Broad Effort to Mix Students by Wealth Under Fire in N.C.

By Alan Richard

Raleigh, N.C.

Feeling pressed by the courts and the threat of a lawsuit, the schools here in Wake County decided to go colorblind.

Leaders of this 101,000-student district, which includes Raleigh and its suburbs, decided in 1999 to make Wake County the nation's largest school system to integrate its students by wealth, rather than by race.

They changed local policy after a federal court scrapped race-based student busing in Charlotte, N.C., 150 miles to the southwest, figuring that the district had better take race out of its desegregation plan, or face a legal...