Juli Leonard/The News & Observer via AP
Ariel Williams raises her hand to answer a question in her first-grade class, where students work from spaced tables during the coronavirus pandemic, October 26, 2020, at Hunter Elementary School in Raleigh, North Carolina.
At age seven, Sahmoi Stout began taking classes for gifted students. He had started first grade in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools, North Carolina’s best-performing school district, after his family moved to Chapel Hill from Durham. In second grade, a teacher recommended him for the academic program that ultimately propelled him to college. At first, Stout, who is African American, didn’t understand why his friends didn’t take those same courses. As one of the few Black students in advanced classes full of white kids, he “felt odd.”
North Carolina’s top public schools may appear integrated, but the excellence of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools obscures a troubling distinction: The district has the second-highest achievement gap between Black and white students in the country. Stout’s experience is one that academically talented minority students often face: Programs for gifted young people bound for college are predominantly white, while the regular courses—ones that largely fail to prepare students to attend college—are mostly Black or Hispanic.
In the nearly seven decades since Brown v. Board of Education struck down school segregation, predominantly white school communities have zealously controlled access to the best opportunities that public school systems have to offer. Without addressing segregation within schools, North Carolina has a long way to go to provide an equitable education, a situation that is likely to become even more challenging as districts confront the social, emotional, and academic consequences of online learning during the pandemic as the new, in-person school year begins.
According to a 2020 study by Duke University researchers, which analyzed classroom-level segregation within and between North Carolina schools, segregation in schools with white and Hispanic students is more pronounced than in schools with white and Black students, an outcome that the researchers noted was “surprising and noteworthy, given the decades of discrimination and segregation directed toward Black students which has long plagued schools in the South.”
Counties with student populations that are 40 to 50 percent Black have the highest levels of white/Black segregation; while counties with student populations that are 20 to 30 percent Hispanic have the highest levels of white/Hispanic segregation. Segregation between schools is higher in the elementary grades, so classes within those schools tend to be more racially and ethnically homogeneous. But by middle and high school, the researchers noted, segregation within a school increases dramatically for Black and Hispanic students in all courses, but especially in seventh- and tenth-grade math classes.
Without addressing segregation within schools, North Carolina has a long way to go to provide an equitable education.
In Orange County, where Chapel Hill-Carrboro City schools are located, these disparities are stark. The researchers found that to achieve racial balance in tenth-grade math classes, both between and within high schools, 46 percent of Black students would have to make transfers.
One reason is racialized tracking, or disproportionately weeding out students of color from challenging courses. According to William Darity Jr., a professor of public policy at Duke University, segregating classes by race within schools began after Brown; today, there are few Black and Hispanic students in advanced, honors, or gifted courses in North Carolina public schools. North Carolina Department of Public Instruction statistics indicate that in 2020, roughly 24 percent of students in North Carolina public schools identified as Black and 19 percent as Hispanic. Yet in advanced or intellectually gifted courses (such as honors or Advanced Placement), only 10 percent of students identified as Black and 9 percent as Hispanic.
“There’s absolutely no way to explain that except by some sort of discriminatory mechanisms that are taking place,” Darity says.
In the early elementary grades, Darity explained that teachers recommend students for placement testing that can lead to a seat in a gifted or talented program. Parents can have their children privately tested, but they would have to be aware of that option and pay a psychologist or psychiatrist to conduct the exam. In high schools, teachers also recommend students for the Advanced Placement classes that can help college-bound students place out of certain first-year university courses.
To minimize racial achievement gaps, Darity says that teachers need to challenge all young children with gifted-level classes. When he visited classrooms run by Project Bright IDEA, a North Carolina Department of Public Instruction pilot program, Darity observed first graders debating the genius of Michelangelo versus Leonardo da Vinci and learning the foundation of set theory, a branch of mathematical logic that analyzes collections of objects. Exposure to complex ideas helped Black and Hispanic students in this program significantly improve their academic performance. According to Darity, only systematic efforts to provide teachers with new skill sets and the tools to shift racially biased predispositions can eliminate or reduce internal segregation patterns.
In May, State Rep. Cecil Brockman (D-High Point) introduced two bills that would begin to address these disparities. One proposal would require the State Board of Education to add a “segregation score” to public-school report cards, which would help parents assess an individual school’s racial and ethnic demographics. Since there isn’t enough information currently available to provide measures of classroom-level segregation on school report cards, the bill would also require school districts to start collecting data about underrepresented students’ access to gifted programs and advanced courses, as well as experienced and credentialed teachers, art and music programs, psychologists, counselors, and nurses.
A second proposal would set up a 14-member task force to study opportunity gaps by considering issues like teacher development and budgeting. With input from parents, teachers, and principals, the task force would then propose plans for reducing the gaps for underrepresented student subgroups by 2030.
In Chapel Hill, Sahmoi Stout participated in extracurricular programs, such as the Minority Student Achievement Network Consortium, a multiracial school coalition working to eliminate gaps in educational opportunities, where he learned that few Black students have opportunities to excel due to historical inequities in education and a school-to-prison pipeline that labels some young students of color “troubled” or “disruptive” as early as kindergarten, markers that tarnish their future prospects.
In 2018, Stout headed off to York College of Pennsylvania. Now a rising senior majoring in economics, he says finding solutions to these disparities is possible, especially in a well-funded school district like Chapel Hill-Carrboro City. But ending classroom segregation will take more than legislative mandates. “As a community,” Stout says, “there has to be an initiative from the parents and from the kids to say something has to change.”
This post has been updated.
