Mind the Gap

Assistant Professor John Diamond Tackles the Racial Achievement Gap [caption id="attachment_8485" align="alignleft" width="108" caption="Assistant Professor John Diamond (photo courtesy of the University of Wisconsin)"]

[/caption] High-stakes testing. Leadership in schools. The racial achievement gap. Educators’ expectations of minority students. These hot-button topics grab headlines, inspire polarizing discussions, and often get picked apart in ways that lead to more heat than light. But new Harvard Graduate School of Education Assistant Professor John Diamond hopes to turn conflict into resolution through solid research that leads to better practice—and to more informed discussions. Speaking just a few days after he moved from the Midwest to begin the fall semester, Diamond outlined the pressing educational and sociological issues he hopes to tackle in his new post.Among them: the K–12 racial achievement gap. Numerous indicators, from standardized test scores to high school completion rates, show blacks and Latinos trailing their white and Asian peers. At the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Diamond was an assistant professor in the department of educational policy and community studies. He also has been the research director of the Minority Student Achievement Network, a consortium of 21 school districts in diverse middle- to uppermiddle-class suburbs where achievement is generally solid, but not always for minority students. Diamond’s interest in these ideas has taken him into schools to observe students, interview parents, and watch teachers in action. While the achievement gap has complex roots, Diamond found that educators’ expectations widened the disparity.

“People don’t expect black or Latino students to be high achieving. It seeps into teachers’ practice and administrators’ leadership in subtle ways. Even when there’s an effort not to have biased ideas affect practice, it seeps into day-to-day issues in schools.”

“We’ve come to expect gaps to be present and we’re not surprised [when they are],” explains Diamond, who received his doctorate in sociology from Northwestern. “People don’t expect black or Latino students to be high achieving. It seeps into teachers’ practice and administrators’ leadership in subtle ways. Even when there’s an effort not to have biased ideas affect practice, it seeps into day-to-day issues in schools.” That can be as complex as classroom teaching styles or as simple as the information that parents get about their children’s education, Diamond notes. In two of the school districts he visited, white parents tended to be the ones most involved in the parent–teacher associations.They know, for example, about mathematics placement tests in fifth grade that dictated which classes students will take. At the forefront of his mind—and later his research—was how race and social class drove classroom teaching as well as the educational opportunities available to children. “It may be that these things just happen,” says Diamond. “It also may be that there’s some level of exclusion where certain parents see the advantage of having the information and keeping other parents away from it. I’m not sure what it is. It was just striking that the differences existed.” Under Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, the Charles Warren Professor of the History of American Education and Dean, HGSE is striving to better connect research to practice and link various strands of inquiry together. In addition to examining the intersection of race and educational policy, Diamond also has written about “distributed leadership”—a way of understanding how multiple actors are involved in leadership and how leaders have an impact on instructional practice. His most recent publications include “African-American Parents’ Orientations Towards Schools” (with K.Williams Gomez) in Education and Urban Society and “High-Stakes Accountability in Urban Elementary Schools” (with J. Spillane) in Teachers College Record. “Coming here, I think,was an opportunity to come to a school with a great tradition among Ed Schools,” Diamond says. “It has a really good reputation among Ed Schools, but it is also a place that was forging a new identity for itself that mapped on to some of the things I was interested in.” In addition to his teaching duties at HGSE, Diamond will advise doctoral students and continue his research into social class and race’s effects on day-to-day life in schools. His classes reflect his lifelong interests and expertise: urban education and educational inequality, and race and class in education. Diamond says he hopes to open students’ minds but also have them dissect his ideas. “My philosophy really is to expose people to multiple perspectives on issues and letting people grapple with those issues and providing as balanced a take on what we know as possible,” Diamond says. “I have pretty strong ideas about what needs to be done, but I think some of the best learning happens when multiple perspectives are put out front. Students here have a lot to offer.” About the Article A version of this article originally appeared in the Winter 2004-2005 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. For More Information More information about John Diamond is available in the Faculty Profiles.