The students in Katie Lowney’s three academic-level world history classes want to go to college.
There’s only one problem: many have GPAs that are too low to qualify them for a college acceptance letter.
“They have big dreams. They want to do better than where they are now, and they all have goals,” Lowney, a 2007 alumna, said. “Everybody wants to, but it seems like they’re not being taught how.”
It’s this “how” that poses a problem, according to Craig Brookins, psychology professor and director of Africana studies. Because while individuals within the black community have made progress, he said the community as a group still suffers from centuries-old legacies.
“African-Americans have been able to take more advantage of the opportunities within the United States,” Brookins said. “As a group, however, they remain very challenged by the legacies of racism, the economy and the political structures within the country.”
These factors can limit black youth from the onset of first grade to the final years of high school, into the work force and even beyond, Brookins said, creating a cyclical effect in which a black student who did not attend college will not be able to provide the funds or opportunity for his or her children to attend college.
“African-Americans tend to live in areas that are less well off,” Brookins said. “Because of that, the resources that the school has to help these youth are going to be less. The quality of education is going to be less.”
A significant reason for this diminished quality of education, he said, is that school systems and teachers either do not know how to or do not teach for black students.
“There still remains a great need to understand how to best work with African-American students and African-American culture so [teachers and educational systems] can know how to reach and educate students,” Brookins said. “Teachers more familiar with white students are better equipped to deal with those students. Learning styles differ across cultures.”
Although some schools are researching different teaching techniques and incorporating them into classrooms, Brookins said it isn’t enough to fully remedy the situation.
“There are different kinds of experiences and cultures that children bring to the table,” he said. “Good teaching is being able to reach students where they’re at.”
And it’s not just the methods teachers and school systems employ that propagate this cycle. Black students, he said, tend to be placed on a lower tier of expectation.
“Students need to be enrolled in classrooms where there are high expectations, and in which they are not only pushed, but expected, to do well,” Brookins said. “If a teacher or school system does not hold these expectations, their African-American students will not succeed.”
In Lowney’s own classes, some of the effects from these low expectations are evident.
Before handing back their first test, Lowney asked her students for a favor: “Raise your hand if you didn’t study last night.”
Almost every hand went up, she said, in each of her three classes — a common occurrence that Lowney said she is trying to reverse.
Her classes, each of which holds about 20 students, also reflect a minority of the population. Most Cary High students, she said, are enrolled in honors and AP classes.
“Most kids are trying to get that 4.0 [GPA] and go to college. Some of the honor classes have more than 30 students. The AP classes are overflowing so much that they’ve had to add more,” she said. “The academic classes are much smaller because there are fewer students who aren’t [working toward those goals].”
Last May, the College Board administered 81,151 AP exams in North Carolina. Of that total, 61,562 were taken by white students and 7,312 were taken by black students, according to data compiled by the College Board. N.C. State received 8,175 of the total number of AP exams taken by North Carolinians.
And these AP exams can impact whether a student is accepted to NCSU, according to Thomas Griffin, director of Admissions.
The admissions review, he said, is a wholistic one — while the primary factors admissions officers evaluate are courses, grades and class rank, they will consider factors such as ethnicity, socioeconomic status, geographic diversity and whether an applicant is the first of his or her family to attend college.
“We try to look at each individual application on its own merits rather than types of artificial cut-offs,” Griffin said. “We consider all factors, together, to make an admissions decision. We don’t admit students based solely on one factor.”
In fall of 2006, 2,130 black students applied to NCSU as freshmen — 844 were admitted. Of the 16,437 students of all races who applied as freshman, 9,869 were admitted. This reflects a 20 percent deficit in the number of black students who were admitted (39.62 percent) compared to the overall total (60.04 percent).
But even if black students have pushed through the obstacles that block them from doing well in school and being accepted into higher level education, Brookins said they still have more to overcome.
“An African-American youth who wants to go to college will need to come up with many more resources than their white peers,” he said. “Although there are resources to help pay college bills — such as loans, scholarships and grants — the resource that many African-Americans lack is out-of-pocket capital that can be put toward immediate expenses.”
It is in this way, Brookins said, that the cycle continues. The black population continues to lag behind in the race that began on Dec. 18, 1865 — when 27 states ratified the 13th amendment, which freed slaves from the bondage they had experienced for roughly 250 years. Although the black community has made some progress has been achieved by the black community, American society and the government, according to Brookins it is becoming increasingly difficult to truly attain those equal rights fueled by the Civil Rights Movement.
“Whites were at a higher point at the start of the race,” Brookins said. “We started behind and it’s been difficult or impossible for some groups to catch up.”
