What the proficiency data says now: NC and New Hanover
There is a relatively large proficiency gap between Black and White students on standardized tests in both North Carolina and New Hanover County. And while the state gap is shrinking, the gap in New Hanover has grown.
For the last school year, roughly 68% of White North Carolina students were proficient on third-grade through twelfth-grade tests, whereas only 40% of Black students were. For New Hanover County, it’s 76% proficient versus 30%. The metrics for the state show a 29 percentage-point difference between the racial groups; in New Hanover, it’s 46 percentage points. The state has decreased the point difference between those groups over the last four years (down 4 points), but New Hanover hasn’t (in fact, it’s up 2 points).
Scott Whisnant is the chair of Elevate Every Child, a group that seeks to reduce these disparities in New Hanover County public schools. He was also one of the leaders of the district’s two-year NHCS Turnaround Task Force. Whisnant was the director of government affairs at NHRMC and a former Star News reporter.
“At the elementary school level, you don't have Black kids coming within 45 points of White kids on any of the proficiency on end-of-grade tests; the same situation occurs in middle and high schools. We know it's not biological. We're not sure why it happens,” he said. (*Note: You can view his presentation on the NHCS data at the end of this report.)
At the November public comment period, Kemeka Sidbury, the education chair of the New Hanover County chapter of the NAACP, told the board she wanted to see a goal added to the district’s strategic plan to increase Black students' proficiency rates on reading exams to at least 60% by 2027. It’s unclear whether the current board will address this, as they plan to remove equity initiatives from their newest plan, which will run from 2027 to 2031.
The current rates, which she read aloud, show that 56% of White students in grades 3 through 8 were proficient in English language arts, compared to 26% of Black students. For grades 9-12, 64% of White students were proficient, compared to 38% of Black students on the ELA tests.
“So what is going on systematically in New Hanover County that you only have one elementary school that meets the 50% proficiency level for Black students [Eaton Elementary] – and one specialized high school [Wilmington Early College] that meets that same criteria?” she said.
Whisnant said this extends to schools in general, as minorities and students who are economically disadvantaged are concentrated in schools throughout the district.
“The discrepancy between the top schools and the bottom 10 or so schools is getting wider, and it's becoming untenable. You can't have a successful school system if about a quarter of your schools are lagging in the way that they are now,” he said.
Whisnant acknowledged the pitfalls of discussing proficiency versus growth rates; the former measures point-in-time ability while the latter measures teacher impact by comparing how students start the year to how well they do by the end.
“The hardest thing about presenting this data is you feel like you're casting blame on teachers and students and families, and you're not. What we're trying to show is that the system is broken, and the system is going to get the results,” Whisnant said.
He did point to schools like Forest Hills Elementary, the International School at Gregory, Holly Shelter Middle School, and Myrtle Grove Middle School that have performed significantly better over the past three years. However, inequities remain, he said.
“But the gaps that remain between racial and economic subgroups are not really improving, and if anything, it's getting worse,” he added.
According to the Dudley Flood Center for Educational Equity and Opportunity’s dashboard, which pulls statistics from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, for the 2023-2024 school year, JC Roe Academy, Rachel Freeman, Snipes, Sunset Park, Forest Hills Elementaries, and Williston Middle School are highly segregated by race. More proportional district schools are SEA-Tech High School, Myrtle Grove Middle, Laney High School, Wilmington Early College, and Emma Trask Middle.
Another data point the Dudley Center reports for 2023-2024: 43% of New Hanover’s schools were majority non-White, and 55% were majority White schools. The state has 48% of schools labeled as non-White and 49% majority White.
What educators, advocates say about the divide
Whisant said that when a majority of low-income students are concentrated in one school, it also concentrates a certain level of trauma that comes from living in poverty.
“When most of the kids in that classroom have a certain amount of trauma, they act out on it. And then you have teachers who may not be the most experienced; they might not know how to respond,” he said.
This trauma may manifest as students sleeping in class, feeling anxious because they haven’t had a nutritious meal, or not knowing how to resolve conflicts productively.
“Then expectations start to match up with these behaviors, and before long, you've got schools where the kids aren't performing, and the teachers don't know how to get them to where they are, and it starts to become a cycle that can't be broken, and I think that's where we are,” Whisnant said.
Other issues could include families not having conversations with their children, instead giving them digital devices or cell phones, which can adversely affect their attention spans. Whisnant acknowledges that some parents or guardians may have had adverse experiences in school, so trusting the school system can be another hurdle to overcome.
Another metric Whisnant examined to gauge the divide between top-performing and low-performing schools — defined as achieving a ‘D’ or an ‘F’ on a state school report grade and not meeting expectations for growth — was chronic absenteeism.
For example, Wrightsville Beach Elementary is one of the higher-performing schools and has a low chronic absenteeism rate. Schools with high poverty rates have higher absenteeism rates, Whisnant said.
“How do you get them to see school is relevant enough that they want to come, and how do you get it so that's non-threatening, and it's a place where parents will make that the priority in the home, no matter what happens tomorrow, ‘I gotta get my kid to school on time,’” he said.
While Whisnant, who has been studying NHCS scores for the past three years, said the racial disparities in schools right now “are nothing short of tragic and not sure what’s driving it,” but said, “it’s probably even more than the poverty that goes along with racial differences. It seems to be a cultural gap that the schools are not crossing. They're having a hard time meeting these kids where they are culturally, emotionally, and socially so that they're ready to learn.”
What researchers say about closing the gap
N.C. State University Professor Anna Egalite said through a university spokesperson that research on racial disparities in testing, synthesized by the Brookings Institution in the 1990s, hasn't changed much.
In a 1998 report, Researchers Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips wrote that chronic poverty may account for some of the gap, but, as Whisnant surmised, it’s also about how families talk to their children, how they handle their questions, and how they respond when they learn — or fail to learn — something.
The research identified four factors that help close the gap: smaller class sizes, a teacher of the same race as the students, having educators set high expectations for students who are performing below the norm, and teachers who score higher on competency exams and subsequent evaluations.
Jencks and Phillips wrote, “Successful theories will therefore have to pay more attention to psychological and cultural influences, which are much harder to measure than income, education, and living arrangements.”
They also mentioned cultural expectations around education and learning. It’s more typical in American culture, they said, to emphasize innate intellectual abilities, whereas in Taiwan, for example, they focus on the student’s effort put into learning.
On the topic of educators looking like the students, Professor Egalite published a policy brief along with Professor Michael Gottfried of the University of Pennsylvania that “a large and growing body of research demonstrates the benefits of assigning students to teachers who share their racial or ethnic backgrounds. These benefits range from improved test scores and attendance to reduced suspension rates and higher graduation and college enrollment rates.”
According to the Dudley Center’s metrics, in the 2023-2024 school year, while 16% of students in New Hanover are Black, only 5% of teachers are. Comparatively, 90% of teachers in the county are White, while 57% of students are.
Dr. Deanna Townsend-Smith is the Senior Director for the Dudley Flood Center for Educational Equity and Opportunity. She said that back in 2019, former Governor Roy Cooper invested in the DRIVE Coalition, a task force to recruit more teachers of color into the classroom.
“I don't think we have a problem with recruiting a diverse educator workforce. We do have a problem, a true problem, holding on to educators of color for a variety of different reasons,” she said.
“It’s about opportunity, not achievement”
Townsend-Smith sees it not as an achievement gap but as an “opportunity gap” between students of color and their White peers. She also questioned the biases built into standardized testing.
“And I lift that up because we all started from a very similar starting place, and we can all achieve when we're all provided access and opportunity,” she said.
Townsend-Smith views the gaps in test scores as stemming from systemic and historical inequities in funding, discipline practices, and access to rigorous coursework.
For funding, Townsend-Smith said the state has “failed to meet the Leandro mandate,” which guarantees access to a sound, basic education enshrined in the North Carolina Constitution. She also cited the NC General Assembly’s decision to send a large influx of funds —$6.5 billion over the next decade —into private schools.
In terms of academic opportunity, the Dudley Center reports that for the 2022-2023 school year, 83% White students in New Hanover County were accessing Advanced Placement courses, compared to just 3% of Black students and 6% of Hispanic students.
As for disparities in discipline, for the 2022-2023 school year, 563 Black students were assigned to school suspension versus 84 White students. For short-term suspensions, 84 White students received this suspension, compared with 408 Black students. That year, Black students were 17% of the student population, with 58% labeled as White.
What to do to close the gap?
New Hanover County Schools has long discussed the differences between proficiency scores and growth. Both former NHCS superintendent Dr. Charles Foust and current superintendent Dr. Christopher Barnes have consistently stated that the path to proficiency is students making year-over-year growth. Officials have also reiterated that teachers and students alike have greater ownership of growth scores than of proficiency scores.
Townsend-Smith said it’s better not to stigmatize schools by focusing only on proficiency rates.
“And while there may not be proficiency, there are other underlying issues that play into that. And so, the more you can illuminate and celebrate the growth, the more you are showing the genius within each of those groups,” she said.
Researchers from NC State University and UNC at Chapel Hill have said that studies consistently show that when schools in a district look similar to each other, without concentrating particular economic or racial groups in one area, overall student performance is better. However, NHCS leaders have shied away from large-scale redistricting plans. In 2024, when the district paid the consulting firm Cropper GIS to help them start planning for future redistricting, Matthew Cropper also advised assigning students to make schools “demographically diverse as possible,” meaning creating racial balance across the district's schools.
Barnes and Republican school board member Josie Barnhart have argued in the past that a large-scale redistricting plan wouldn’t fix the disparity issues.
Another data point from NHCS that Whisnant pulled out this year was how well the Hispanic student population performs at Masonboro Elementary, a high-performing school from the higher end of the district’s income distribution. He said that lends anecdotal support to the idea that placing students in higher-performing schools will raise expectations and that those schools typically attract higher-quality teachers.
“The best example is a small Hispanic cohort in fourth grade at Masonborough Elementary. That's one of the few White-dominated schools that has a large enough subgroup to be measured. Masonboro fourth graders passed the end-of-grade test at 93% in math and 88% in reading. So the Hispanic group was 75% for reading and math,” he said.
Whisnant noted that in schools with lower-income populations, Hispanic students didn’t fare nearly as well.
“If you look at Hispanic groups in other schools, four schools toward the bottom of the income distribution, the same test: their Hispanic populations are 30% and 21% [proficient]; in one school, in fourth-grade reading, it was only 6.9%.”
Since the neighborhood school model took effect in the early 2010s, NHCS has become increasingly racially and economically segregated, and there hasn’t been the political will to change it.
“If you're not going to ascribe to moving them to other schools that are succeeding, the question becomes, what are you going to do to make those 10 schools succeed? It's going to take more resources, different strategies, and more effort than we're putting into it right now,” Whisnant said.
With the district’s current funding gaps from local, state, and federal governments, there have been recent moves to close some underenrolled or underperforming schools, such as the Career Readiness Academy at Mosley and the Mary Washington Howe preschool. Those proposals ultimately failed when those respective communities came out to advocate for them. Townsend-Smith advises against that.
“Have we asked the community about what it is that they need? How we engage with the relevant stakeholders that are a part of that school community to tap into the things that they might see as those things that could help to further increase enrollment, bring students back to school,” she said.
Recent federal and state mandates have eliminated diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, which may lead researchers to shy away from speaking about or studying racial disparities, like those found in NHCS’ test scores. For example, for this story, WHQR was unable to reach researchers at UNC at Chapel Hill or Wake Forest University to discuss what they know about the causes of racial disparities in test scores.
For the Dudley Center, Townsend-Smith said they are continuing their studies of inequities that plague education. She agreed that after the murder of George Floyd, more attention and money were focused on closing these gaps between White and Black educational outcomes, but now, it’s a different story.
“I think the work is the same. Is it funded at the rate that it was before? No,” she said.
