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 took a lot of discussion on Saturday before the Wake County school board finally agreed to modify the district's core beliefs.

The board made two changes from this original document approved by the old board in February. This new set modifies the wording about academically challenging students and the role of teachers and principals in student achievement.

The impetus for the changes came from the new school board members.

It looks like there's still a solid majority on the Wake County school board to implement the new single-gender leadership academies for next school year.

As noted in today's article, school board member Keith Sutton said he still strongly backs the new schools even though several groups, including the Great Schools in Wake Coalition, raised concerns in a Thursday memo. So even with the new members being sworn in Tuesday, Sutton and the four Republicans who voted yes in October should be enough to keep it moving.

Sutton is such a strong backer that he and Superintendent Tony Tata were in Chicago on Friday to visit the Urban Prep Academy, a male single-gender school that has seen phenomenal success.

SEE UPDATE AT END OF POST

No one disputes that more should be done to help the low-performing students at Enloe High School but the problem seems to be finding the right solution.

As noted in today's article, the rejection of the block schedule has left Enloe's leadership looking for alternatives. The challenge is finding something that will help the low-performing students without causing too many changes that would draw complaints from magnet students and their parents.

And with one current Enloe parent and two former Enloe parents now elected as school board members, what else is in store for the magnet school? Enloe has the dubious distinction of having the lowest passing rates on state tests among Wake's high schools for black and low-income students.

The repeated theme at last week's ED task force meeting is that all children can succeed but it's going to take a lot of hard work from the school system to help the students out.

The tenor of the Wake County school board's economically disadvantaged student performance task force meeting was set when this YouTube video of Sir Ken Robinson was shown to a packed room of teachers and principals.

Robinson contends that the current educational system is based on the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment and the environment of the Industrial Revolution. He argues that most people don't benefit from that model, creating the plague of ADHD.

Project Bright Idea will take center stage on the agenda at today's Wake County school board economically disadvantaged student performance task force meeting.

In a nutshell, the goal of Project Bright Idea is to increase the number of children from underserved populations in gifted and academically challenging programs. The idea is the students are more likely to excel and perform as if they're gifted if high expectations are set for them.

While begun as an elementary school program, this Duke Today article talks about how elements of Bright Idea have been incorporated at Fuquay-Varina High. It's credited with helping narrow the school's racial achievement gap.

Here's the quick summary of the new academic audit done of Wake County schools.

Wake still outperforms the state on state exams but the gap is narrowing with the rest of North Carolina growing at a faster rate. Wake’s low-income students aren’t growing as fact academically as their more affluent peers and higher poverty schools are on average not showing as much growth as more affluent schools.

A finding that drew discussion was the one in which, in general, schools with high percentages of free and reduced lunch students have lower rates of growth in reading and math exams than schools with low percentage of free and reduced lunch students.

Today's Wake County school board discussion should be action packed from the work session straight through to the annual meeting and regular meeting.

The thing that will likely most generate attention on the work session agenda is Superintendent Tony Tata presenting what's expected to be a modified form of the original blue plan to the board. One key question could be whether the board balks at the lack of base assignments.

Other work session topics include:

Here's an abbreviate recap of the discussion at today's Wake County school board retreat.

At Superintendent Tony Tata's request, the board agreed to set target performance goals for individual subgroups as opposed to a specific systemwide goal. Tata will consult with staff and come back with a draft of the specific numbers for the targets. (It's a variation on the goals set by the prior boards.)

This came amid a discussion in which Tata said a new audit will show Wake isn't closing the achievement gap.

UPDATE

When Tata reports back on the subgroup goals, he'll also indicate what impact they'd have if reached on systemwide performance. He said they'll discuss then whether to set a districtwide performance goal as well.

Click here to view the handout from the meeting.

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.