The achievement gap: One man’s cautionary tale

By Jaymes Powell Jr.
Institute for Advanced Journalism Studies

RALEIGH, N.C. -  In this Old South city, the distance between America’s promise and America’s poverty is only one block.

In a neighborhood just a few feet away from the governor’s mansion, black people live in boarded-up homes and rooming houses, while just around the corner, whites live in renovated Victorian homes in a gentrified neighborhood.

Chances are, this contrast was created, at least in part, by a history of racial segregation and inequality in Wake County schools. Before an aggressive new schools reorganization plan that took effect in 1982, the worst schools were in this part of the city.

After years of experiments with magnet schools, and struggles with high dropout rates, these schools are, in many ways, still the worst.

More than 50 years after the Supreme Court handed down the Brown decision that declared segregation unconstitutional, nationally black children still lag behind their white counterparts in most achievement measures.

Among other things, only 14 percent of black children are proficient in reading by the time they reach the fourth-grade, while 43 percent of white children are. Worse, only 56 percent of black students graduate high school.

The reasons for the disparities in these educational outcomes range from poverty, to subtle racism and cultural disconnects between black students and white teachers, experts say.

Fifty-nine-year old Donnie Farrow understands this all too well.

On an unusually blustery and icy day, Farrow has ridden his bike to a nearby rooming house. He is rushing inside to file for his weekly unemployment benefits.

How Farrow got to this point in his life – jobless and disheveled, with decaying and missing teeth – began with the educational disadvantages he experienced at an early age that combusted with the bad luck he experienced later in life.

Farrow began school in coastal, southern Jones County, N.C., in 1957 – three years after the Brown decision.

But the year before he entered school, North Carolina was one of 11 Southern states whose lawmakers signed on to the Southern Manifesto – a document in which they vowed to fight racial desegregation in public places.

Farrow says he lived with the indignation of substandard and segregated education, poverty and racial intimidation.

“I remember finding a black man’s (severed) hand on the beach,” Farrow says. “They never did find the body.”

Farrow spent his childhood in segregated schools. 

“Not knowing, at the time, I thought the books were all the same,” he says. “But what I found out is that the whites always had better (books) than we did.

“They had a better education, we got hand-me-downs. We always got the raggedy desk - they got them first.”

When Farrow was 16, his high school was integrated. But, he says, the educational advantages the white kids brought with them made his senior year look different than any other previous year.

“(African-American students) came to the realization that there was a differential between black and white (experiences and education) … it was a lot whole better,” Farrow says.

“It made things a bit more competitive because the Caucasians - to my way of thinking - were much more informed and more articulate that what we were.”
 
The idea that whites would invariably wind up with an advantage tormented Farrow.
It stuck with him long after a graduation celebration with his friends turned into a racial confrontation with two white men. Farrow was celebrating going to Pace College in New York.

“You’re niggers, you’re dirty and stinky. You look like monkeys and need to take a bath’,” Farrow says they told him and his friends. “I feared for my life because they had shotguns to our heads.”

Farrow went on to New York, but relationship problems got in the way of him finishing Pace. So he returned to North Carolina.

“I somewhat lost interest (in trying to get a degree). ... There was so much racial tension. It was such a separation in the races of people,” Farrow says. “It made me feel as though I was somewhat inferior.”

Farrow eventually learned how to lay bricks, and bought a modest home in Raleigh.
But bad luck caught up to him again last year when was laid off, and his house burned to the ground.

Jaymes Powell is a freelance journalist in Raleigh, N.C.

Index of Black-White Achievement Gap Stories