Heritage Weighs in on Wake County Schools

Anissa Borchardt lends a much-needed and reasoned voice to the brouhaha over diversity and neighborhood schools in Wake County. Borchardt, writing on the subject  in the Heritage Foundation blog, The Foundary, quickly gets to the heart of the matter: the right of parents – or lack thereof – to choose quality schools and correctly highlights the best way to address these concerns. She writes:  

 Having a county bus children to a school—in some instances over an hour away—is not the answer to creating more diverse learning environments. The main focus should not be on the distribution of children but rather empowering parents to choose a quality education. The power should ultimately reside in the hands of the parents to choose the school in which their children can best excel.

School choice, not the central planning that comes from policies such as busing or assignment-by-zip-code, ultimately fosters innovation and leads to academic achievement increases for all children. And school choice has many forms, including innovative practices in online learning, which are beginning to catch fire across the country.

It’s exactly these types of innovative practices that can become available to students when robust school choice options are in place. And hopefully for the students in Wake County, the board’s move to end bureaucratic busing policies will usher in something far more effective than the status quo.

Nice to see a good article on an important subject.