Of course, the interesting thing when you take a look at Durham's schools is that, on a disaggregated basis, they perform about the same as Wake County schools, within individual student categories.  These numbers are published by the Durham CVB each year:

Average SAT scores, by ethnicity (2005):
White: Durham 1132, Wake 1060 (national: 1068)
African-American: Durham 868, Wake 901 (national: 864)

End-of-grade reading at or above grade level, grades 3-8 (2005):
White: Durham 93.8%, Wake >95.0%
African-American: Durham 73.2%, Wake 79.1%

These numbers tell me a couple of things.  First, and obviously, we have a national crisis in terms of the education that African-American youth are receiving. That's a complex issue that goes beyond schools and into issues of historic discrimination, underserved neighborhoods, trends in families, and failures of public policy in housing and financial support.  On the local level, it looks like the numbers in the Triangle mirror the trends in the nation -- inexcusable as they are.

The second thing I learn from these numbers, however, is that most folks moving to the Triangle never see them.  They instead see aggregated numbers showing the level average of school performance. These numbers ignore the fact that Durham is a significantly more racially and socioeconomically diverse community than almost any other in the Triangle.  It's like the asterisk sometimes added to baseball statistics to highlight that there are extraordinary circumstances to why Joe Slugger got so many home runs in a year.  You can't understand Durham's numbers without the asterisk.

In the end analysis, though, no one reads asterisks or footnotes.  We look at the bottom line number and make our decisions.  It's a rational action in human behavior to minimize uncertainty.  We seek out heuristics, or mental short-cuts that help us to understand our surroundings, doubly so in a complex world.  "Great schools" have great scores, right?  Or so you'd think.

And this is doubly true of individuals looking to move to the Triangle who aren't interested in a close textual reading of school statistics in any one district, but who are looking at every place from Alamance County to Zebulon to try to find the right home for them.  And in the bottom line numbers, frankly, the cities and towns that have done less to be inclusive, less to foster and promote diversity, have school numbers that "look" better, on paper, than Durham's.

To my mind, and thinking about this from a national perspective, it's one of the great failings of our current obsession with tests and measurements for our schools.  Because the 'bottom line' number in every community has as much to do with the level of diversity the community celebrates as with the performance of individuals within the various sub-categories.  And this is to say nothing of important factors that don't show up in any standardized test: appreciation for the arts, early exposure to world cultures, instilling compassionate and humanitarian values in our youth.

The communities with "great schools" across the nation tend to be racially homogeneous and socioeconomically exclusive.  Personally, I chose to live in Durham because it wasn't either of those things.  You couldn't pay me enough to live in Cary or Clayton or, God forbid, Wake Forest.  When my kids someday get to go off to schools here locally, I feel secure knowing they're going to get a good education and see a truer representation of what America really looks like than they'd see if we raised them in a Truman Show-like caricature of a community.

So let me just take this opportunity to say: I think Durham's schools are doing great work and making great progress.  No asterisks needed.