Insight
The stubborn persistence of the achievement gap
Apr 23, 2009 12:04 PM
Though racial gaps in test score performance and in other student achievement measures are the shame of the nation, history suggests they are by no means inevitable.
Through the 1970s and 1980s, the gap between African-American and Hispanic reading scores and those of their white counterparts narrowed dramatically on the long-term National Assessment of Educational Progress, the national achievement test. Among 17-year-olds, the difference between black and white reading scores narrowed by 62 percent and the Hispanic-white gap was cut in half. Similar gains occurred in math. “Had that pattern continued uninterrupted,” according to “New Frontiers,” a 2001 Education Trust report, “the gaps could have been eliminated early in this decade.”
But it didn’t happen that way. By the late 1980s the progress reversed and the gaps began to widen again, especially for 13-year-olds and 17-year-olds. Today, black students are about two years behind other students by the end of 4th grade, and by the time they reach 8th grade they are three years behind on NAEP. Only about half of Hispanic and black students graduate high school on time (just 43 percent of Hispanics and 47 percent of blacks in New York City) compared with about three-quarters of their white peers nationally.
The results of this backslide are too painful to enumerate, and are now well-known. These achievement gaps, caused by a combination of factors including discrimination, de facto segregation and poor schooling, lead to more discrimination and more segregation. Minds and lives are wasted, at steep cost to the entire country. Yet the gaps persist.
Achievement gaps in New York City
The New York City Department of Education claims that since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took over the schools and Chancellor Joel Klein’s Children First reforms were launched, racial performance gaps have narrowed. They have indeed — looked at in one way. On state tests, the percentages of black and Hispanic 4th-graders meeting math and reading standards have increased at a slightly faster pace than the percentage of white students.
For example, 60 percent of black 4th-graders met math standards in 2003 while 85 percent of white students did, a gap of 25 points. By 2008, 73 percent of blacks and 91 percent of whites met 4th-grade math standards, for a narrower gap of 18 points, a seven-point reduction. A similar trend held for Hispanic 4th-graders in math — the gap closed by eight points. In ELA, the 4th-grade achievement gaps narrowed much less, by one point for blacks and two points for Hispanics, over the same time frame, 2003-2008.
But that is not the real story. If we are to succeed in truly narrowing the gap, the first step is to look squarely at the data to see what it shows. And a close look shows a very mixed picture in New York City despite the claims others make. Here is...
The rest of the story
1. The DOE claims much more dramatic results on the state tests. But it includes the 2002 testing year, where there was very significant progress in both black and Latino achievement. However, Children First only began the following school year. So aside from taking credit where none is due, the department also does not ask what happened in 2002 and before that might inform our work. It was “NIH” (not invented here) and so of little interest to an administration that came in believing that everything that went before was “failure.”
2. Reporting average student proficiency across all the tested grades, 3rd through 8th, blurs the reality that as students move up the grades, achievement declines and the achievement gaps widen. Using a statistical technique that allows comparison of scores for different groups, the DOE data actually shows that from 2003 to 2008, the gaps in math proficiency widened for both blacks and Hispanics in 6th and 7th grades. By 8th grade, the gaps also widened for both blacks and Latinos in percentages meeting ELA standards. By 2008, just 36 percent of black students and 33 percent of Hispanics met ELA standards. These results are not good. And while they are up 10 points since 2003, white 8th-graders gained 11 points over the same time frame, so the gap widened.
3. Looking at the more finely tuned “scale” scores rather than broader proficiency levels shows a different trend from the DOE’s analysis. Columbia University sociologist Jennifer Jennings, the former mystery blogger “Eduwonkette,” found that achievement gaps had actually increased in 4th and 8th grade in both subjects judging by scale scores over the five years from 2003 to 2008.
Scale scores are the number of points that students score on the state tests. Proficiency levels group those points into four categories of achievement, with “passing” set at Level 3 or above. Using scale score comparisons, Jennings found that in 4th-grade ELA the black-white gap actually grew by 13 percent and the Hispanic-white gap by 6 percent between 2003 and 2008. In math, 4th- and 8th-grade gaps grew as well, with the exception of the white-Hispanic gap which decreased 6 percent. In 8th grade ELA the gaps decreased, but only because the average scale scores of white and Asian students fell, not because black and Hispanic scores rose.
How can percentages at proficiency and scale scores yield contradictory results? Simple really. For example if some Level 4s slipped to Level 3, and some high Level 3s slipped to low Level 3s, the average scale score will decline, but since the total number of 3s and 4s combined remains the same, the percent at proficiency will be unchanged.
“The central problem is that the black-white achievement gap can be increasing even as the difference between the proficiency of black and white students is closing,” Jennings wrote. And this squares with what many teachers perceive to be this administration’s strategy: focus on getting high Level 2 students just over the Level 3 hump, because that’s what really counts in evaluating teachers, principals and districts. And ...
The gold standard
4. Perhaps of greatest concern to researchers is that New York City’s black and Hispanic students show no significant improvement on NAEP, the national test. In an April 10 op-ed in The New York Times, New York University education historian Diane Ravitch wrote, “On the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress — widely acknowledged as the gold standard of the testing industry … there were no significant gains for New York City’s students — black, Hispanic, white, Asian or lower-income — in 4th-grade reading, 8th-grade reading or 8th-grade math” from 2003 to 2007. She continued, “The federal test reported no narrowing of the achievement gap between white students and minority students.”
So while Joel Klein insisted, in a Daily News editorial on April 16, that the achievement of black and Hispanic students in New York is exemplary and can be replicated in other urban districts by implementing a culture of “no excuses” and hard-nosed “accountability,” the reality is that the achievement gap has not decisively narrowed in New York.
Nor is “no excuses” widely viewed as a winning strategy. “It takes more than pressure to improve failing schools,” NYU professor of teaching and learning Pedro Noguera told a policy seminar on April 10. “We have an impoverished view of education in this country, and we have Third World schools.”
Which circles back around to those 1970s and 1980s results. What did the nation do differently then to cut the achievement gap in half? The data alone cannot tell us, but history suggests some reasons. Those advances followed on the heels of the Civil Rights movement and the Great Society reforms, including the first major federal education legislation, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, a major part of which targeted funding to high-poverty schools which were largely African-American and later Hispanic. A sharp decrease in poverty, and the birth of social programs that reached many black and Hispanic families, also boosted school achievement.
That may not be the whole solution, but it’s a place to start. Children flourish when we pay attention to them and ensure that they and their families have what they need — educationally and socially — to succeed. Research continues to document the effects of poverty on children’s learning. In the rush to raise standards the country may have forgotten that achievement is the result not just of goal-setting, but of creating the conditions to reach them.
