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Thursday, September 29, 2005
The Income Tipping Effect
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
At least 10 blog-readers sent me a link to another newspaper’s story on Raleigh’s controversial busing program. You can find a link here.
The gist is that Raleigh uses a complex assignment process to make sure no school has more than 40 percent of its students coming from poor families. (Parents and teachers often lament that once a school has a majority of its kids qualifying for free lunch, test scores plummett) The result, according to a school official quoted in the story, is the vast majority of elementary and middle school kids are on grade level.
I would like to know more about the Raleigh plan, even though it’s not something I could see ever flying here. For education research purposes, it’s a goldmine. If middle school kids from poor families are overwhelmingly doing well in school…well, I’d say that lends credibility to what I’ve often heard, that exposure to students for whom college is a given benefits those who do not come from homes where Mom and Dad are college graduates.
Still, I’m skeptical. I want to see some nationally normed test data on middle school kids, and I haven’t had time to look that up. When I do, I’ll report back.
Meanwhile, what about balancing out school enrollments so the poor kids are not all clumped together?
