The achievement gap has become an icon in North Carolina education, complete with logo tote bags, pens, posters, and notepaper. As educators assembled for a recent conference in Greensboro, they received a whole set of amusing paraphernalia from the Department of Public Instruction.

Imprinted with the happy faces of children from different races, goodies displaying the conference theme — closing the achievement gap — reflect a sad fact. Public education has failed to advance academic achievement among black children in tandem with their white counterparts.

The N.C. Department of Public Instruction’s two-and-a-half day conference was titled “Closing the Achievement Gap: Improving Minority and At-Risk Student Achievement.” Several thousand educators filled the lobby and meeting floors of the Koury Convention Center from March 24-26. They gathered from around the state to hear about the causes, consequences, solutions, perspectives, and prospects for eliminating the gap between black-student and white-student achievement.

All registered participants received information packets, along with session schedules, evaluation forms, and certificates to verify attendance with the State Board of Education. North Carolina teachers are credited with 15 contact hours for attending the conference as a license renewal activity. Renewal hours are part of the requirement for maintaining a current teaching license in the state.

With more than 33 concurrent sessions in each time slot, more than 200 individual session in all, it was impossible to attend more than a small sample of presentations. Some focused on the implications of the No Child Left Behind Act for closing the gaps between racial groups. One detailed study examined issues that have awakened raw sensitivities in North Carolina education: desegregation and resegregation in North Carolina schools.

The playing field

Dr. Charles Clotfelter of Duke University opened the convention with what was officially a preconference lecture. His research was prepared with Helen Ladd and Jacob Vigdor of Duke University for the August 2002 Resegregation of Southern Schools conference at UNC-Chapel Hill. The title of the study is “Segregation and Resegregation in North Carolina’s Public School Classrooms.”

The research team wanted to look at trends in the racial mix of the state’s schools. Research that links lower student performance to the racial and/or socioeconomic makeup of schools suggests that integration benefits nonwhite and poor students. Within a certain percentage, the same research argues that more affluent students, and white students, don’t suffer academically from the association.

Predominantly minority schools and ones in poor neighborhoods do suffer, the research says, because they receive less-experienced teachers. Poorer schools typically have fewer available resources, including parent and community assistance, the research says.
The solution? Mix diverse students together to “even the playing field.”

Clotfelter’s work is unique because it uses data at the grade and the classroom level. The paper that he excerpted covers the years from 1994-95 to 2000-01. It reviews racial changes within schools and between schools in North Carolina. Essentially, Clotfelter describes the current academic playing field from the perspective of trends over time, looking more closely at what goes on inside schools than anyone has been able to look before.

Instead of dividing North Carolina into its 117 school districts for the study, 11 large areas were artificially constructed. Researchers included the five largest school districts — Mecklenburg, Wake, Guilford, Cumberland, and Forsyth — plus three subdivided geographic regions.

Separate urban and rural divisions created two coastal, two piedmont, and two mountain areas in the state, making 11 demographic regions in all.

Six main findings come out of the report. First, the degree of white/non-white segregation varies depending on where in the state one looks. In 2000-01, Guilford, Mecklenburg, and Forsyth had segregation levels above the state average. Clotfelter used a segregation gap index that captures the difference between black/white popula- tion ratios and the ratios that appear in schools.

Statewide, the gap is about 0.10, which is not highly segregated, even though the ideal would be zero.
Mecklenburg measured a 0.20, Guilford a 0.29, and Forsyth a 0.25, meaning those districts were at least 20 percent more segregated than the black/white population ratios would predict with no segregation at all. On the district level, in the regions where nonwhites made up 50 to 70 percent of the population, segregation appeared to be at its highest levels.

Classroom-by-classroom measures show how one room in a particular grade compares to another room in the same grade. The fourth-grade rooms were virtually identical. In the seventh and 10th grades, however, different classrooms had black/white ratios that varied considerably from room to room. The researchers believe that part of this finding is due to elective classes, as well as honors and other options, that may tend to track along racial lines. Whether for academic or for other reasons, the races tend to separate more dramatically in the upper-grade classrooms.

Two final observations deserve attention. First, segregation in neighborhoods exceeds school segregation throughout the state. And perhaps most important, the report stated that “…we find marked increases in segregation over the period.” The percentage of nonwhite students in already “largely nonwhite districts” climbed about one-third between 1994-95 and 2000-01. The reported change is an average.

While Mecklenburg moved from a 0.12 in the index to a 0.20, Guilford moved from 0.24 to .29, and Forsyth experienced the largest change, from 0.07 to 0.25.

Plans for closing the gap

A number of presentations addressed the convergence of No Child Left Behind with North Carolina’s plan for eliminating the achievement gap. One school that showed evidence of progress in this direction is Hodge Road Elementary School in Knightdale.

Its principal, Jamee Lynch, talked about the school’s success using the Project Achieve model. In two years, overall student proficiency rose from 71 to 88 percent under the program. Over that same period, the number of students receiving free/reduced-price lunch rose from 35 to 48 percent.

Project Achieve employs a system of breaking down the objectives of the school year into short daily “focus lessons.” Every seven days or so, students are given a brief assessment to check understanding. The assessments provide feedback for continued work or review, but aren’t used to generate grades, Lynch said.

It’s the preplanning that involves time, money, and effort in this system, since at least one semester of daily focus lesson plans must be completed before the school year begins. The good news is that once lesson planning is done, “the plans are transportable,” Lynch said. Project Achieve involves a strong element of scripted “direct instruction,” which means other schools could use the same plans.

No Child Left Behind, in a very real sense, was the federal govern-ment’s answer to the achievement gap. The part of NCLB that is most relevant to the achievement gap is the progress requirement for racial subgroups.

According to Lynch, Hodge Road Elementary is serving as a model for other counties in the state because of its success, and hosts administrators who want to come and observe exactly what the school does. While Hodge Road Elementary hasn’t fully broken down its reports into the NCLB racial subgroups, the school made progress in all groups using the Achieve approach.

Hodge Road Elementary School had 48 percent of students in the free/reduced lunch program last year. It also had about 13 percent of its student in special education (excluding gifted or talented kids). Under NCLB, high-poverty schools are not excused from testing and performance requirements. Nor are special-education students, though they may receive some accommodation from the school system.

Palasek is a policy analyst at the North Carolina Education Alliance and an assistant editor at Carolina Journal.