January 2006 | Number 44
The Achievement Gap: An Overview

Closing the Gap: An Overview

Anne Rogers Poliakoff

First in a Series

John F. Kennedy Middle School, located in a California farming community a few miles from the Mexican border, serves a student body that is 100 percent economically disadvantaged and 99 percent Hispanic. Once a school where few mastered even basic skills, John F. Kennedy has made a remarkable turnaround over the past decade, becoming an environment of high expectations, challenging curriculum, dedicated and hardworking staff, and students who are learning (Manzo, 2005). Indeed, the National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform named it a “School to Watch” in 2005. Nearly simultaneously, however, the school was notified that it had not met federal requirements for adequate yearly progress under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), despite a 5 percent increase in just one year to 22 percent proficiency in language arts.

The school's principal and teachers appear to be taking this disappointment in stride, but the irony does not escape them. Even when schools, like John F. Kennedy, make remarkable progress, federal and state policies do not always recognize or support them. Further, schools are expected to address achievement gap issues in isolation from other community and social institutions, whose many resources could contribute to their resolution.

Persistent gaps between the academic achievements of different groups of children are thoroughly documented by the U.S. National Assessment of Educational Progress and other statistical analyses of state assessments, grades, course selection, and dropout rates. Despite improvements in some years, the gap endures as a consistent and disturbing phenomenon that contradicts the fundamental belief that any child who studies and works hard, regardless of socioeconomic status, skin color, or country of origin, will succeed in school and in life. And, having acknowledged this contradiction, the question becomes: Where does the responsibility for this failure lie? With the schools? The kids? Their families?

Not a week passes without a news story or book review relating the tale of a school that has turned the tide (see Casey, 2000; Manzo, 2005). The Washington Post, for example, recently profiled North Glen Elementary School, which has increased 3rd grade proficiency among black students on the Maryland School Assessment from 32 percent in 2003 to 94 percent in 2005 (De Vise, 2005).

The Post story follows a formula well established in the fields of educational research and policymaking: first, identify schools that succeed in making headway against the achievement gap and, second, discover the recipe for their success. Accordingly, the article focused on pinpointing the elements that made this dramatic change possible at a mixed-race suburban school where two-thirds of the students are eligible for federally subsidized meals, ultimately concluding that North Glen Elementary “illustrates how a public school can go a very long way in a very short time with the help of a charismatic principal, an enthusiastic staff and supportive parents” (De Vise, 2005, B6).

The public discourse about reform and the achievement gap is stuck between the grim statistical face of failure and shining stories of success, courage, and charisma in the public schools. How are educators to negotiate this confusing territory, framed by hopeful portraits of successful schools on the one hand, devastating statistical indictments on the other, and the taxing policy environment of NCLB on all sides?

This Infobrief is the first in a series that will focus on the achievement gap. The intent of the series is to provide guidance for policymakers and practitioners seeking to institutionalize processes that successfully address achievement gap issues.

“The Achievement Gap—Closing the Gap: An Overview” seeks first to examine what the gap is, as a statistical construct, and to present what educational research has determined about its many causes, outside of schools as well as within. Such an examination will hopefully lead to a deeper understanding of what is needed to close the gap—namely, a comprehensive set of strategies that consider the whole child: developmental years, physical and emotional health, and supportive family and community structures, as well as schooling issues.

ASCD Position: The Achievement Gap

The Alarm: The Achievement Gap

Children in some demographic groups—African American, Hispanic, and low-income—consistently score, on average, lower on measures of academic achievement than children in other demographic groups—especially those from white and more affluent backgrounds. No measure of academic achievement is more widely respected or consulted in the United States than the annual National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a congressionally mandated program of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Conducted regularly since 1969, NAEP's purpose is to provide objective information about student performance. Its findings are reported for individual states and for the nation as a whole and are disaggregated by gender, race or ethnicity, income, and other factors.

During its nearly 40 years of assessment, NAEP has revealed substantial and significant achievement gaps, and although these gaps have narrowed over the years, the fundamental trends underlying them have remained consistent. For example, even though the gaps between white students' scores and the scores of Hispanic and black students narrowed by one or two points since the 2003 assessment (across subject and grade), overall, minority students remained more than 20 points behind on NAEP's 500-point scales. Commentators variously viewed these results—seen as a possible indicator of NCLB's effect on student achievement—as premature, discouraging, or promising, the last because, as Grover Whitehurst, acting commissioner of NCES, observed, a two-point gain per year could close the gap in 15 years (Olson & Manzo, 2005).

These same scores can be viewed far more starkly, however. NAEP interprets the numerical scores as basic, proficient, and advanced. When 4th graders read at the basic level, it means that they have partly mastered the knowledge and skills they need at that grade level. On the 2005 national reading assessment, 84 percent of 4th graders eligible for federally subsidized meals scored at or below basic (54 percent scored below basic). Among students not poor enough to qualify for a subsidy, 58 percent scored at or below basic (24 percent scored below basic).

The statistics for racial and ethnic student groups are equally stark. Of black 4th graders, 87 percent scored at or below basic (58 percent scored below basic). Of Hispanic 4th graders, 84 percent scored at or below basic (54 percent scored below basic). Of white 4th graders, 59 percent scored at or below basic (24 percent scored below basic).

Looking beyond national assessments, the achievement gap is significant enough to register on international assessments as well, such as the Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). According to TIMSS, the gap between highest and lowest 8th grade scores in the United States is one of the largest among advanced countries. Whether one considers high school graduation rates, course selection, grades, or dropout rates, the pattern is the same: black children, Hispanic children, and poor children consistently achieve at lower levels than their peers (OECD, 2005).

Deconstructing the Achievement Gap

The achievement gap is a signal, a warning that something has gone gravely wrong with the education of young people. It is not a diagnosis of what has gone wrong. Making a diagnosis requires looking past the demographic trends to the variables that research has shown to influence student learning.

To examine achievement in mathematics, Ramirez and Carpenter (2005) analyzed data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS:88) database, which includes variables known to influence student learning in math (e.g., units of algebra completed, time spent on homework, parental involvement). The researchers found that these variables had a similar effect on white and Latino students and that, “for the most part, white and Latino student achievement were mirror images of each other” (p. 602).

Attributing differences between groups to the achievement gap, observed Ramirez and Carpenter, potentially obscures the complexity of what is occurring: “We must be careful about jumping to conclusions simply because we find a number that implies a difference between groups of students. We must always investigate the underlying factors that contribute to the average score for any group of students” (p. 603).

To interpret the achievement gap to mean that categories of students, defined by economic or racial status, are failing to achieve at the same levels as their white or more affluent peers is missing the complexity of the issue. What the achievement gap actually shows is that poor, black, and Hispanic students are more disadvantaged than their white and affluent peers by a range of factors that tend to inhibit academic achievement. These factors—not those of being poor, black, or Hispanic—drive the achievement gap.

The recently released Pew Hispanic Center report The High Schools Hispanics Attend (Fry, 2005) found that Hispanics are much more likely than either white or black students to attend large public high schools with greater concentrations of low-income students and strikingly higher student-to-teacher ratios. Previous studies have linked all three of these factors to lower student achievement.

The Pew study indicates that these factors hindering academic achievement in high school fall heavily and disproportionately on Hispanic students. Being Hispanic is not itself a variable that independently produces lower academic achievement.

Beyond Demographics: The Roots of the Achievement Gap

The research presented by the Pew report and other studies indicates that educators and policymakers should look beyond the characteristics of students to the context of learning. The Pew report points to the characteristics of schools, but the context of a child's learning extends to family and community as well. When researchers look at these concentric rings of influence, what emerges is a portrait of the achievement gap's root causes.

One of the more comprehensive efforts to survey this learning landscape was the 2003 Educational Testing Service (ETS) report Parsing the Achievement Gap, which identified 14 factors correlated with academic achievement and explored how these play out in the lives of children from various racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Author Paul Barton's review of the research found evidence that all these factors weigh against the school achievement of racial and ethnic minority students and that most weigh against poor children. (Others have reviewed the research on the roots of the achievement gap; see Editorial Projects in Education, 2005; Hertert & Teague, 2003.) Barton was careful to caution that these factors often represent “the best researched representatives of a group of related or similar factors” (thus, lead poisoning is a marker for environmental hazards) that might shape the learning environment inside a school or during a child's developmental years (p. 6).

This Infobrief considers these factors in two groupings: first, those that operate in school, and second, those that operate “before and beyond school,” as Barton describes them (p. 1).

Inside the School Door

It is generally accepted that students from poor and minority backgrounds are more likely to attend schools where the curriculum is weak, teachers are ill-prepared, and the environment—if not outright dangerous—fails to support academic achievement. Jonathan Kozol's latest book, The Shame of the Nation, documents the worst of the worst. Kozol visited schools in Los Angeles, the South Bronx, and Camden, chronicling environments in which students attempt to learn despite crumbling buildings, overcrowding, inexperienced teachers, and regimented lessons.

Few dispute the reality of these circumstances or find them acceptable. A difference of opinion arises in regard to whether the public can expect schools to close the achievement gap on their own. Can such burdened schools be expected to reinvent their curriculum, teaching staff, and environment alone, or does their condition “reflect economic and political realities that are mostly beyond the power of those schools to remedy,” as some have argued (Evans, 2005, p. 583; see also Rothstein, 2004.) What about less burdened schools that also have an achievement gap?

Several fundamental elements of schooling are generally recognized as having a major impact on student success.

• Curriculum. Research indicates that academic achievement is closely related to the curriculum. Students succeed when the curriculum is challenging, engaging, and undiluted by tracking. Effective instruction is differentiated, flexible, and provides the support that each student needs to succeed. Students are expected to work hard, are motivated to succeed, and are provided with an array of supports, from tutoring to extended school days to summer programs.
  The academic quality of the curriculum is shaped not just by content but also by attitude and practice. Numerous studies have demonstrated the effect of the self-fulfilling prophecy, where students expected to perform well, or badly, do so (American Educational Research Association [AERA], 2004). Evaluations of successful schools have also found a direct connection between a culture of high expectations and a student body that achieves at high levels (Barthe et al., 1999; Kannapel & Clements, 2005; Ragland, Clubine, Constable, & Smith, 2002).
  Common practices related to curriculum specifically disadvantage minority and low socioeconomic students (Burris & Welner, 2005). The traditional practice of tracking, for example, disproportionately places Hispanic and African American students in less challenging classes. Further, black boys are referred for special education services at a high rate (Varlas, 2005). Emerging evidence indicates that eliminating tracking entirely and offering a challenging curriculum to all can play a major role in closing the achievement gap, as illustrated, for example, by African American and Hispanic student achievement in the Rockville Centre School District in New York. (See box below.)
• Teacher quality. Even more important than a challenging and engaging curriculum is the classroom teacher. It has become a truism that “the most important thing a school can do is to provide its students with good teachers” (Goldhaber, 2002, p. 52). William Sanders and colleagues, using the Tennessee data system that tracks teachers and links them to student achievement scores over time, have found that teachers have more influence on student achievement than any other characteristic of schools (see, for example, Sanders, Wright, & Horn, 1997). Similarly, an analysis of data from the UTD Texas School Project found that high quality teachers substantially closed the achievement gap, especially for low-income primary school students (Rivkin, Hanushek, & Kain, 2005).
  Students attending schools that have a substantial number of poor or minority students are less likely to have highly qualified teachers. In Parsing the Achievement Gap, Barton draws on Education Trust data that show twice the rate of out-of-field teaching in high-poverty schools (34 percent, compared to 15 percent in low-poverty schools) and substantially higher rates of out-of-field teaching in high-minority schools (29 percent compared to 21 percent in low-minority schools). In addition, Barton reported that percentages of 8th graders whose mathematics teachers are not certified in math are much higher for Hispanic, black, and poor students than for white or non-poor students.
• Learning Environment. A school's physical, social, and cultural environment affects the learning of every student, as well as the work of a school's staff. “Environment” encompasses the basics—whether students feel safe—as well as more subtle matters of respect and expectations. Schools where students are afraid and undisciplined are not conducive to learning (Barton, 2003). The ETS report also cites NCES data that black and Hispanic students are about twice as likely as white students to report the presence of gangs in their schools or to report a fear of being attacked at school or on the way to school.
  Other researchers have found that schools that value academic achievement and maintain an atmosphere of respect and high expectations are most likely to value and achieve safety and discipline. They achieve this environment less by the exercise of authoritarian discipline than through adherence to a culture of high expectations (Casey, 2000; Kannapel & Clements, 2005).

Detracking to Close the Gap

Beyond the School Doors: Early Development, Home, and Community

Research identifies a variety of factors likely to hinder academic achievement long before children actually enter school. At the age of 4, children of professionals have vocabularies twice as large as those of welfare children and 50 percent larger than those of working class peers (Hart & Risley, 2003). Data from the U.S. Department of Education document that, in tests of general knowledge as well as reading and math skills, black and Hispanic kindergartners trail their white and Asian peers (Editorial Projects in Education, 2005).

Children's physical, emotional, and cognitive development are profoundly shaped by the circumstances of their pre-school years. Before some children are even born, birth weight, lead poisoning, and nutrition have taken a toll on their capacity for academic achievement. Other factors—excessive television watching, little exposure to conversation or books, parents who are absent or distracted, inadequate nutrition—further compromise their early development.

Because the achievement gap is already apparent on the first day of kindergarten, a number of observers and researchers have argued that it is bad reasoning and bad policy to believe that school reform alone could ever close the gap. Richard Rothstein (2004) finds the social and economic disadvantages that hinder children before they enter school and throughout their subsequent school years to be overwhelming. He points to the statistical evidence for the vulnerability of poor babies and young children to a range of basic health issues: vision problems, dental problems, high blood lead levels, high rates of asthma, and poor health care.

Once children enter school, many of these issues persist and others worsen. Mobility is a chronic problem: families move frequently because of the shortage of affordable, decent housing, hindering not only their own children's achievement but also that of other children, whose teachers must cope with a continual influx of new students. High levels of television watching correlate with lower levels of achievement, and black and Hispanic children watch far more television than others (Rothstein, 2004; Barton, 2003).

Then there is the question of whether groups of students embrace cultural attitudes that inherently encourage or discourage academic achievement. John Ogbu studied African American students in an affluent Shaker Heights, Ohio, school in 2003 (Flaxman, 2003). He found a set of experiences, assumptions, and attitudes that worked to powerfully disengage the students from academic success: lack of understanding of the connection between academic achievement and future employment success; internalized and negative assumptions about their own intelligence; twin beliefs that their teachers did not care about them and that teachers were responsible for student success or failure; parents who thought their children should work hard but did not involve themselves in their schooling; and teachers and counselors who assigned black students to less rigorous tracks.

Others have found that the hunger for peer approval can undermine parental efforts to support and promote their children's academic success. Laurence Steinberg and colleagues surveyed more than 20,000 students and found that Asian students, who outscored all others in measures of school engagement, were also more likely to have friends (whether Asian or not) who emphasized success in school. For black and Hispanic students, Steinberg's findings were the opposite (Hertert & Teague, 2003).

Schools Can't Do It Alone

Schools alone cannot redress the achievement gap. Responsibility for education extends beyond the schools, necessitating a comprehensive set of strategies that actively invite families, communities, and businesses onto the school campus. Schools must actively and willingly invite new partners into the process of education.

Policy Recommendations

As key leaders in forging and strengthening these partnerships, policymakers must broaden their understanding of public accountability from the current narrow focus on high-stakes testing, which places accountability almost solely on the shoulders of educators. When viewing the root causes of the achievement gap, it becomes clear that closing the gap will occur only through policies that address the needs of the whole child in areas that extend far beyond those measured by a multiple-choice test.

Many of the policy changes called for will take place within the schools; others require a reexamination of state and federal policies and their effect on the achievement gap and appropriate governmental action. Still others call for collaborative efforts in which educators are key partners. Decision makers at all levels of government must enact and support policies that

• Attend to the health, literacy, and other developmental needs of all children in light of the fact that early childhood is where the achievement gap often takes root.
• Address the physical and emotional health of school-aged children, as well as their academic achievement.
• Support and recognize schools with challenging academic curricula and high academic expectations along with academic support for all students.
• Fund academic mandates to schools and “whole child” programs adequately.
• Eliminate the misclassification of students in special education and tracking patterns that reinforce the segregation of African Americans, English language learners, and other students.
• Support research and development to identify instructional practices that improve academic achievement.
• Support programs that engage families in education and encourage them to come to the schools.
• Create incentives that engage communities, including employers and industry groups, in school learning and in the design of meaningful learning outside of school.
• Modify preservice teacher training, professional development, and state certification polices to ensure that teachers are ready, willing, and able to teach all students.

Filter out the finger pointing and posturing and it becomes clear that much is known about what is required to close the achievement gap. First, research clearly shows that many children enter kindergarten with challenges, from health and nutritional problems to inadequate preschooling, that deeply undercut their ability to perform academically. Second, it is well documented that many school-age children face challenges outside of school, ranging from physical and emotional health issues to transience and poverty, that interfere with their ability to focus on their studies. Third, much can be learned from schools and education systems that have achieved measurable success in raising academic achievement despite having large populations of students traditionally on the losing side of the gap.

Subsequent issues of Infobrief will look closely at best practices for closing the achievement gap: in early childhood, in families and communities, and inside schools. The series will continually examine ways that decision makers can develop and support policies to strengthen the critical bond between teachers, families, communities, and schools—in the service of supporting the critical goal of success for each learner.

ASCD Position: The Whole Child

References

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