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.

The Great Schools in Wake Coalition is questioning why the Wake County school system isn't trumpeting the fact that it has the third-highest graduation rate among the nation's largest school districts.

In an article Tuesday on the New Raleigh website, GSIW Program Coordinator Patty Williams touts the recent Education Week report as being "good news about our Wake County public schools." But she also says "we’re just wondering why the school district isn’t sharing it."

Information about the recent report doesn't appear to exist on Wake's website. I also don't recall anyone but the public speakers mentioning it at this month's school board meetings.

Wake County has the third highest graduation rate among the nation's largest school districts, according to a report today in Education Week.

In its annual Diploma Counts report, Wake County's graduation rate of 78.2 percent for the Class of 2008 placed it ahead of most of the nation's 50 largest school districts. Only Montgomery County in Maryland at 85.7 percent and Fairfax County in Virginia at 85.1 percent came in higher than Wake.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, the only other North Carolina school system on the list, was ranked 30th with a 61.2 percent graduation rate.

Education Week has become the latest mainstream publication to portray the Wake County school diversity fight as being an example of Tea Party influence sweeping candidates into office.

Wake is prominently featured in an article this week in Education Week titled "Tea Partiers Playing a Role in Some School Board Races." The article talks about how Tea Party groups are becoming more active in local races.

The article then says "the best-known example in education circles is Wake County." Without specifically mentioning Tea Party, the article talks about how the new school board majority was elected in 2009 with support from "some conservative community organizations that viewed the (diversity) policy as social engineering."

Whether you agree or not with the allegations about Tea Party influence in Wake, the charge has snowballed since the January article in the Washington Post. It's become almost conventional wisdom.

Education Week is checking in on the Wake County school diversity fight as part of its weekly focus on a school district.

Today's article focuses on the school board's decision to have Superintendent Tony Tata review the Wake School Choice Plan as part of his efforts to develop a new long-term student assignment plan. The article calls the decision a step "that may turn down the temperature of the intense debate."

Going forward on the blog, I'm just going to call the proposal from the Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce and the Wake Education Partnership the Wake School Choice Plan.

Both The Economist and Education Week had their takes last week on the fight over socioeconomic diversity in Wake County schools.

In The Economist article, the writer speculates whether Wake's future looks like that of Charlotte-Mecklenburg, where the percentage of high poverty and high minority schools has increased since the district ended busing for diversity. The article says that efforts by CMS parents in poor areas to get into wealthier schools have often been impossible to grant because of capacity limits.

"(School board member John) Tedesco bristles at the notion that Charlotte is the future; he believes that with better management and more efficient spending Wake can avoid Charlotte’s errors, and he may be right," according to the article in the British weekly. "But Wake’s school system faces a $20m shortfall, which makes the board’s task all the more daunting."

An e-mail heckler styling himself as Albert Einstein sent around a blast to Wake County commissioners and school board members venting his frustration with the school system's reassignment plan. A copy came in this direction as well. Suffice it to say that the gentleman doesn't think much of any plan that has diversity of students as one of its criteria.

Kevin Hill, school board vice chairman, took it upon himself to respond. He didn't argue. Hill (who also included us on the distribution list) simply wrote,

"Dear Mr. Einstein,

"Please read the attached."

What he attached was an article from Education Week, published last June. The article is titled, "Socioeconomic Integration: It's Legal, and It Makes Sense." The authors are identified as Angela Ciolfi, attorney for the JustChildren Program of the Legal Aid Justice Center, Charlottesville, Va., and James E. Ryan, a University of Virginia law professor. It's a concise piece with this point at the core: Socioeconomic integration promises "more academic benefit for less money than under alternative policies. More than 40 years of social science research shows that the socioeconomic composition of a child's school has an effect on academic performance over and above that of the socioeconomic status of the child's family." (Find the piece here.)

Socioeconomic diversity, or integration, is one of the Wake school system's goals as it prepares to shuffle several thousand students over the next three years (the need to divvy students among new schools that will be coming online also is driving the process). The school board's majority believes that keeping any school's student body from being drawn mostly from families who are poor is a way to promote academic success. The Education Week article is the sort of thing that reinforces their commitment to stay the course. Check it out. There's even a comment posted by a reader that will warm the heart of the board's critics, such as the distinguished Mr. Einstein.