On the heels of hearing William Sanders present the SAS EVAAS report, Wake County commissioners may next hear from Richard Kahlenberg.

As noted in a recent article by Thomas Goldsmith, Commissioner Stan Norwalk successfully got a motion approved last week to explore bringing Kahlenberg in to make a presentation. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, has been a strong supporter of Wake's diversity policy.

After last fall's school board election, Kahlenberg made a pitch for a controlled-choice diversity model in lieu of going to neighborhood schools.

Donna Hargens, Wake's chief academic officer, says the school system is addressing the issue of minority underrepresentation in Algebra I.

In an op-ed piece today, Hargens says the Wake County school system has been trying to increase minority participation in Algebra I in middle schools for the past three years. She lays out a chronology of steps that have been taken since then, including using the SAS EVAAS program.

Has the Wake County school system been deliberately not offering some students access to Algebra I in middle schools to boost test scores?

That's the charge made by Tony Gurley, chairman of the board of commissioners, in today's article. It came after commissioners got a presentation Monday about the SAS EVAAS report.

Much of the discussion Monday focused on how the report found that half the  Algebra I ready student in Wake were not taking the course in middle school.

The TAP program could get a big boost now that the new school board majority is set to take over on Tuesday.

As noted in today's article, the new majority thinks TAP can help provide incentives for teachers to work at high-poverty schools, which would increase in some areas under neighborhood schools.

It's a shift from how TAP was viewed by the old board as a supplement to the diversity policy. Outgoing board members such as Patti Head had thought of using TAP in schools where the F&R percentages were high despite efforts to balance enrollment.

Wake is now jumping into using the EVAAS program.

As noted in today's article, administrators said they're moving to get passwords into the hands of principals and other school personnel. It's a change from when a school had to request access to EVAAS to be signed up.

Wake still has a long way to go to catch up with other school districts in terms of using the program, which is free of charge to districts.