task force of people working on the problem of increasing participation in higher mathematics for younger kids and for more kids from a variety of backgrounds," he said. "The analyses shared in the report were interesting, but we knew that."

Holdzkum said the reason the brief was not released in June was that it came in response to a school system-initiated comparison of the SAS research method, called EVAAS, and that of Wake's in-house research department. A report on the comparison was published on the school system's website in March 2009. Holdzkum maintained that the brief was part of a technical discussion of research methods, to find the best tools to help guide student improvement.

"If we made an effort to hide something, this report has as much good news as perhaps not," he said. "So we would have had no advantage. There was no reason to hide anything."

Related Links

1. Wake Schools Report: Comparison of SAS EVAAS Results and WCPSS Effectiveness Index Results