• Economic Integration in Wake County. The best education news of the year came from Raleigh, North Carolina, where voters supported gutsy school board members who backed a controversial measure to give low-income students a chance to attend good middle-class public schools. In the Wake County public school system, which includes Raleigh and the surrounding suburbs, the school system adopted a plan under which no school should have more than 40 percent of students eligible for free or reduced price lunch. Guided by research showing that all students do better in middle-class schools, Wake relies mostly on an extensive use of magnet schools to avoid concentrations of poverty. In September, the plan was featured in a front page New York Times story entitled, “As Test Scores Jump, Raleigh Credits Integration by Income.”
  
  Low-income and minority students in Wake do considerably better than low-income and minority students in other North Carolina districts which fail to break up concentrations of poverty. For example, on the 2005 High School End of Course exams, 63.7 percent of low-income students in Wake passed, compared with 48.7 percent in Durham County, 47.8 percent in Guilford County, and 47.8 percent in Mecklenburg County.
  
  Despite the plan’s success, some wealthier families didn’t like the burden of longer bus rides associated with efforts to ensure the schools were integrated, and they launched an attempt to unseat the school board members who backed the plan. Since wealthier families often hold disproportionate power and are more likely to vote, there was some concern that opponents of the economic school integration plan would prevail. But in a November runoff election, pro-integration forces turned out in large numbers and the nationally recognized system was preserved—demonstrating that, every once and a while, voters will focus on what’s best for all the children in a system and won’t say no to success.

• Private School Voucher Schemes in New Orleans. The worst education news came when conservatives attempted to push the idea of school vouchers on the students of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. Just as the nation was awakened to the tremendous racial and economic inequality faced by poor, black students in New Orleans, the right wing proposed an idea that was likely to worsen those divisions.
  
  Americans support public schools in large measure because they like the idea of institutions that promote social mobility on the one hand, and social cohesion on the other. New Orleans public schools were doing neither very well, but research shows that voucher schemes are likely to exacerbate the problem—encouraging divisions by race, class, ethnicity, and religion—and leaving those behind in public schools even less likely to climb the social ladder.
  
  New Orleans students do deserve better than they had received in the past, but rather than providing vouchers to private schools, Louisiana could provide choice among public schools—and include city and suburb in the mix, with an eye to making all the schools middle class, as done in Wake County.
  
  New Orleans is one of the best places to try economic school integration through public school choice because if any children in the country have purchase on the American conscience it’s the children of New Orleans. Maybe we’ll do better by them in 2006.

Richard Kahlenberg is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation.