Progress in the Deep South: Black students combat segregation, poverty and dwindling school funding

FIRST STEP TO THE MIDDLE CLASS: More than 27 million Americans age 25 or older don’t have a high school diploma or GED, the basic credential needed to qualify for nearly 80 percent of jobs in this country. The Hechinger Report traveled to three counties with very high numbers of adults without a high school credential to learn about the obstacles schools and families must overcome to provide and obtain this essential first step to a middle-class life. The three counties, all in the rural South, are profoundly different in terms of race and ethnicity — and in their experiences of racism and segregation. Yet they face many of the same challenges, including low funding for schools, intergenerational poverty and few well-paid career opportunities, to motivate students. They also share one abiding theme: Parents know the risk of dropping out of school and want desperately for their children to get through high school and beyond in their education.

MARKSVILLE, La. — On a chilly March morning, Liza Jacobs stood in the Marksville High School parking lot, bullhorn in hand, herding straggling students into the low brick building before the 7:30 a.m. bell.

She followed the last of the teenagers into the school, past the metal detector, still clutching her bullhorn. A teenager rushed down the hallway to his first class. “You better take that hat off your head,” she called after him, smiling through the stern command.

“Why are you tardy?” she called to another as the bell rang. “I’m almost on time, ma’am,” the girl answered as she broke into a jog.

Jacobs became principal at the school, which serves grades 7 through 12, last fall and has been a teacher and administrator for more than 20 years in Avoyelles Parish. A former marine who often works 14-hour days, she raised four children, for many years on her own, and is skeptical of excuses.



Most mornings, Principal Liza Jacobs is in the Marksville High School parking lot, bullhorn in hand, hustling students in to school before the first bell. Photo: Cheryl Gerber for The Hechinger Report



Getting students to class is just the first step toward Jacobs’ ultimate goal: increasing the school’s graduation rate. Avoyelles has one of the lowest percentages in the country of African American adults with a high school diploma — 61 percent. They are among the 27 million adults age 25 and older of all races in the United States who haven’t graduated from high school or gotten their GED, even as the number of jobs that don’t require these basic credentials are shrinking. High school dropouts are much more likely to be unemployed and earn thousands of dollars less per year than people with higher levels of education.

Nationally, black students who have the same family income as white students are much less likely to graduate from high school.


“It’s like a legal segregation.”

Liza Jacobs, principal of Marksville High School


The economic futures of African Americans without a high school diploma are especially bleak. Black 25- to 34-year-olds on average earn about $21,000 annually compared to about $29,000 for whites.

In Avoyelles, these trends have become deeply entrenched. In 2012, 57 percent of ”minority” students (almost all African American) graduated from Avoyelles Parish high schools, lower than the percentage of adults with a diploma. By 2018, that number had increased to 75 percent, but was still far below the white graduation rate of 90 percent. Jacobs, who graduated from Marksville in 1991, believes she can help level the playing field for the kids who are being left behind. But she’s not naïve about what stands in the way.

The reasons for these racial disparities are both obvious and complex. In this mostly rural, central Louisiana parish street names like Shirley Plantation Road and buildings that used to house segregation academies mark the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. Segregation has left many black families clustered in dilapidated houses while white families occupy freshly painted manors across town. The poverty rate for African Americans here — 41 percent — is more than twice that of whites.

Stanley Celestine Jr., 19, decided to run for school board last year because of the inequalities he witnessed at his hometown schools. In 2017, he graduated from the Louisiana School for Agricultural Sciences, a charter school with one of the highest graduation rates in the parish. The school requires an interview and considers students’ academic records before admitting them. But before that he was a student at Cottonport Elementary, which is majority black, almost entirely low-income and has struggled for years to improve its academic performance.



Stanley Celestine Jr. is one of seven new members elected last year to the Avoyelles School Board. Photo: Cheryl Gerber for The Hechinger Report



“I was constantly watching some of my peers who did not have the opportunity that I did,” said Celestine, who is African American and was elected with 65 percent of the vote. “There was a revolving door of teachers at their schools, and my friends were just as capable as I was of going to the school I went to.”

Cottonport, like most of the majority-black schools in Avoyelles, had an extremely high rate of teacher turnover last year — more than 40 percent of teachers didn’t return.  LaFargue Elementary has the lowest percentage of black students in the parish and the lowest rate of teacher turnover — only 10 percent left last year. At the high school with the highest percentage of black students, 38 percent of the teachers left last year, compared with just 15 percent at Avoyelles Public Charter, which has the lowest percentage of black students among the parish schools teaching grades 9-12.


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This story about Avoyelles Parish was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

The post Progress in the Deep South: Black students combat segregation, pove... appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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