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."

Wake County school board member John Tedesco is turning Stephen Colbert's mocking criticism of him into a tool to help him get elected as state schools superintendent.

On his campaign website, Tedesco uses a cropped screenshot of his picture on Colbert's "Disintegration" segment from January 2011. Last year, critics of the Republican board majority repeatedly pointed to the segment on Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report."

"Opposition, obstructionists, and status quo bureaucrats are met head-on by John Tedesco's pledge to his constituents," says Tedesco's website. "This has caused fans and critics alike in the media to chronicle his every move; some just waiting to see what he will do next. The New York Times, CNN, Fox News, LA Times, The Economist, The Washington Post, Education Weekly, and more have joined North Carolina's news outlets WRAL, ABC 11, NBC 17, News 14, and The News & Observer in their coverage of Mr. Tedesco."

Tedesco includes a line from a not terribly flattering New York Times story in February 2011 that says "since he was elected, his ups and downs have been chronicled practically daily in the media." (The website incorrectly says it was a 2010 article.)

The New York Times is in discussions to sell its 16 regional newspapers, including three publications in North Carolina -- The Wilmington Star-News, the Hendersonville Times-News and the Lexington Dispatch.

The company confirmed the talks with Halifax Media Holdings in a release.

The Times has made a number of cost-cutting moves in recent years, including selling its headquarters building and its ownership stake in the Boston Red Sox.

The Times, along with the entire newspaper industry, has been pummeled in recent years by a dramatic downturn in advertising spending and the ongoing shift to online.

The Times recently instituted a pay wall on its website whereby readers can read a certain number of stories for free each month before they are asked to subsribe.

Smaller regional newspapers have been hit particularly hard by the decline in classified ads.
 

Are The New York Times and local Republicans overstating the role that Obama for America played in this fall's Wake County election results?

The Sunday Times Review analysis piece cites the Raleigh and Charlotte mayoral races and the Wake school board races as examples of how successful the Obama campaign was locally. The article goes on to quote local Republicans to buttress the assertions in the piece about a mass Obama for America organizing effort in Wake.

“It was very scary,” said Chris Sinclair, a strategist for Billie Redmond, the Republican candidate for mayor in Raleigh. “You don’t know what’s going on until you wake up after Election Day and go, ‘Oh my gosh, what happened?’ ”

A new report published today in Science magazine questions the effectiveness of single-sex schools such as the ones the Wake County school board voted this week to create.

"The Pseudoscience of Single Sex Schooling,” contends that there is "no empirical evidence" that segregating students by sex improves education—but that there is compelling evidence that in can increase gender stereotyping among students and adults, according to this Education Week blog post.

Wake Superintendent Tony Tata has contended that national research has shown the academic benefits of single-sex schools like the two new leadership academies that will open for the 2012-13 school year.

Is the rest of the nation watching this fall's Wake County school board elections?

As noted in today's article, that's an assertion made by state Rep. Paul Stam, the House Majority Leader, in explaining why he's endorsing school board chairman Ron Margiotta in his re-election bid in District 8.

"I support Ron Margiotta because this election represents a national litmus test in education reform," Stam said in an invitation to a July 14 fundraiser for Margiotta. "From the New York Times to the Washington Post, the Wake County School board elections will be analyzed on a national scale."

If you've ever wondered what it looks like when a new editor is appointed at a major newspaper, the new world of social media has provided.

Wake County school board member John Tedesco's colleagues weren't joking when they repeatedly said he was charged up on caffeine when he gave a fiery speech at last Thursday's Northern Wake Republican Club meeting.

During the speech, Tedesco praised the board majority's actions since December 2009 in "revamping public education." He also ripped into liberals, including what he called their "unholy trinity" of the NAACP, the Great Schools in Wake Coalition and Raleigh FIST.

"They will try and scare people," Tedesco said of the opposition. "People use fear. These are cowards who understand that anger can be power as long as there is a victim on TV. So they will strike fear."

What do Wake County school board meetings and the Cartoon Network have in common?

The New York Times thinks both have a lot in common according to this article that was posted online Sunday night and will appear in Monday's print edition. The Times article notes the more recent developments in the Wake school diversity controversy and how the Wake School Choice Plan could be the solution.

"The (school) board is split five Republicans to four Democrats, and for the last 15 months meetings have looked like a Cartoon Network special, featuring in the lead role Mr. (John) Tedesco, 36, the most verbal member of the majority," according to the article. "He is single with no children and has lots of time on his hands to stir things up."

UPDATE

No front page this time. The article appeared on pg. 11 in the A section of Monday's New York Times.

A claim and counterclaim involving an investor and the State Employees Credit Union was featured in a New York Times article on Sunday.

The article, written by Gretchen Morgenson, who writes a business column every Sunday for the paper, looks at SECU's tactics in a case filed by the estate of Helen Cohen, a elderly widow who opened an investment account with SECU's brokerage unit in 2005.