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Achievement Gap the Focus at Askwith Education Forum

By Jill Anderson
03/16/2009 2:57 PM
4 Comments

Attendees of the March 10 Askwith Education Forum took home one message from the panelists: Yes, we can close the .

“I think it is time to think of the work as a national social movement,” said Harvard Kennedy School Professor , cochair and director of Harvard’s . “We can come pretty close in the next 20 years to closing the gap.”

In addition to Ferguson, participants of the forum, Yes We Can! A Panel on Closing the Achievement Gaps, included Columbia University Professor and University of Michigan Professor . They emphasized that, while many people might think closing the gap is impossible, black-white test scores, evolving research on intelligence development, and motivation as a nation are all indicative that a future without the achievement gap may exist.

“I want to underscore one thing, which I think is very clear as you look at data across the past 30 years – those who asserted the black-white assessment gap could not be closed were clearly wrong,” Waldfogel said. “We can clearly see tremendous convergence at some periods over the past 30 years and see other periods where policies shift, factors shift, and there is not so much convergence. This suggests that the black-white test score gap is extremely sensitive to environmental factors, to social factors, and to policy factors.”

Waldfogel noted that trends in black-white test scores over the last 30 years indicate that we may be entering a period of steady gains among black students in America.  For instance, according to the National Assessment Educational Progress (NAEP) math and reading data examined by Waldfogel, the 1970s and early 1980s brought closure between white and black children’s scores from 44 points to 29 points. However, by the late 1980s and 1990s, the gap between black and white children grew larger. The gains and gaps, said Waldfogel, fluctuated with declines or increases in segregation, teacher quality, and improvements in parental education.

As for the latest trends, Waldfogel said, “We are entering a period of renewed progress and gap-closing in the late 90s and early 2000s. We can only speculate what is driving these factors but it is likely that both family and school factors are playing a role like they did earlier.” Additionally, a decline in black family poverty can also have an effect, she said.

In recent years, Waldfogel credited “good” things happening in education like accountability and increased governmental spending on programs and policies as encouraging for the gap closing. “These are exactly the right policies to be closing the achievement gaps,” she said. “What I don’t think any of us foresaw over the last years as we worked on this project is what would happen with the economy…the recession is very concerning for a lot of reasons but in particular what it can do for child poverty and state education budgets.”

Beyond test scores is lingering misinformation about intelligence, according to Nisbett, author of the book, Intelligence and How to Get It, who addressed how schools and culture do shape intellectual development. For some time, the well-known book The Bell Curve has propagated ideas that heredity dictates intelligence, schools can’t develop students’ intelligence, and the social classes are growing further apart, Nisbett said. However, he concludes that, due to IQ not actually being solely determined by heredity, many of these ideas are untrue. In the past 60 years, IQ has increased by 18 points which is enough, Nisbett said, to prove that IQ is hugely malleable and possibly influenced by environment. Further, in recent years, the average IQ difference between blacks and whites has dropped from 15 points to 9.5.

“We know that early childhood education can make a huge difference. We know that education at the middle school level can make a huge difference. We know that differences can be made at the high school level from a stand and deliver experiment…” Nisbett said. “If we want the poorer to be smarter then we should make them richer. We have high socioeconomic status differences in this country and the [socioeconomic] gap is highly related to the academic achievement gap.”

Ferguson concluded that it is imperative to create a social movement focused on closing the achievement gap. In 2050, the United States will be a nonwhite nation, he said, noting the important effects of education on America’s future. “If we don’t make the progress that we need to make in narrowing the achievement gap then that’s a recipe for social instability and economic decline,” Ferguson said.

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  • malcolm bellamy

    I feel that the idea of “closing the gap” is a very real and sincere one. I think though that the terminology needs to be looked at. The “gap” is one measured by so-called results in measureable tests. I feel that any measure that continues to denote success in a measureable quantitative way will continue to show a gap between different groups’ achievement.
    What I would like to see is the development of a new mindset based on the concept championed here in Great Britain, where I live, of “learning without limits”. Thus, there is no need to quantify in order to prove a gap, but to be aware of all human potential and allow children to become aware of their own ability to learn. Fighting against the negatives of schooling experience and promoting the idea that anyone, of whatever grouping,ethnicity or religion can succeed in an environment where education is seen as freeing up the mind and not delimiting it and testing it to death.

  • khcasey

    The prevelance of hitting children and beating them in the Black culture in order to induce obedience is not mentioned as one of the causes of Black non achievement. It is not unusual to hear people talk about how their mothers or fathers had a *heavy* hand or how *wupping* taught them *humility*. Physical force against children is common place and does not encourage children to view themselves in a positive manner.
    I hope President and Mrs. Obama have the courage to address this issue and Harvard faculty will recognize and publicize the horrific effects of physical abuse as punishment on the achievement levels of Black children.

  • Malcolm

    Your statement is inaccurate. It is difficult for me speak about aspects of say Russian culture because it is foreign to me but I can speak with confidence about the African American experience. Educational and life skills development indicates that there is more than one way to raise a child. My sister and I received spankings and beatings as a consequence of our poor or bad decisions. This form of discipline did not limit our achievements but in fact helped to prepare us for a difficult and cold world. My sister has received her Ph.D. and I am working on mine at this time.
    The real reasons for the disparity are the lowered expectations and cultural insensitivity that is a part of the American education system and culture. The students who are underperforming are those that have not been widely accepted into the American culture. Despite the challenges ahead of us, as a country, there is an opportunity for this severe problem to be resolved if individuals look beyond their limited scope of understanding to evaluate the methodology, systems and policies that presently support the gap in performance.

  • Frank Simpkins

    The inability of our inner-city public school systems to adequately teach our Black non-mainstream, disadvantaged students to read in grade school and work with grade-appropriate subject materials, has lead to a very precarious and chaotic situation.
    Several studies from Europe to the United States, have proven through experimental research data, that taking the vernacular into account when teaching the standard have worked. What the researchers found both in Europe and in and in the Philippines, is that kids who started in their vernacular (dialect) when they switched to the second language(standard), very rapidly caught up to the kids who started in English and even surpassed them. The kids who started in the vernacular(dialect), were outperforming in English, the kids who started in English, in subjects ranging from reading to social studies, and even arithmetic.
    This was a massive study done over fairly long period of time. The closest paralle to this study in terms of the United States and African American Vernacular English(Ebonics), is the” Bridge” study reported on in Simpkins and Simpkins(1981).
    What researchers found, after four months of instruction and testing, is that the kids who were being taught by the conventional methods showed 1.6 months of reading gain, which is consistent with current evidence, that the longer African American kids stay in school with existing methods, the further behind they fall. By contrast, the kids who were being taught by the”Bridge Readers” showed 6.2 months of reading gain, after four months of instruction. The experimental evidence was dramatically in support of the approach–the method offered hope that African American kids would finally be able to read above and ahead of the norm, rather than below it. But the inclusion of the vernacular in some of the”Bridge Readers” elicited negative reactons similar to those which emerged in the Oakland Ebonics debacle of 1996. The publisher of this innovated reading program “Bridge Readers” embrassed by the negative reactions, quickly decided against continuing production of the”Bridge” series, and this very innovated and promising experiment came to an abrupt end, despite, its dramatically pedagogical success! ‘Using the Vernacular to Teach the Standard” Department of Linguistics, Stanford; John Rickford; and “Betwee4n the Rhetoric and Reality”; Lauriat Press, G&F. Simpkins.

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