The Wake County, N.C., school system will have to correct a controversial report it sent to U.S. Department of Education investigators, after a review revealed errors in a section that tried to correlate long bus rides and poor academic performance among certain ethnic groups. The department is investigating a charge that the system practiced racial discrimination in its school assignment policies.
School board lawyer Ann Majestic said the reported relationship between length of bus rides and declining student achievement is “generally true” of black and white students, as stated in the report, but does not appear to be true of Hispanic students. Also, the numbers for smaller ethnic groups are “probably too small to be meaningful.”
