The issue of low teacher expectations for poor and minority students and the SAS EVAAS report came up during today's Wake County school board retreat.

Superintendent Tony Tata proposed adopting as a core belief that “all children, regardless of socio-economic environment, can be high achieving students.” In explaining the reason for it, Tata cited the EVAAS report and his conversation with a middle school teacher about math placement.

Tata said the EVAAS report showed to him there's a problem with minority and low-income students not being placed in challenging enough classes because of low expectations.

UPDATE

The board was trying to find a balance between saying it wanted to close the  gaps while not holding back high-achieving students.

The school board finished ahead of schedule today. Saturday's session has been cancelled.

Look soon for a New York Times article on the Wake School Choice Plan and how that could impact the diversity fight in Wake County schools.

A Times reporter was in town Monday and Tuesday to visit schools and interview people, particularly about the plan from Michael Alves. The Times, like other national media outlets, has been monitoring the ongoing controversy in Wake.

It's arguably this 2005 New York Times Sunday front-page article that put Wake in the national spotlight. The article, based on the test results before the state toughened the exams, touted how the diversity policy had sharply closed the racial achievement gap.

Is Enloe High School a tale of two schools with one for magnet students and another for base students?

As noted in today's article by Jane Stancill, students and parents aren't disputing that the advanced courses at Enloe are largely made up of white and Asian students with the regular courses are often predominantly black and Latino. But they disagreed on whether that's a big problem for Enloe.

The highly visible role that Enloe students and parents have taken fighting the Wake County school board over eliminating the diversity policy has put the situation at the school under the microscope.

The leadership of the Eastern N.C. Episcopal Diocese of the A.M.E. Zion Church says it will announce tonight "the launching of a special Wake County School Initiative for Economically –Disadvantaged Students with a targeted focus on reaching the Black Male."

The announcement will come during an 8:30 p.m. news conference at Rush Metropolitan A.M.E. Zion Church, 558 East Cabarrus St. in Raleigh.

In addition, organizers say the event is meant to show they're "renewing their commitment to fight the abandonment of the socio-economic diversity policy which will lead to high poverty, racially identifiable public schools in Wake County."

SEE UPDATE AT END OF POST

A discussion Thursday about how to help improve the performance of African American male students turned into yet another fight over school diversity in Wake County.

School board member Keith Sutton gave a presentation during Thursday's ED task force meeting highlighting the racial achievement and graduation rate gaps between black and white students. Click here and here to see what was handed out.

The ensuing Q&A turned into a discussion of the elimination of the diversity policy, with some shouting and heated words.

A conservative website has given a pretty harsh review of Wednesday's Washington Post article on the Wake County school diversity fight.

In a a blog post Wednesday, Newsbusters managing editor Ken Shepherd argues that the Post article unfairly paints Tea Party conservatives in North Carolina as being opposed to racial integration and diversity in Wake. Newsbusters is a project of the Media Research Center, which describes its mission as exposing liberal bias in the news media.

"In truth the Wake County, North Carolina, school board is simply moving to reverse decades of busing that shuttled some students to schools farther away from their homes in an effort to artificially engineer the socioeconomic and racial diversity of the county's individual schools," Shepherd writes.

Wake County school board member Keith Sutton wants the school district to begin setting priorities for things to protect in the face of next year's budget crunch.

Sutton got the process started at last week's finance committee meeting, where he proposed ideas such as protecting pre-K funding, providing enough funding for alternative schools and improving the academic performance for African American male students.

Sutton said he's hoping the full school board will have a similar discussion on the issue.

The new middle school math placement guidelines will take a back seat at today's meeting of the Wake County school board economically disadvantaged student performance task force.

Only five minutes on today's agenda is scheduled for an update on the math placement stats presented at the last ED meeting. School board member John Tedesco, chairman of the task force, said administrators are still resolving whether the numbers accurately reflect minority enrollment this year in pre-algebra and Algebra I.

Far more time, 45 minutes, is set aside for discussion of a draft policy on equity and equality.

Is the glass half full or half empty when it comes to comparing how the Wake County school system is doing academically versus other school districts?

During Tuesday's school board work session, school administrators touted how Wake is doing better overall than the state and the state's four other largest districts. But school board member John Tedesco focused more on how Wake is trailing some of those districts among some subgroups.

In addition, questions were raised whether greater funding might explain why Wake is trailing among some of the subgroups.

Minority participation is up in pre-algebra and Algebra I this school year in Wake County middle schools but a lot of the talk today was that it's still not enough.

School officials said 61.6 percent of black middle school students who were identified as being ready to take pre-algebra or Algebra I were placed in those courses this year. The rate was 61.6 percent for Hispanic students and 58.6 percent for economically disadvantaged students using the new EVAAS selection criteria.

Previously, the SAS report indicated a majority of qualified black and Hispanic students weren’t being placed into Algebra I in middle school.

SEE UPDATE AT END OF POST