At age seven, Sahmoi Stout began taking classes for gifted students. He had started first grade in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools, North Carolina’s best-performing school district, after his family moved to Chapel Hill from Durham. In second grade, a teacher recommended him for the academic program that ultimately propelled him to college. At first, Stout, who is African American, didn’t understand why his friends didn’t take those same courses. As one of the few Black students in advanced classes full of white kids, he “felt odd.”
North Carolina’s top public schools may appear integrated, but the excellence of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools obscures a troubling distinction: The district has the second-highest achievement gap between Black and white students in the country. Stout’s experience is one that academically talented minority students often face: Programs for gifted young people bound for college are predominantly white, while the regular courses—ones that largely fail to prepare students to attend college—are mostly Black or Hispanic.
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