Chamber of Commerce vs. Tea Party over Wake County schools
My guest is Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a nonprofit public policy research organization, writes about education, equal opportunity and civil rights. By Richard D. Kahlenberg Wake County, North Carolina, which includes the city of Raleigh and the surrounding suburbs, has made headlines in recent months as a new Tea Party-backed school board majority has sought to dismantle the district’s longstanding and nationally acclaimed school integration plan. The policy had the goal of limiting the proportion of low-income students in any given school to 40 percent and was based on decades of research finding that concentrations of school poverty are bad for education. As Stephanie McCrummen noted in a front page story in The Washington Post last month, one tea party school board member argued that a new plan that would allow much higher concentrations of poverty could actually improve the prospects of low-income kids.