The Washington Post has published Kathleen Brennan's sharply worded response to both this month's front-page article and to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan's letter to the editor criticizing the Wake County school board.

In a letter to the editor today in The Post, Brennan, a co-founder of Wake CARES, complains that the Jan. 12 article "reflected preconceived notions about the situation in Wake County." She argues the reality is the diversity policy "created nontraditional calendar assignments, widespread parental discontent and great instability, with over 60,000 students reassigned over 10 years."

While the diversity policy influenced some of the assignments, supporters of the policy will counter that it's growth that played the larger factor in reassignment.

UPDATE

Link added for Brennan's letter.

Kathleen Brennan is amplifying on her letter to the editor with this Tuesday night post on the Wake CARES website.

The idea of the Tea Party having taken over the Wake County school system is spreading rapidly on the Internet after the publication of Wednesday's Washington Post article.

Numerous news stories, blog posts and opinion pieces have used the Post piece as their source for talking about how the Tea Party has scrapped integration in Wake County's schools.

One of the latest examples is a blog post today in The Economist, where R.A., a correspondent decries the end of Wake's diversity policy. R.A. mentions that he used to be a magnet student in Wake.

Richard Kahlenberg is calling the Wake County school system's school diversity fight an example of one of the best developments to happen in education in 2010.

But before you scratch your heads about it, here's what Kahlenberg, an ardent defender of using socioeconomic integration, means.

In a blog post Monday for the progressive Century Foundation, Kahlenberg cites the controversy in Wake an an example of how at the local level "many citizens and education leaders fought back vigorously against growing segregation."

A new study about Montgomery County schools in Maryland could add some fuel to the fight over socioeconomic integration in Wake County schools.

As reported in the Washington Post, a study coming out today shows that low-income students in Montgomery County performed better when they attended affluent elementary schools instead of ones with higher concentrations of poverty. At 144,000 students, Montgomery County is only slightly larger than Wake County.

The study tracked the performance of 858 elementary students in public housing scattered across Montgomery from 2001 to 2007. About half the students ended up in schools where less than 20 percent of students qualified for subsidized meals. Most others went to schools where up to 60 percent of the students were poor and where the county had poured in extra money.

UPDATE

The study was done by the Century Foundation, which has been an outspoken supporter of socioeconomic diversity in school assignment. Click here to view the report.

Both The Economist and Education Week had their takes last week on the fight over socioeconomic diversity in Wake County schools.

In The Economist article, the writer speculates whether Wake's future looks like that of Charlotte-Mecklenburg, where the percentage of high poverty and high minority schools has increased since the district ended busing for diversity. The article says that efforts by CMS parents in poor areas to get into wealthier schools have often been impossible to grant because of capacity limits.

"(School board member John) Tedesco bristles at the notion that Charlotte is the future; he believes that with better management and more efficient spending Wake can avoid Charlotte’s errors, and he may be right," according to the article in the British weekly. "But Wake’s school system faces a $20m shortfall, which makes the board’s task all the more daunting."

Both the Great Schools in Wake Coalition and the Coalition of Concerned Citizens for African American Children came out with press releases last week criticizing the Wake County school board majority's actions.

In the GSIW press release, the group cites a statement released last week by a group of local and national researchers such as Richard Kahlenberg of the liberal Century Foundation and Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. The researchers urge the school board to reconsider its decision to abandon the diversity policy.

There was a lot of data and emotion coming from supporters of Wake County's school diversity policy at Saturday's Great Schools in Wake Coalition forum.

As noted in today's article, researchers presented national and state data on the challenges of high-poverty schools and the benefits of socioeconomically diverse schools. The message presented was that community schools would be the wrong step for Wake to take.

"It's very important that Wake County stay the course on their programs," said Richard Kahlenberg, senior fellow at the Century Foundation, which he called a 'progressive think tank.' "The plans to dismantle the socioeconomic diversity policy would have disastrous effects.”

Here's a taste of what you can expect from Richard Kahlenberg at Saturday's Great Schools in Wake Coalition forum.

In a March 1 post on the left-leaning Century Foundation blog, Kahlenberg bemoans the changes being proposed by the new Wake County school board majority to end the socioeconomic diversity policy. Like local critics of the new board, Kahlenberg says Wake "is a victim of its own success" from growth and how a small percentage of voters were able to change the board's direction.

"The political debate in Wake County isn’t over yet," writes Kahlenberg, who has extensively researched socioeconomic diversity. "Supporters of the diversity policy — teachers, civil rights advocates, business leaders, and white parents who like magnet schools — are fighting back. An important forum is slated for mid-March to discuss the diversity policy."

The push toward neighborhood schools in Wake County has definitely caught the eye of those who support socioeconomic diversity, both nationally and in Louisville.

The Jefferson County school system, which contains Louisville, was one of the districts in the landmark 2007 U.S. Supreme Court case that restricted the use of race in student assignment. Jefferson County school officials had looked to Wake for help in developing an assignment policy driven by socioecononomic diversity.

With four of seven school board seats on the ballot this year, supporters of Jefferson County's diversity efforts said in a Sunday (Louisville) Courier-Journal article that what happened in Wake should serve as a “wake-up call” in Louisville.