'Excessively black' charter schools face extinction in North Carolina

Human Events, Jul 17, 1998 by Murdock, Deroy

Despite Excellent Test Scores and 98% Attendance

Too many blacks.

That's the rap against North Carolina's Healthy Start Academy, one of the Tarheel State's 34 charter schools. In just one year, it has wowed the parents of its kindergarten-- through-second-grade students with soaring test scores and a 98% attendance rate.

But the educational establishment is not amused. Why? Because 168 of Healthy Start's kids are black, while two are white. Healthy Start's 98.8% black student body violates a state requirement that each charter school mirror its community's ethnic diversity. Even though they do not discriminate against nonblacks, Healthy Start and 12 other charters that are more than 85% black are in danger of being closed by state officials using this law. So is one disproportionately white campus.

"We have encouraged the State Board of Education to enforce the law," says John Wilson, executive director of the North Carolina Association of Educators, the state's chief teachers' union. "I think if a school ends up segregated, yes, it should be closed down."

Healthy Start celebrates achievement if not diversity. At a June 17 meeting for pupils and parents, Headmaster Thomas Williams unveiled the school's scores on the standardized Iowa Basic Test of Educational Skills.

Kindergartners Soar To 99th Percentile

Last October, Healthy Start's second-- graders tested at the 34th percentile. By May, they had climbed to the 75th percentile. First-graders rose from the 21st to the 32nd percentile. Healthy.Start's kindergartners, meanwhile, rocketed from the 42nd percentile to the 99th among 5 million students tested nationwide.

"When I announced these scores at an assembly, moms were crying," Williams recalls by phone. "Grandmas and grandpas were crying and yelling."

Lynette Cradle, a black parent, attended the event but didn't find these student accomplishments quite so startling. "I really wasn't surprised, because of the volume of homework that came home with them every day," says the self-described "stay-athome mom." She and her husband are very proud of their second-grader, Jasmine, who became the school's spelling bee champion, and of son John, Jr., who just graduated from kindergarten.

He is "reading things that I didn't think he would be able to read yet," Cradle says. "He's very in tune with what's going on. He talks about the ozone layer and Monica Lewinsky. They go from current events to colors and the months of the year. It's like a well-rounded education."

Healthy Start's students are making Olympic-class educational strides despite Spartan conditions. "We're in a church basement," Williams explains. "These kids don't get any natural light. We have ten rooms divided by paper-thin walls. No public school would operate in this joint."

A blunt, straight-talking man, Williams says that Healthy Start belies liberal educators' theories about why poor, minority children supposedly cannot learn.

"We fly in the face of all the bureaucratic excuses," Williams says. "We hold up a lantern of expectations. We say to students: `It's this high. Reach it.' And they do."

But for state educrats, this progress pales in comparison to the overwhelming blackness of some charter schools. "This wasn't supposed to happen," State Board of Education member Jane Norwood declared at a spring board meeting. "This is not the intent of having charter schools."

Open to Students Of All Races

As the Greensboro News & Record reports, Julius Chambers, a civil rights attorney and chancellor of North Carolina Central University, adds: "I don't think we should be creating havens for black students or for white students."

"To say that they could close our doors down because we're not racially balanced is ridiculous," says Letisha Judd, a Healthy Start second-grade teacher. "We're open to the public. We cannot force people to bring their children here."

Indeed, Healthy Start has advertised in white neighborhood newspapers, posted flyers in white churches and mailed literature to white homes. If white parents refuse to educate their kids in a poor, black community, Healthy Start can't stop them.

Some have heeded its call, however. Christine Jonsdotter is the mother of Michael, one of Healthy Start's two white students. Although she and her husband live 15 minutes away in an affluent Raleigh neighborhood, they chose not to send their first-grader to the local public school. "I wanted a smaller-school setting with more emphasis on character development, not just academics," she says. At Healthy Start, "they teach manners. They teach kids to be kind to each other."

Jonsdotter says that in just four months, Healthy Start helped Michael overcome many of his reading difficulties. She also is "totally appalled" that the school's racial make-up could jeopardize it. "There's been nothing but an outpouring of love from that school," she says. "When my kid walked in there, the kids ran up and hugged him."

A state shutdown of Healthy Start and other "excessively black" charters "will happen over my cold, dead political body," says Kay Daly, a spokeswoman for the North Carolina Foundation for Individual Rights (NCFIR). The NCFIR plans to ask a federal judge to prevent North Carolina officials from using the state diversity mandate to close charter schools. It believes students should be treated equally as Americans under the Constitution's 14th Amendment, rather than as components of racial categories.