One District. 185 Schools. A 77-Point Gap.
Wake County has a national reputation for good schools. For its 45,000 Black students, the school you’re assigned to matters more than the district you live in.
Wake County Public Schools is the largest district in North Carolina and one of the largest in the country. It serves Raleigh, Cary, Apex, Garner, Wake Forest, and the fast-growing suburbs in between. Families move here for the schools. Relocation guides recommend it. The district’s reputation is a selling point in real estate listings.
That reputation is not wrong, exactly. It’s just incomplete in a way that matters enormously if your child is Black.
We analyzed every Wake County school with at least 25 Black students tested — 185 schools serving 45,824 Black students — using 2024–25 North Carolina Department of Public Instruction data.
At the top: Wake Early College of Information & Biotechnologies, where 93.5% of Black students score Grade Level Proficient or above.
At the bottom: Lacy Elementary, where 16.7% do.
Same district. Same school board. Same superintendent. Same funding formula. A 77-point difference in whether a Black child is reading and doing math at grade level.
The number that should stop you
Here is the finding that matters more than the spread.
Of the 185 Wake County schools we examined, 8 have Black students performing at or above the school’s own average.
Eight. Out of 185. Four percent.
At the other 177, Black students trail their classmates — in the same building, with the same teachers, under the same principal. The median gap is 19.2 points.
This is not a story about a few struggling schools dragging down an otherwise strong district. It’s a pattern that holds across almost every school in the system, including the ones with excellent overall ratings.
The schools with the widest gaps are not the ones you’d guess
The instinct is to assume the biggest gaps appear at the lowest-performing schools. In Wake County, the opposite is true.
Lacy Elementary — School average: 74.2%. Black students: 16.7%. Gap: 57.5 points.
Lacy is, by its overall number, a good school. Three out of four students there are proficient. But among its 108 Black students, fewer than one in six is. If you looked only at the school’s rating — the number on the report card, the number a real estate agent quotes — you would have no idea.
Carnage Middle — School average: 72.4%. Black students: 24.3%. Gap: 48.1 points. With 519 Black students, this is not a small sample.
Root Elementary — School average: 69.3%. Black students: 24.4%. Gap: 44.9 points.
Farmington Woods Elementary — 76.7% overall, 31.6% for Black students. 45.1 points.
Apex Elementary — 69.7% overall, 27.4% for Black students. 42.3 points.
Apex is one of the most sought-after communities in the Triangle. Its elementary school is failing Black children at a rate that would be a scandal if it appeared on the district’s public-facing scorecard. It doesn’t, because district and school averages don’t break the number out by race unless you go looking.
Where the most Black children actually are
The schools with the widest gaps are not where most Black students in Wake County go to school. The largest Black student populations are concentrated in a handful of schools east and south of Raleigh:
East Garner Middle — 1,204 Black students, 40.4% proficient
River Bend Middle — 1,040 Black students, 31.3%
Zebulon Middle — 887 Black students, 37.3%
South Garner High — 782 Black students, 49.6%
Rolesville High — 780 Black students, 38.3%
Southeast Raleigh High — 774 Black students, 24.5%
Notice something about these schools: their gaps are small. East Garner’s gap is 4.4 points. River Bend’s is 0.4. Southeast Raleigh’s is 2.9.
That looks like equity. It isn’t.
These gaps are narrow because the schools are struggling for everyone. River Bend Middle’s overall proficiency is 31.7% — barely above its Black student rate of 31.3%. Southeast Raleigh High’s overall rate is 27.4%.
So Wake County contains two distinct problems, and they require different answers. At schools like Lacy and Apex Elementary, a strong school is failing its Black students specifically. At schools like River Bend and Southeast Raleigh, the school is failing nearly everyone — and it happens to be where thousands of Black children are enrolled.
What’s working
Four schools stand out, and three of them share something in common.
Wake Early College of Information & Biotechnologies — 93.5% of Black students proficient, 62 tested Wake Early College of Health and Science — 91.7%, 72 tested Wake Young Men’s Leadership Academy — 90.0%, 160 tested Wake Young Women’s Leadership Academy — 84.7%, 163 tested
Two early colleges and two single-gender leadership academies. All four are application-based, which is a real caveat — they select their students, and selection effects are not the same as instruction effects.
But note what’s happening at the two leadership academies in particular. Wake Young Men’s Leadership Academy serves 160 Black students at 90% proficiency, with a gap of just 2.2 points. Its sister school serves 163 at 84.7%. These are schools founded explicitly to serve students of color in downtown Raleigh, and they are producing outcomes near the top of the district.
Mills Park Middle deserves separate mention: 80.1% of its 191 Black students are proficient. That’s the highest figure for any non-selective school in the county.
What Wake County families should do
Look up the specific school. Not the district. Not the town. The building your child will actually attend.
The district’s reputation tells you almost nothing about what will happen to a Black child inside it. A school can be excellent overall and still be one of the worst in the county for Black students — Lacy Elementary, at 74.2% overall and 16.7% for Black students, is the clearest example in the data.
Two numbers matter: what percentage of Black students are proficient, and how that compares to the school’s overall rate. If there’s a large gap, the school is working for some children and not others. If the overall number is also low, the school is struggling more broadly.
Both are worth knowing before you sign a lease.
A note on what this analysis excludes
We removed Wake County’s alternative schools from this analysis — SCORE Academy, Mount Vernon, River Oaks, Connections, and Mary Phillips. These programs serve students placed through disciplinary reassignment or credit recovery, and comparing them to traditional schools produces numbers that are technically accurate and substantively misleading. Including them would have made the district’s spread look larger than it is.
We also excluded schools with fewer than 25 Black students tested, where a handful of students can swing a percentage dramatically.
What remains is 185 schools and 45,824 Black students — the actual experience of Black families in Wake County.
Data source: North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, 2024–25 disaggregated performance data. Metric: percentage scoring Grade Level Proficient or above, all subjects combined. Search any Wake County school — or any school in North Carolina, Georgia, or Texas — at bearinglight.org.