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SEPARATE AND UNEQUAL
A Briefing Report to the NCTE Executive Committee
from the NCTE Strategic Governance Focal Issues Group
On Closing the Achievement Gap
― Respectfully submitted by Committee Members
Akua Duku Anokye
Sandy Hayes
Franki Sibberson
Keith Younker
Kylene Beers, Chair
Dale Allender, NCTE Staff Liaison
With special thanks to…
Eric Cooper, President, National Urban Alliance
Rafael Heller, Education Consultant
In memory of…
Rina Moog, committee member
SEPARATE AND UNEQUAL
For decades, dating back at least as far as the 1950s, education officials across the U.S. have observed stark disparities in the academic achievement of students from differing races, ethnicities, and economic backgrounds, as measured by test scores, grades, high school graduation rates, and college attendance and completion.
Similarly, for decades, education reformers have sought ways to close those achievement gaps, trying everything from large-scale compensatory programs (such as Head Start, Title I, and GEAR UP) to local investments in after-school programs, tutoring centers, alternative schools, youth mentoring, bilingual support services, smaller class sizes, remediation programs, and on and on.
And for several years—particularly since the publication of the Brookings Institution’s landmark 1998 volume, The Black-White Test Score Gap 1 —education researchers have made an all-out effort to locate the precise causes of those disparities, specifically to explain why the scores of African American and Hispanic students lag behind those of White students even when family income, parental education, and other important variables are taken into account. Perhaps the gap can be traced to subtle cultural differences in childrearing practices experts have wondered, 2 or mismatches between the cultural styles and linguistic practices favored at home and those favored in school.3 Or perhaps student test scores are affected by the psychological burdens of minority status.4 Or perhaps certain unconscious forms of racism persist in the schools, leading teachers to hold low expectations of African American and Hispanic students.5
Yet, after half a century of reform, and while researchers have come to many important new insights into the possible root causes of achievement gaps, the fact is that disparities in test scores, grades, high school graduation rates, and college completion stubbornly persist.
For a time, it had looked as though things might be improving; according to data from the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP, or “the Nation’s Report Card”), the gap in reading and math scores separating African American and White students narrowed considerably between 1971 (NAEP’s first year) and the mid-1980s, perhaps in response to school integration, federal anti-poverty programs, or gains in African American prosperity. However, the gap hasn’t closed since then, and at times it has grown wider, all but reverting to its earlier dimensions.
In 2007, NAEP showed that just 14 percent of Black and 17 percent of Hispanic 4th-graders were reading at a proficient level, as compared with 43 percent of White 4th-graders. Among English language learners, only 7 percent scored at the proficient level, and among students eligible for the National School Lunch Program, 17 percent were proficient (versus 44 percent of those whose family income was too high to make them eligible). At the 8th-grade level, reading scores were even lower. And while 12th-grade scores were slightly higher for Black (16 percent proficient) and Hispanic (20 percent proficient) students in 2005 (the most recent 12th-grade assessment), those scores are probably misleading, given that many lower-scoring students drop out between 8th and 12th grade.
Such statistics have always been deeply troubling, making clear just how far the public schools remain from realizing the egalitarian ideals from which they were conceived. But while educators have expressed anguish over these disparities for many decades, the sense of alarm now appears to be reaching an entirely new level of magnitude, fueled in part by the testing and accountability provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act and, at the same time, by anxieties about the future of America’s economy, social structure, and civic character.
As recent high-profile reports have documented,6 the nature of the workplace has changed dramatically since the advent of the so-called “information age.” Across the country, millions of low-skilled, living-wage jobs have dwindled away and a minimum of two years of post-secondary education is fast becoming the prerequisite for a decent entry-level job. For generations, poor and non-White Americans have suffered the pain and indignity of second-class educational services, but, still, there were jobs available that did not require advanced literacy skills and college degrees and that offered a chance to earn a living wage or even to join the middle class. For students on the wrong end of the achievement gap, that no longer seems to be the case as jobs requiring less education are now “outsourced” to the automated machine that has replaced the grocery clerk, the toll taker, the office receptionist, the bank teller, the airline and hotel reservationists, the fast-food counter clerk, the sanitation worker, and the telephone solicitor (to name but a few). Additionally, the digitalization of information now allows that outsourcing to move jobs across the globe.
Further, consider the profound demographic changes now underway across the country. English language learners and low-income Hispanics make up the fastest-growing student enrollments in the U.S. today, and both populations lag far behind White, middle class students in terms of achievement scores, graduation rates, and college attendance. Unless those students begin to make real progress in educational achievement, the result will be a ballooning population of American adults who are unprepared to succeed in the 21st century economy—in other words, even as the quality of life declines for the least educated Americans, their numbers will grow.
Consider also the impact of the current mania for educational “rigor,” evidenced by skyrocketing enrollments in programs such as Advanced Placement and the International Baccalaureate, which on closer inspection seems to be a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it seems laudable that growing numbers of America’s young people are choosing to pursue demanding courses of study. On the other hand, it is not yet clear how those advanced educational opportunities will be distributed. Do the public schools have the resources, capacity, or determination to offer truly rigorous, high-quality programs in the poorest neighborhoods, and to provide students the kinds of instruction and support they need in order to succeed in those programs? The College Board’s own data show that they do not.7 If they don’t, and if policymakers fail to make a serious enough commitment to spread such academic wealth, the unintended consequence will be a further widening of gaps between the most economically advantaged students and everybody else, echoing the well-documented “Matthew effect” in reading 8 —the more advanced the students, the more quickly they learn, and the further ahead they get.
And finally, consider the extent to which student achievement gaps are intertwined with other gaps in American society, such as disparities in nutrition, health care, housing, personal safety, access to technology, travel, disposable income, leisure time, etc. Moreover, given longstanding patterns of “white flight” and residential segregation, students of different races, ethnicities, and income levels are becoming increasingly separated from one another physically, as well. According to data from the Civil Rights Project, the nation’s schools are more segregated today than they were fifteen to twenty years ago, 9 with the schools serving the greatest numbers of African-American, Hispanic, and low-income students staffed by the teachers who are least experienced, least educated, and most likely to be teaching out of field. 10 Additionally, in these poorest schools, technology—where it is available—is used in the least engaging and effective ways. Instead of offering students entrée to activities that encourage students to act collaboratively, think creatively, communicate widely, and critique carefully, technology is used as a way to offer students an electronic remedial workbook. Thus, we can add the technology gap to the growing list of gaps our poorest students face.
In light of these powerful trends, and drawing from the last five decades’ worth of efforts to understand and reduce achievement gaps in the nation’s schools, the 2007 NCTE Strategic Governance Focal Group “Closing the Achievement Gap” looked to see what NCTE should do to address the academic disparity that exists between White and non-White students.
Results of a 2007 survey of NCTE members show that the great majority of English/Language Arts (ELA) teachers give high priority to the task of closing student achievement gaps—in fact, 77 percent of respondents in an NCTE survey describe it as an extremely (if not the most) pressing challenge they face in their current work, one that they often feel unprepared to meet.
For NCTE, then, one priority must be to make more visible and accessible the plentiful resources it already has in place to help teachers develop the considerable potential in their lowest-performing students. For example, Adolescent Literacy Pathways and ELL Pathways, NCTE’s Web-based professional development programs, are specifically designed to assist teachers as they work to improve the literacy abilities of all students, but especially underachieving students. Journal issues, convention programs, NCTE consultants, print materials, and other online resources (Read/Write/Think, for instance), all offer teachers information and support for helping to better educate underachieving students. Considerable in their scope and powerful in their content, these multiple resources must be presented to teachers in a way that highlights the breadth and depth of these varied resources. The issue is not that NCTE fails in providing support to teachers; the issue is that the support that is available is often not recognized or is seen in isolation from other services.
But at the same time, NCTE must go well beyond the mission of providing support and professional development opportunities to its members. The organization also has a responsibility to make its voice heard in the larger arena of public opinion and policy debate on the future of American education. Having dedicated its first hundred years to helping students and teachers realize the transformative power of language, NCTE is well equipped to speak up and speak out against the very terms in which student achievement has been discussed.
Far too often, the “gap” in question has been reduced to nothing more than a comparison of test scores, as though a handful of multiple-choice problems were all that separated the least from the most advantaged of the nation’s schoolchildren, and as though a solid dose of test-prep instruction might be sufficient to make up the difference. And that’s especially problematic because with our current assessment framework, the “fix” is more test prep, most likely of the remedial variety, thus sending students into those computer-based remediation workbooks that, once again, continue to set them apart from their higher-achieving counterparts.
The fact is that the gaps that divide America’s children are many, and their effects on education are complex. Bridging those gaps will require much more sophisticated means than the sorts of empty reading drills and practice tests that many classrooms have been reduced to for the past several years in the name of “standards and accountability.” And in order to do this work, teachers will require far richer kinds of student assessment—enabling them to see the full extent of students’ knowledge and skills—than the kinds of simplistic, multiple-choice tools that predominate today.
Perhaps the time has come to replace “achievement gap” with a more telling phrase; one that directs attention not merely to a discrepancy in test scores but to the whole range of ways in which young people have been set apart—gaps in opportunity, gaps in access, gaps in expectations, gaps in aspiration, gaps in hope, and so many others. On the cusp of its centennial, perhaps NCTE’s greatest mission is to recast this most urgent of discussions so as to acknowledge the myriad ways in which certain groups of students have been made separate and unequal, and the many ways—beyond preparation for achievement tests—in which they may be free to flourish. 22
1 Jencks, C., & Phillips, M. (Eds.) (1998). The Black-White Test Score Gap. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution.
2 e.g., Ferguson, R. (2005). “Toward Skilled Parenting and Transformed Schools: Inside a National Movement for Excellence with Equity.” Cambridge, MA: Achievement Gap Initiative, Harvard University.
3 e.g., Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). “Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy.” American Educational Research Journal, 32 (3): 465-491.
4 e.g., Alva, S. A., & de los Reyes, R. (1999). “Psychosocial Stress, Internalized Symptoms, and the Academic Achievement of Hispanic Adolescents.” Journal of Adolescent Research, 14, 343-358; Steele, C. (1997). “A Threat in the Air: How Stereotypes Shape Intellectual Identity and Performance.” American Psychologist, 52
5 e.g., Ferguson, R. F. (1998). “Teachers' “Perceptions and Expectations and the Black-White Test Score Gap.” In C. Jencks and M. Phillips (Eds.),The Black-White Test Score Gap (pp. 273-317). Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.
6 Kirsch, I., et al. (2007).America’s Perfect Storm: Three Forces Changing our Nation’s Future. Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service; National Center on Education and the Economy (2006). Tough Choices or Tough Times. Washington, DC: Author; CEE 2007; The National Academies, Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy. (2007). Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing Regions, States, and Cities. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.
7 College Board reports that “despite the strides that have been made by educators to provide traditionally underrepresented students with AP courses, lower performances on AP Exams indicate that often these teachers and students are not receiving adequate preparation for the rigors of an AP course. As a result, traditionally underrepresented students currently demonstrate significantly lower performances on AP Exams.” College Board. (2007). Advanced Placement Report to the Nation. New York: NY. Summary of the report found online at http://www.collegeboard.com/press/releases/152694.html.
8 Stanovich, K. E. “Matthew Effects in Reading: Some Consequences of Individual Differences in the Acquisition of Literacy.” Reading Research Quarterly 21 (1986): 360–407.
9 Orfield, G., & Lee, C. (2006). “Racial Transformation and the Changing Nature of Segregation.” Los Angeles, CA: The Civil Rights Project.
10 Peske, H. & Haycock, K. (2006). “Teaching Inequality: How Poor and Minority Students are Shortchanged on Teacher Quality.” Washington, DC: The Education Trust.
11 When considering the notion of flourishing, this committee must thank two individuals for expanding our understanding of this complex issue: Eric Cooper, President of the National Urban Alliance, and Rafael Heller, former policy analyst for the Alliance for Excellent Education. Eric offered his time and expertise to the committee while Rafael did the same with the chair of this committee. Both men are due the committee’s sincere thanks.
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