The newly elected board gained a 5:4 Republican majority and was successful in overturning the integration policy that had been operating in Wake County for years.
In February 2009, the school board approved a plan that would move 24,654 students to different schools over the next three years). This wave of changes will require the reassignment of many low-income students to schools that have greater proportion of higher-income students. For the 2008–09 school year, for example, the school district has stated that it will reassign some 6,464 students in order to affect a new system-wide policy designed to help schools in the same geographic area achieve similar economic demographics. Many parents object to this annual shuffle. In the effort to maintain economic diversity and keep up with rapid growth in its student population, Wake routinely reassigns thousands of students each year to different schools. Supreme Court ruling restricting the use of race in assigning students, Wake has been cited as a model for how other school systems can still maintain diversity in enrollment.
Despite improved integration, test results among poorer students continue to lag: for the 2007–2008 school year, only 18% of the district's schools met the adequate yearly progress goals of the No Child Left Behind Act, with only 71 percent passing state standardised tests. The county's residents are divided in their support for the system's integration program due, partially, to some of the means of achieving that integration, such as long bus rides for many students and a lack of neighbourhood schools. News and World Report, in 2005, 63.8% of low-income students in Wake County passed the state's end of high school exams, which was significantly higher than surrounding counties that do not have similar integration policies. Grant says, "The research is very clear that having the right mix of kids socioeconomically, as Wake County does, has enormous benefits for poor kids without hurting rich kids." According to U.S. Professor Gerald Grant of Syracuse University used Wake County as a metaphor of hope in his 2009 book Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are No Bad Schools in Raleigh. Magnet schools are characterized as being public schools that specialize in a particular area, such as science or the arts, to encourage desegregation by drawing students from multiple neighbourhood and districts to the same school. Consequently, thousands of suburban students are bused to magnet schools in poorer areas-and likewise, low-income students to suburban schools-to help maintain this income balance. Schools in the system are integrated based on the income levels reported by families on applications for federally subsidized school lunches, with the goal of having a maximum ratio of 40% low-income students at any one school. The district since has become notable for its integration efforts. School and business leaders instead convinced the North Carolina General Assembly to force the merger. The proposal proved initially unpopular with residents, however, who rejected it by a 3-1 margin in a non-binding referendum in 1973. Political and educational leaders also hoped that merging the two systems would ease court-mandated desegregation. The merger was proposed initially by business leaders in the early 1970s out of concerns that continued " white flight" from Raleigh's inner-city schools would negatively impact the county's overall economy. The current school system is the result of a 1976 merger between the previous (historically largely white) Wake County school system and the former (historically largely minority) Raleigh City schools.
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