The magnet school program will be a major discussion topic during today's Wake County school board meeting.

During the work session, staff will recommend which schools to include in the new federal magnet grant application. This means staff will identify today which schools are recommended for new magnet programs and which existing magnets will see major revisions to their themes.

Whether staff also recommends today which schools to demagnetize remains to be seen.

SEE UPDATE AT END OF POST

Former Wake County school board chairman Ron Margiotta is being praised for showing "what conservatives accomplished for Wake schools" in the latest issue of Civitas Review.

The magazine article published by the conservative Civitas Institute praises Margiotta and the former Republican school board majority for various accomplishments in their two-year tenure. The list includes raising the graduation rate, passing the new choice-based student assignment plan, increasing minority placement in Algebra I, lowering student suspensions and not laying off teachers.

"Liberals and their allies like to stereotype conservatives as penny-pinchers who don’t care about students," writes Civitas President Francis DeLuca, the author of the article. "But Ron Margiotta and his conservative allies showed how false that image is."

Bob Luebke says the Wake County school board's passage of the student assignment directive "is not encouraging for conservatives," "disappointing" and "the same old school assignment plan in different packaging."

In this online article Thursday for the conservative Civitas Institute, Luebke writes "don't believe him" when school board chairman Kevin Hill says they're not going back to the old assignment plan. He points to how Hill talks about "healthy schools" and "diversity."

"While most candidates played nice during last fall’s election, it was really only a matter of time before the masks came off and the major philosophical differences between the two camps were exposed," Luebke writes.

North Carolina's education system got some praise while the Wake County schools system got a warning from the number two man at the U.S. Department of Education.

As noted in today's article, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Education Tony Miller was in Raleigh Thursday for an education roundtable discussion at William Peace University. The roundtable discussion was closed to the media, but in an interview beforehand Miller said he was here to recognize North Carolina's education accomplishments.

Miller cited how the state is increasing its high school graduation rate, developed an alternative method for assessing student performance under the federal No Child Left Behind program and has slowed college tuition growth.

Wake County school board chairman Kevin Hill is pointing to the need to change the student assignment plan for diversity reasons and downplaying concerns the recent vote will negatively impact a looming school bond issue.

In this interview last Tuesday on the Bill LuMaye Show on WPTF, Hill said the reason for passing the student assignment directive was the data they had been receiving over the last month about school demographic trends from the new choice plan. Hill said they were concerned that they could add 10 new high-needs schools with high levels of poverty.

"I've heard the superintendent on record all spring basically say there's going to need to be some changes, there's going to be some tweaks," Hill said. "As a board we've been supportive of the choice plan through the spring, but I think this data was kind of alarming in terms of where enrollment was going at several schools. The superintendent again is on record as saying it's cheaper to keep a school from becoming high risk than to deal with a school once it is high risk."

The concept of healthy schools and the significance of the student assignment directive, along with how it was passed by the Wake County school board, were among the topics on WRAL's "On The Record" show on Saturday.

David Crabtree, the host of the show, asked whether the passage of the directive meant the Wake County school system was headed back to where it was before the 2009 school board elections. School board chairman Kevin Hill said the directive calls for staff to “look at the best pieces of the past several assignment processes we’ve had and move forward.”

But school board member Deborah Prickett answered that “this plan is looking to me that it is slipping backwards." She said the directive “is a fundamental change" to the choice plan and "is actually going after the structure of the plan.”

Supporters of restoring diversity to Wake County's student assignment plan have been talking about a recent article on resegregation and school choice in the Winston-Salem Forsyth County schools.

This Sunday article in the Winston-Salem Journal notes how the school district phased out busing for diversity starting in 1995 in favor of "choice zones," which allow parents to choose from among multiple schools. The article says that racial resegregation quickly accelerated in the schools and led to concentrated poverty in certain schools.

"Despite zoned assignment plans offering parents diverse school choices, local schools tend to reflect their neighborhoods," according to the article. "And those neighborhoods, while changing, still reflect the legacy of zoning laws that laid out where black people were allowed to live for much of the 20th century."

Is it a conspiracy or coincidence that the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights is spending a lot of its time investigating various complaints filed against the Wake County school system?

As noted in today's article, OCR has used its discretion to launch investigations of three complaints against Wake in the past two years. The scope of the investigations means OCR is looking at how students are assigned, how they’re suspended, what athletics opportunities they’re provided and whether they’re getting important notices in Spanish.

Depending on your point of view, they're welcome probes or a case of the feds butting in too much into Wake County's business.

The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights will investigate allegations that the Wake County school system discriminated against some Latino students by not providing their parents with Spanish translations of important documents.

The Southern Poverty Law Center and Advocates for Children's Services announced today that OCR is acting on the Title VI complaint that the two groups filed against Wake last month. Here's the OCR letter to Wake dated June 27.

“This is good news for all Latino students in Wake County schools whose parents have limited English proficiency,” said Peggy Nicholson, one of the ACS attorneys representing the students in the complaint. “We hope this investigation results in Wake County public schools adopting new policies and practices that better enable all parents to play a more meaningful role in their children’s education.”

Wake County school board chairman Kevin Hill is trying to ease concerns about the school board's recent vote to change the student assignment plan for the 2013-14 school year.

As noted in today's article, Hill said during a Friday meeting with N&O editors and reporters that he's not expecting the return to an address-based plan to result in large-scale reassignment. He stressed the proposed "stay where you start" policy which would allow students to stay at the school they're attending until they complete the grade span.

But Hill also said they're still going to have to reassign people to fill all the new schools that Wake will need to deal with growth.