The News & Observer continues to defend efforts by the Wake County Public Schools to bus poor kids to and fro. In this piece, N&O columnist Steve Ford welcomes the New York based Century Foundation to the debate over Wake County busing efforts. Wake County school folk do not have the data to substantiate their social engineering program, so they simply appeal to an authority from a galaxy far, far away.
Anyway, see if you can pick out the key word in the following passage:
As it happens, the foundation last month put out a synopsis of three “educational strategies that work,” and socioeconomic diversity again made the hit parade.
A report by foundation vice president Greg Anrig (it’s on the Web at www.tcf.org) focuses on a St. Louis program allowing inner-city students voluntarily to attend schools in the suburbs.
African-Americans who were involved didn’t show much academic gain in the elementary grades, Anrig writes. But “those who stayed in the program until they reached the tenth grade displayed levels of achievement that far surpassed that of their peers who either remained in neighborhood city schools or attended magnet schools” created under a court’s desegregation order.
If you chose the word “voluntarily,” you are a winner!
Choice is a huge difference between the St. Louis and Wake County programs. Anrig’s report does not even mention Wake County, probably because Wake does not operate a “voluntary” system. (And I wonder how academic gains suddenly emerge in high school, but that is a separate, albeit important, question.) Apparently, these points are lost on Ford, who concludes his column with a defense of pre-kindergarten programs. Huh?
