In 1976 the commissioners in Wake County and the City of Raleigh, N.C., worked together to merge what had been separate school systems. Busing controversies had intensified white flight from Raleigh, and the commissioners felt that increased segregation would make success nearly impossible for schools with concentrations of kids in poverty.
Later, when the Wake County schools shifted their focus from racial to socioeconomic equality, they ruled that no school could have more than 40 percent of kids eligible for free-and-reduced lunch (FARL), a poverty indicator.
That policy had a nickname: “No bad schools,” which sociologist Gerald Grant used in the title of his book “Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are No Bad Schools in Raleigh.” In the book, Grant contrasts the Wake County school-reform strategy with that of his hometown of Syracuse, N.Y. Mind you, like all school systems trying to improve, both Wake County and Syracuse implemented a host of common school-reform solutions — changing leadership, improving teacher hiring and evaluation, beefing up curriculum and so forth. But Wake County went one critical step further, giving itself five years to eliminate concentrated poverty in all schools.