Mixing Wealth for Academic Health

One North Carolina county sees scores jump with economic shake up.

Jacob, a third grader whose dad is a convenience store clerk, probably doesn’t know that his classmate, Nayima, has a mom who’s the president of a bank and takes home $125,000 a year. He also has no idea what that has to do with his recent B+ in math. But educators in Wake County, North Carolina, do—and they couldn’t be happier.

They’re crediting a 5-year-old system of busing that integrates schools based on parental income—rather than race—for helping to significantly boost test scores.

Last spring, 80 percent of Black third- through eighth-graders scored at grade level on the state’s standardized tests. A decade earlier, only 40 percent had. This evidence of economic integration’s benefits comes at a key time for Wake County. Twenty-seven percent of the students there are poor, up from 20 percent in 1998.

But these results aren’t surprising to many researchers. Decades’ worth of evidence suggests that exposing kids at all economic levels to middle class educational values provides a better learning environment for all, says Richard Kahlenberg of The Century Foundation, a New York-based non-profit that touts economic diversity in schools.

“You want an environment in which peers are highly motivated and have big dreams and whose parents are very involved in their education,” says Kahlenberg.

Photo: Nathan Ham