Learned behavior.

• Author: Gearino, G.D.
• Position: FINEPRINT

It is an article of faith in Wake County, where I live, that the Triangle's economic vitality is due in no small measure to its progressive, nationally lauded school system. It naturally follows, then, that the recent election of a conservative-leaning school-board majority is a threat to that economic vitality--one so menacing that almost before the new board chairman had broken in his gavel, a group called Great Schools in Wake Coalition was formed to oppose the fresh majority's revanchist drift. One of the coalition's stated aims is to "examine how proposals of the new [board] might affect the economic growth of Wake County and our ability to attract new business."

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It's certainly true that no economic good results from socio-political strife in a public school system. But the inverse of that fact--that economic growth flowers in areas where school boards are calm and the grades are good--strikes me as a shaky claim. And if I were so foolish as to take a swan dive into the particulars of the longstanding (and now endangered) Wake schools policy of busing students all over the county in the name of economic diversity, I would note that whatever industrial-recruitment benefit is gained from that progressive stance is likely balanced, and maybe even outweighed, by a hesitancy among corporate types to move to a place where their children, well, might be bused all over the county. But I don't propose to adjudicate the wisdom of either the established diversity policy or the effort to overturn it. Instead, let's ponder the school/business connection.

Wake County's school system indeed is considered among the state's finest. And it's true that the Triangle has enjoyed a long period of economic prosperity, being awarded over the years the top spot on so many lists of the best places to [start a business, launch a career, etc.] that the local media long ago adopted a sardonic, yawn-we-made-another-list attitude every time a new ranking was reported. But the exact relationship between those two facts is elusive. It's something akin to the connection between a smile and a seduction: The first seems to lead to the second, but there are way too many other factors to be sure. Besides, if Wake schools are better than most others in the state performance wise, couldn't it be because the offspring of knowledge workers who've migrated to the Triangle boosted that performance? The relationship between the school system and business...