Local NAACP protest CHCCS decision to add more honors classes

Seventeen years after local educators first studied the achievement gap between white and minority students in local schools, very little has been done to close the gap, local NAACP representatives said at a press conference Thursday.

The conference, held in front of the Lincoln Center, was the group’s protest to the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools Board of Education’s recent vote to add more honors courses.

The school board responded with its own conference immediately following that of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The board said it will keep trying to close the achievement gap, but the honors classes would increase academic rigor for all students.

The addition of honors courses in six subjects proves the school board’s priorities are with privileged students, representatives for the NAACP said.

“We are not against raising standards and challenging all youth to succeed at all levels,” NAACP branch president Michelle Cotton Laws said. “But we are against policies that expand opportunities for those persons at the top with little or no genuine attention given to how to bring those children at the bottom along with them.”

Mike Kelley, chairman of the school board, said the board recognized the achievement gap as its number one priority but did not believe that adding honors courses would widen the gap.

“Closing the gap involves adding honors classes,” he said.

The school board was split 4-3 along racial lines when it approved adding the classes last week.

Greg McElveen, a black member of the board who voted against the honors classes, said it was time to focus on the implementation of plans that have been discussed for years to close the gap.

“My first focus was to boost the success of those students who aren’t currently being successful,” he said. “Once we did that, everyone would see improvement and then we’d be in a better position to offer honors courses.”

The school system will add high school honors classes in world history, civics and economics, U.S. history, biology, chemistry and physics next school year.

Data from the school system showed black students in grades three through eight fared significantly worse on end-of-grade tests than the district average, with only 52.3 percent passing reading compared to the 84.8 percent average.

Math results were slightly better, with 71.3 percent of black students passing compared to the 91.8 percent average.

Graphs released by the school board showed the gap in both reading and math tests scores steadily narrowed from 1994 to 2005.

But when the state restructured the tests about five years ago, making them more rigorous and raising the passing grade, passing rates for blacks and Latinos plummeted about 40 percentage points, while the rates for whites and Asians dipped by about 10 percentage points.

 Since then, scores have climbed, but a significant gap remains.

Earlier this month, the board considered a hybrid option for offering honors classes that would combine standard and advanced instruction in the same classroom, but it was received poorly by students, parents and educators, Superintendent Neil Pedersen said.

Laws said the school system was not preparing minority children to be world citizens.

“This is not a black or white issue,” she said. “This is a human and what’s right issue.”



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