at 40% minority students performing at great level before this program began and in four years it was up to 80%. this program is nationally recognized. you re saying minority students have actually performed higher and they ve done better through this integration program. john, what s wrong with that? we should be busing black kids into white schools, white kids into black schools and working on race relations, and when you get along and do well, you can t help but have a better education and perform better in school. if that was really the case, we would hold some value and reconsider the policy, but the reality is, and anyone can look at the wake county numbers. currently wake county has a 54% graduation rate between our economically disadvantaged children. you re giving up on half of our children, exacerbating a school to prison pipeline. the policy was unfairly aimed at our low-income families. the forced busing mechanism
it was supposed to take all of the schools in wake county system, 162 schools with 142,000 kids. it was supposed to ensure that no school would exceed a high poverty goal. they used a forced busing mechanism to reassign children if those schools exceeded that threshold. unfortunately, at that time, 5% of the schools exceeded that threshold, and today over 30% of our schools exceed that threshold and over 50 exceeded a poverty threshold close to 80%, and the university of georgia just presented an independent study that was presented at the american educational researchers association in may at their national conference showed that the policy had good intentions but created more segregation in an integrated community like raleigh. do you agree that s what happened as this program carried on for so many years, that
actually it has not met the goals it was set out to do? no, and john knows that s not the facts that we should be talking about. the reality is that across this nation we see resegregation. wherever we try to use selected real estate zones, we end up we resegregation, from los angeles to new york to pittsburgh, to mississippi, to right here in north carolina, and it creates pockets of poverty and misery, and we know that recession greated schools are the enemy of school excellence, diversity is the friend to school excellence. when the program was put in place, it was to move closer and to end the conservative attacks we had to turn back our strong constitutional high quality education for all children by ultra conservatives and others. from 2000 to now, the reality is in a new york times article and a book written by gary grant, why there are no bad schools in wake county, shows that we were
policy of the policy targeted low income families and gave choice to affluent families to fill out an application and choose a magnet school while low income families were taken block by block in their neighborhood and taken away from their communities. the policy had a weighted system. for gifted and talented schools, the policy tracked down and out many of our children away from the schools. so low income families were given a lower rating and less of a chance to get into magnet schools, and a recent study at one of our largest software companies concluded in wake county by identifying these children at risk as a subgroup we tracked down and out 81% of our low income and minority children hurp gifted and went into lower courses. you feel those facts are distorted. hold on, reverend, there are a lot of numbers and surveys and things that you guys are citing.