Well, it would be the same. As far as class achievement—. Well, you've
got-now we have statewide testing programs that make it relatively easy
to identify who is doing well and what the gaps are. They had
achievement testing, and I don't remember what. There again, you'd have
to go back to school records to find out. But, I don't think there was
any question that there was a larger proportion of the low-income
population that were having difficulties. Though the schools had had
probably the smallest drop-out rate in the state for some time. Back in
the, back when I was on the school board, I had
Page 13been teaching courses in secondary education and expressing concerns
about the drop-out rates, and the superintendent said, "Well, you're
talking about somebody else." He says, "our drop our rate at that time
was maybe five percent." So, whereas in Yanceyville, where I had been,
between the first grade and the twelfth grade, you dropped off
seventy-five percent of your population, or between the fifth grade and
the twelfth grade, you'd drop out. Same thing would have been true in
Northampton County, in 1950, 1955. But—. So, we didn't have a large
drop-out problem, but the drop-out problem was always with the students
who were doing less well, which typically was the lower socio-economic
group. I had a number of graduate students do dissertations on school
persistence. And, in fact, one of them pointed out, one of the
dissertations pointed out, that if a sibling finished high school, the
odds were much higher that the younger siblings would finish. If the
parents had finished high school, the odds were pretty high, were
exceedingly high, that the children would finish high school. If the
parents had gone to college, the odds were pretty good the students, the
children were going to go college. So that, here again, these studies,
most of them, most of the dissertations I worked on there were, were
prior to desegregation. So, you have an achievement gap any time that
you have a large disparity between the social levels, the educational
levels, the economic opportunities within the population. Now, you got a
reasonably homogeneous population, as
Page 14you might
find in let's say Iowa, then that is less true, because basically the
whole community has about the same education level. Now, it's not
necessarily very high, but it is similar. Whereas in our setting, the,
or in any semi-urban area, you've got a wide disparity, economically
between the haves and the have-nots, and educationally, it follows
somewhat the same pattern. So, it's a more complex kind of a problem
than to simply say it is the result of blackness or whiteness. Now, I
suppose it is convenient to recognize that as long as there is that
disparity between the black population and white population, that there
is going to be some tendency to re-segregate along other lines. But, I
think that the proposition that the blacks were here and the whites were
here is not totally accurate. We did have middle-class blacks, and they
were achieving in either the black school, or in the white school. Now
the number, the proportion of the black graduates of Lincoln for
instance going on to college was probably much smaller than the
proportion of white students going from Chapel Hill High to college.
Part of that represents the fact that we are in a University community
and the principal employer is the University. So, the proportion of
parents who went on to college was much greater. Now, whether that would
have been true in Yanceyville, and I assume in Northampton County—. The
only college graduates in Yanceyville was the professional classes: the
lawyers—well it's the county-seat town, so the lawyers—the doctor, the
people that worked, the school nurse, and the people that worked
Page 15for the county, the school teachers, and that
pretty well did it. The principal—. Well, the owner of the Ford Motor
Company for instance, had never been to college. Now, he was a
relatively wealthy person and very supportive of schooling, but he was
also an older man who had gotten started in business in an era in which
college education was not particularly important. His wife-he had
married the school teacher. It's an interesting all right, I don't know
if I've taken care of that question for you.