CHAPEL HILL -- State NAACP President William Barber and civil rights historian Tim Tyson joined local activists Thursday in criticizing a plan they said would leave minority students in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools further behind their white peers.
In a news conference, critics said newly approved high school honors courses in science and social studies will divert resources from closing the district's racial achievement gap.
"We're not against academic excellence," Barber said. "We're against academic exclusion."
School officials, in their own news conference, said the honors courses will add only one-time, up front costs.
"It doesn't require any more teachers," Superintendent Neil Pedersen said. About $107,000 will go to train and pay teachers and buy materials for two levels of courses: standard and honors.
"We don't pay them extra to either get prepared or to teach the class," he said.
The district will establish two levels of courses in world history, civics and economics, U.S. history, biology, chemistry or physics. Advanced Placement courses will provide a third option.
The school board approved the honors courses because so many students were taking online honors courses offered by the N.C. Virtual Public School, according to Chairman Mike Kelley. The four white members voted for the new courses, while the three black members voted against them.
It's not that the NAACP opposes extra spending on potential honors-level students. Instead, the group wants the district to close the achievement gap first.
"We're asking our school system not to put one dime behind these new honors courses until you can assure us that all children will be challenged," said Michelle Cotton Laws, president of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro chapter of the NAACP.
The district released figures Thursday showing black students about 40 percentage points behind white students on end-of-course exams in core high school subjects.
The figures showed black and Latino students had nearly closed the elementary-level achievement gap by 2005. Then, Pedersen said, the state made the tests harder, and scores dropped for all students, but most dramatically for minority students. In 2009, black and Latino students scored 30 to 35 percentage points lower on average than white and Asian students.
Pedersen said the district received strong support for adding honors courses as the school board debated the proposal over five meetings. But NAACP members complained that white parents seem able to communicate more effectively with school officials and get what they want.
"I believe that the school board members have become pawns of elitist self-interest," said the Rev. Mark Royster, pastor of Cedar Rock Baptist Church and chairman of a Blue Ribbon Task Force on minority achievement in the 1990s.
"Seventeen years [later], I have no business standing up here," Royster said. "This is a sad day for Chapel Hill-Carrboro. It seems that we are the bad guys. I'm not against success, but I am against elitism. There is a systemic problem that we have yet to address."
Tyson, author of the book-turned-feature-film "Blood Done Sign My Name," and Nancy McDermott, another writer, said East Chapel Hill High School had been a great place for their gifted children but not for their lower-achieving friends.
McDermott said the community has enough resources to help both succeed, and Tyson suggested a new A.P. course in African-American history that would both engage black students and demand academic rigor.
Kelley pointed out that about 20 percent of black students already take existing honors courses in math and English, about the same as the overall population of black students in the district.
But Pedersen conceded that honors courses are not the way to close the achievement gap.
"What this school system does best is to prepare students who are college bound," he said. "We are much less successful with students who aren't so certain of their careers."
