Numbers game: North Carolina educrats may shut down the successful Healthy Start charter school because it enrolls 'too many' blacks.

• Author: Murdock, Deroy

Too many blacks. That's the rap against North Carolina s Healthy Start Academy, the first of 34 charter schools launched last year in the Tar Heel State. In just one year, the school on Durham's Liberty Street has wowed the parents of its 170 kindergarten-through-second-grade students with soaring test scores and 98 percent attendance.

The educational establishment is not amused. One hundred sixty-eight of Healthy Start's kids are black. Only two are white. Healthy Start's 98.8 percent black student body violates a Democrat-sponsored clause in the charter school law requiring that each school "reasonably reflect the racial and ethnic composition" of the district it serves. By this racial calculus, Healthy Start should be 55 percent white, rather than 1.2 percent. Although the school is in a nearly all-black neighborhood, and its staff has not discriminated against anyone, state officials could use this law to shut down Healthy Start and 13 other "insufficiently diverse" charter schools. The student bodies of 12 of these schools are more than 85 percent black, while only the Megellan Charter School in Raleigh is considered "too white," given its 90 percent Caucasian student body.

"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 kids need to learn to share the experiences and cultures of all children in their communities," he adds, "and I think if a school ends up segregated, yes, it should be closed down."

While Healthy Start may not "celebrate diversity," it clearly values academic achievement. At a June 17 meeting for pupils and parents, Headmaster Thomas Williams unveiled his students' scores on the standardized Iowa Basic Test of Educational Skills. Last fall, Healthy Start's second graders scored at the 34th percentile on the exam. By May, they had climbed to the 75th percentile. First graders rose from the 21st to the 32nd percentile. Healthy Start's kindergarteners, meanwhile, rocketed from the 42nd percentile last October to the 99th percentile 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. Theirs were kids who never heard anything good from schools."

Lynette Cradle, a black parent, attended the event but didn't find Williams's announcement 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-at-home mom. Her second grader, Jasmine, became the...