Terry Stoops is telling a national audience that the Wake County school system's former socioeconomic diversity policy was a "failure" and "that school districts cannot bus their way to success."

In an online piece posted Sunday by The New York Times, Stoops, director of education studies for the conservative John Locke Foundation, compares what happened after Wake adopted the socioeconomic diversity and Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools abandoned busing for diversity.

Stoops points to how "the performance of disadvantaged students in Wake County has stalled." In contrast, he notes that Charlotte's low-income students "outperformed their Wake County peers on most measures of student achievement."

A new report from the Brookings Institution is likely to add more fuel to the debate about the value of the Wake County school system's old socioeconomic diversity policy.

As noted in today's article, the report found that schools attended by low-income and middle/high-income students in the Raleigh-Cary metropolitan area exceeded test score expectations more than in any of the 100 largest metropolitan areas.

"One possible explanation is that Wake County has a history of aggressive district-wide socioeconomic integration policies," according to the report.

UPDATE

Click here to read Kahlenberg's column on the Brookings report that was posted Sunday in The Washington Post's Answer Sheet blog.

Longtime Wake County school board attorney Ann Majestic is the focus of a front-page article in last week's issue of North Carolina Lawyers Weekly.

The profile details how Majestic started a legal career that will lead to her in April receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National School Boards Association Council of School Attorneys.

Much of the article focuses on Majestic's work in Wake, including her successful efforts to win over the initially suspicious Republican board majority in 2009. The article also talks about her personal views on the role of socioeconomic diversity in student assignment.

It's not much of a surprise that the Wake County school board elections have made some lists of top news stories in 2011.

According to the Associated Press' 2011 Memorable Moments for North Carolina, "Wake County voters returned Democratic-backed candidates to power on the state's largest school board, although it took one runoff race to complete the five-seat sweep.

The contest was watched nationally - and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars - because Republican-backed candidates had earlier scrapped the district's student assignment policy which aimed at achieving a socioeconomic - and, therefore, racial - balance in student populations through busing."

Richard Kahlenberg, senior fellow for the liberal Century Foundation, is calling last week's Wake County school board election results "an important victory for proponents of integration."

Kahlenberg's column, which was reposted today in The Washington Post's Answer Sheet blog, says "the vote has national significance because it demonstrates that if school diversity policies are pursued through choice, rather than compulsion, they can draw strong public support."

Kahlenberg was an outspoken supporter of the old diversity policy and criticized the board majority's decision to scrap it. He went on to back the efforts to develop a compromise plan "to employ choice to promote integration by student achievement levels, a close cousin of socioeconomic status."

"Voters sided with business people and teachers and civil rights groups in rejecting resegregation," Kanlenberg says of the election results. "This development should give hope to supporters of integration that if implemented smartly — through public school choice rather than compulsory busing — diversity can win broad support from voters."

While noting it's up to feds to see whether they'll believe the Wake County school system's latest response, Cash Michaels is making it clear he doesn't put stock into the reasons used for justifying ending the diversity policy.

In a blog post today of a piece that will appear in The Carolinian, Michaels writes that "after over forty years of school busing for desegregation across the nation, South and North Carolina, there are no credible independent studies proving the board majority’s point."

"Nothing that confirms, beyond conservative board members own 'feelings,' and the dubious statistics school system staff was directed to produce, that undeniably details how academically debilitating a school bus ride from Southeast Raleigh to Cary can be," Michaels writes.

UPDATE

Click here for a response to this blog post written by Michaels.

Cash Michaels is using the AdvancED report to lash into the Republican majority on the Wake County school board as having no plan to help high-poverty schools that would result from ending the diversity policy.

In a blog post Thursday on the fifth part of his series in The Carolinian on the new Walnut Creek Elementary School, Michaels focuses on a section in the AdvancEd report that accused the board majority of having no plans to help high-poverty schools.

"When Board members were asked how they would ensure that schools with a significant population of low achieving students would be supported, there were no solutions or plans offered," according to the report. "High school principals noted deep concern that the new [neighborhood schools] policy would significantly compromise their ability to meet the needs of students.

How much value do you place on the national research on the benefits of maintaining socioeconomically diverse schools?

As noted in today's article, the importance of the social science research was a dividing point at Tuesday's forum between Richard Kahlenberg and Abigail Thernstrom. Kahlenberg, senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a liberal think tank, repeatedly pointed to what he called "dozens of studies" extolling the benefits of integration and the downsides of high-poverty schools.

"Let me begin with the four decades of research which suggests that having separate schools for low-income and middle class students will never provide genuine equal opportunity," Kahlenberg said.

CORRECTED THERNSTROM'S REFERENCE ON WHO GAMED THE SYSTEM IN TEXAS AND ADDED LINK AT END OF POST TO VIEW THE FORUM

You might want to pencil into your schedule what could be an interesting discussion on Tuesday about the Wake County school diversity controversy.

The John Locke Foundation and the Campbell Law School Federalist Society have invited two nationally known speakers  for a lunchtime discussion on "Neighborhood Schools, Diversity, and the Wake County Controversy." It's at 11:45 a.m. at Campbell University Law School, 225 Hillsborough St. in downtown Raleigh.

One of the speakers is pretty well known in Wake. Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the progressive Century Foundation, will presumably be making his pitch for socioeconomic integration of schools.

Add Richard Kahlenberg to the list of those who are praising the student assignment model for Wake County that was proposed by the Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce and the Wake Education Partnership.

In a guest blog column in today's Washington Post, Kahlenberg writes that the new controlled-choice plan "presents a credible third way between the constant reassignment of students under the old system and the tea party’s proposed re-segregation of Raleigh’s schools." He also calls it a "a politically palatable model for preserving diversity in our schools."

Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the liberal Century Foundation, was one of the most outspoken national supporters of Wake's old socioeconomic diversity policy. After the 2009 school board elections, Kahlenberg called for using controlled choice as a way to still maintain diversity in Wake's schools.