Wake Schools Asst. Supt. Chuck Dulaney is challenging the notion that some Wake kids are bused more than 20 miles from home. As the News & Observer’s Keung Hui puts it in this blog, “that would come as a surprise to some folks.”

“I don’t know of a single child assigned to a school 20 miles away — not one,” said Asst. Supt. Chuck Dulaney in the latest issue of In Context, the weekly newsletter of the Wake Education Partnership.

That sure would come as a surprise to some folks. For instance, nodes 51.0 and 444.4.

Students in Node 51, located around Maywood Avenue and Montrose Street near downtown Raleigh, now make the 20+ mile commute to Green Hope High in Cary.

To be fair, the new reassignment plan does move them closer to Broughton High.

But the school district is actually making the commute longer for kids in Node 444.4.

Then there’s this nugget from Wake Ed Partnership’s newsletter In Context, in which Mr. Dulaney’s comment appears:

That doesn’t mean there isn’t wiggle room in this debate. The district measures the distance between home and school in a straight line. Bus routes are never that efficient.

So, the debate over Wake’s transportation policy continues. The big sticking point, of course, is busing kids to achieve socioeconomic “balance.” That debate could end if the system would acknowledge what Queens University researchers discovered recently about Wake’s controversial policy:

A newly released report on academic performance says there’s not much difference in student test scores in the Wake County and Charlotte-Mecklenburg school systems despite their different policies on the assignment of low-income pupils.

The Queens University of Charlotte comparison of North Carolina’s two largest school districts found that student test scores are only slightly higher overall in Wake than Charlotte, which the study’s author attributed to Charlotte-Mecklenburg having many more low-income students. Some Charlotte students are doing as well as or better than their Wake peers.

Of course, this debate might be settled at the ballot box in the fall.