When the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) long-term achievement trends came out earlier this year, they verified that the gap between white 13-years olds and their black and Hispanic counterparts had actually grown between 1990 and 2007 on the NAEP in both reading and math. Furthermore, the gap widens as students progress through school – growing from 39 points for African American 13-year olds in comparison to their white peers to 53 points for the subset of African American 17-year olds who are still in school. Graduation rate statistics suggest this is only about half of the cohort of black youth in many urban districts. Those who have dropped out achieve at even lower levels.
Furthermore, international data on assessments like PISA show that the United States’ low rankings (35th out of the top 40 nations in math and 31st in science in 2006) are largely a function of inequality: White and Asian students score at or above the OECD average, while black and Latino students do significantly worse. The U.S. is one of the most unequal of the industrialized nations in both educational inputs and outcomes.
For all of the annual breast-beating about the achievement gap whenever test scores come out, American policymakers have shown little willingness to confront the most fundamental reasons it persists. International comparisons bring these reasons into relief.
First, the United States has the highest child poverty rate – at about 1 in 4 children – of any industrialized nation, and the most tattered safety net. High-achieving European and Asian nations provide housing and health care for all families, and generally ensure food security. After governmental transfers, U.S. levels of childhood poverty change very little, while those of other nations largely disappear.
Second, whereas high-achieving nations fund their schools centrally and equally, often with additional allocations of resources to the schools serving the neediest students, the United States funds schools more unequally than any industrialized nation, with the highest-spending schools receiving 10 times more than the lowest-spending. Within any state, ratios of 3 to 1 between high and low-spending districts are common. Affluent students are served by the highest spending districts. Meanwhile, the growing group of apartheid schools serving almost exclusively low-income African American and Latino students in poor urban and rural communities generally offers the lowest level of resources. As school finance suits in over 20 states have documented, these schools often feature crumbling buildings, a paucity of books, computers or other materials, no libraries, and a revolving door of underprepared teachers.
The unequal allocation of school resources is made politically easier by the increasing re-segregation of schools, which has worsened since the 1980s.
For these reasons and others, the U.S. rations high-quality curriculum to a minority of students through both inter-school disparities and within-school tracking systems, offering many fewer of our students the kind of “thinking curriculum” commonplace for all students in high-achieving nations.
Finally, factory model school designs inherited from a century ago have created dysfunctional learning environments for students and unsupportive settings for strong teaching. These environments allow children to fall through the cracks, rather than being carefully and personally nurtured, something the parents of affluent children take for granted as a prerequisite for success. Our factory model schools also fail to support teachers in developing and sharing professional expertise, thus reducing both opportunities and incentives for improving teaching. And all of these factors feed psychological barriers that can sabotage success. Bring the five together, and you have the leading causes for our achievement gap.
Only after understanding these factors, can we really get at the core of closing the achievement gap. How? In an upcoming book, The Flat World and Education, I describe how previously low- and inequitably-achieving nations have risen to the top of the international rankings by making intensive long-term investments in the quality of teaching, removing barriers to access to knowledge caused by now-abandoned examination and tracking systems, and creating strong learning environments for educators and students guided by standards and curriculum aimed at critical thinking and performance skills.
I also describe how states like New Jersey, now arguably now the highest-achieving state in the U.S. if student demographics are taken into account, raised overall achievement and cut the achievement gap in half after being pushed by 30 years of school finance reform litigation to substantially increase spending in its poor urban districts. New Jersey – serving 45% minority students and a large and growing number of new immigrants – ranks in the top 5 states on NAEP on every measure and is first in the nation in writing, having invested in quality preschool for all children and quality pedagogy, with a focus on early literacy now expanding to other subject areas.
States like Connecticut and North Carolina also showed extraordinary gains in the 1990s by making strategic investments focused on more equitably distributed high-quality teaching. They did so by addressing core instructional issues. They used state funds to raise and equalize salaries, along with teacher and principal licensing standards, investing in better preparation, stronger recruitment, mentoring for beginners, and professional learning throughout the career.
After starting down this path in the 1990s, North Carolina, for instance, posted the largest student achievement gains of any state in math, and made substantial progress in reading. It was the most successful state in closing the achievement gap in the 1990s. And in 2007, it remained the top-scoring southern state in math, ranking on par with states like Idaho and Maine, which had many fewer poor and minority students. Connecticut became the nation’s top-achieving state in nearly every area by 1998, even while the proportion of low-income, minority, and new immigrant students had increased throughout the decade. As is often true in the U.S., however, both states have slipped in their policy commitments and investments since then. While they maintain some of the advantages of their earlier investments, inequality is re-emerging once again.
We have trouble in this country maintaining focus and commitment to closing the educational opportunity gap. For decades now, the education community has sought to “solve” the achievement gap. In that time, we have learned one important fact. We cannot address issues of inequity and lack of access by simply doing the same things harder. If we are to provide a truly equal, high-quality education to all students – the only true long-term solution to the achievement gap – we must start by acknowledging the inequalities in the system we currently operate, and we must focus on providing all students with well-trained, effective educators and all educators with the training, support, and resources necessary to lead today’s classrooms.
