Posted: December 20th, 2021

Closing The Achievement Gap Education Essay

Study Bay Coursework Assignment Writing Help

The American education experienced long and sustained period of school reforms filled with significant challenges. The policymakers as well as the governors made the school reform movement their top project priority since the 1980s (Sindelar, Shearer, Yendol-Hoppey & Liebert, 2006). The school reform movement undergone profound achievements in the past and continues to tackle significant challenges although it has achieved its goal in creating changes to school conditions, student performance, and institutional policy. The National Governors Association for Best Practices is looking into the achievement gap challenge facing the schools today (Grant, 2009). This requires creating new policies and developing old policies to close in the achievement gap problems happening in several states. The policy primer discloses the nature of the achievement gap problem, its history, and the different state’s efforts to solve the existing problem. The primer also discusses alternative solutions and strategies at state level including important issues and factors to avoid in implementing solutions.

Understanding the achievement gap context

The achievement gap context is all about the differences one sees between people coming from different race and class (Chubb & Loveless, 2002). There is an increasing difference concerning the performance of students coming from the disadvantaged minority as compared to the performance demonstrated by white students of the same grade level (Chubb & Loveless, 2002).

This achievement gap is a clear issue of racism and the effects of the power of the privilege. Educational institutions, educators, and policymakers face genuine lack of understanding creating and developing schools that can cope up with the context of a diversified society. The challenge goes on with the creation of correct policy that could help close the achievement gap.

Federal response to the urgent persisting achievement gap problem

The No Child Left Behind Act or NCLB is an attempt by the Federal government to close the achievement gap (Chamberlain, 2004). The policy set forth a new accountability practice for American schools to set the same standards with detailed plan for testing performance to ensure students meet preset standards of the schools. The framework of the NCLB allows a student to transfer to other schools located at the same district if he fails to pass the test performance set by the school. It is the responsibility of the school district to provide persistently failing students supplemental services as well as choices to study at other schools operating within the same district (Chamberlain, 2004). The school needs to demonstrate adequate progress about the problems of persistently failing students. Failure to show progress makes them open for state law corrective action (Chamberlain, 2004). The schools focus their performance targets based on the conditions of the students with disabilities and coming from disadvantaged family background. This includes students coming from ethnic or minority group that possess limited English language skills and proficiency. However, well performing schools are still required to alter school practices, policies, and governance to accelerate and enhance the educational experience of the disadvantaged group of students.

The state considers a school as well performing only when they become successful in bridging the achievement gap. The intervention of the new Federal law on the educational scene has created quite a stir among schools struggling to meet the new set of policies and criteria.

How do you measure the achievement gap?

NCLB Act is clearly a Federal strategy to challenge the achievement gap brought by the effects and challenges of inequality among students in the US. Schools measure achievement gap by comparing African-American test scores and academic performance with the Hispanic group and white Americans using standard assessment tests (Chamberlain, 2004). Survey statistics gathered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reflected a narrow gap between Hispanic and African-American 17 year old students reading scores for the period 1975 to 1988 (US Commission on Civil Rights, 2004). The gap becomes wider or somehow constant in the areas of mathematics and reading during 1990 to 1999. The NAEP charts on achievement gap raised concern over the intelligence and skills of the disadvantaged minority students. The Education Trust analysis on the NAEP data bothered policymakers. It concluded that the grade 12 level disadvantaged minority students performed similar to the level of the students studying four years behind them (Ferguson & Mehta, 2004). The skills of the Latino and African-American 17 year old students are comparable to the skills possessed by the 13-year-old White students in the subjects of English, science, and mathematics (Ferguson & Mehta, 2004).

The educational attainment is another way to measure the achievement gap between races. The different ethnicities showed wider gap as to the highest educational level of attainment they had achieved in the past. The groups showed gaps in all discipline. Dropouts among African-American and Hispanic groups in high school are heavier even though the tuition fee rates are lower than those rates given to the Whites (Ferguson & Mehta, 2004). The Whites show more effort in trying to get a college degree than the Blacks and Hispanic young adults.

Policymakers and schools do not overstate the importance of achievement gaps but actually noted the big difference between Whites and other ethnic group’s educational achievement specifically Hispanic and African-American groups (Chubb & Loveless, 2002). The achievement gap is the outcome of local and national standard test measures between diversified groups of students mostly categorized by ethnicity and socioeconomic status (Chubb & Loveless, 2002). The other forms of category applicable to the groups are their gender and ability.

There are many ways that a school can measure the achievement gap between the groups such as test scores resulting from standardized test and average grades obtained by each group. The dropout rates, highest level of educational attainment, and population of college enrollees are other ways to measure the achievement gap between ethnicities (Strictland & Alvermann, 2004).

Although the results of this statistic survey came from different American states, the same thing is also happening with other countries. These achievement gaps noted across countries showed the possible effects brought by discrimination and social injustice. The government made a good move eradicating social discrimination.

The move to bridge the achievement gap between ethnicities also responds to their effort to solve existing social discrimination at the same time. Eradicating the gap as a public policy would help eliminate the other problem of social discrimination. However, some people disagree that the core causes of the achievement gap come from a person’s class, culture, or even biology. These people believe that policymakers can directly influence economics and education using progressive education based on multiculturalism. This idea is more effective in helping them achieve equality among ethnic groups.

Identified factors causing the widening achievement gap

Researchers do not have any clear idea about the real reason for the increasing achievement gap between ethnic groups. Structural as well as cultural factors played a major role to the widening discrepancy. Students lacking the cultural capital portrayed by the middle class are likely to show low academic scores and achievements especially if they experience little parental involvement concerning their education and home coursework (Strictland & Alvermann, 2004). Annete Lareau stated that better resource students demonstrate more accomplishments in academics and life (Lareau, 2000).

Other researchers believed that a person’s ability to achieve more in life and academics largely depends on its socioeconomic condition and the classification of race from which he belongs. It is evident that students belonging to the disadvantaged minority suffer the adverse result of the achievement gap because they find themselves at a disadvantage position than the White students.

Understanding the effects of the environment and culture to students’ performance

The culture, traditions, beliefs, social roles, and environment of the student influence the student’s performance and are factors that need extra consideration and study when dealing with the core causes of achievement gap (Lareau, 2000). It would be for the researcher’s advantage that he should look into the lives, environment, economic condition, and practices of the disadvantaged minority to ascertain and identify specific cultural differences that can help explain the differences of the child-parent relationships between ethnic group families (Lareau, 2000). Cultural differences shaped the child’s behavior and motivation to become achievers. The authors Jencks and Phillips argue that a child belonging to the Black family do not have much motivation and encouragement from their parents because of the lack of understanding about the benefits of education and obtaining academic skills (Jencks & Phillips, 1998). The lack of awareness resulted to Black children going to school with little vocabularies than their White counterparts.

Studies claimed that students with parental involvement such as homework Helpance show more progress in school (De Carvalho, 2001). In comparison, the disadvantaged minority consists of single parents have to spend more of their time looking for money to cope up with their household economics and other needs rather than staying and getting involve with their child’s homework (De Carvalho, 2001). The minority group also consists of parents that do not understand nor speak English well. The study points two major causes of the child’s difficulty namely unavailable English speaker at home and lack of parental involvement for homework.

Researchers highly believed that children from the minority group do not attend school because they are not willing to find themselves in comparison with the Whites and accused as behaving like the White children by their peers (De Carvalho, 2001).

The children of the minority group simply lack the motivation and the understanding to pursue higher education because they do not see and believe the benefits and role of education in their future. They possess little understanding about the benefits that knowledge and higher education bring to their lives and how it could improve years of hard work (De Carvalho, 2001). The common minority behavior from lack of motivation to do better in school is plain rejection of the idea to achieve something more in their future. It is like giving up their potential and the ability to do more by not studying and working hard to make any progress in their social status as well as to receive higher wages.

Furthermore, researchers found that schools often set up their performance measures based from the students’ knowledge as well as familiarity about the White group that belongs to the middle class cultural capital. It is obvious that the disadvantaged minority is not familiar about the middle class cultural capital background of the White group. Schools need to change their test for students’ performance and base it on their understanding of the subject matter. The test should be solely base on how they understand and perceive the subject they are taking.

How structures of the institutions influence the students?

Students coming from the disadvantaged minority group definitely go to schools categorized by the district as poorly funded schools (Danielson, 2002). Children belonging to low-income household attend poorly funded schools because it is the only affordable form of education. Schools belonging to the poorly funded school category have limited resources and employ teachers with less qualification (Danielson, 2002). Schools tried to solve the achievement gap between ethnicities by placing students in tracking education groups.

The framework of the tracking education group assigns students within the same school into several groups base on their skills and academic abilities (Ansalone & Biafora, 2004). The schools then tailored the teachers’ lesson plans to meet the varying requirements of the different sets of learners’ abilities (Ansalone & Biafora, 2004). The strategy made dramatic progress to some learners.

However, some schools based their grouping from the students’ cultural capital and socioeconomic status that results to the disadvantaged minority overly representing the lower educational group (Ansalone & Biafora, 2004). This made schools placed the African-Americans and the Hispanic students into the lower educational group. Their perception about the minority group wrongly placed the African-Americans and the Hispanic students, which reflects practice of institutional racism (Ansalone & Biafora, 2004). This confirms some researchers’ beliefs that the initiation of the tracking education groups implies the existence of racial segregation within the school system itself.

Several studies performed on tracking education groups provided negative results. The implementation of the tracking education groups harmed the potential of the minority students to learn more skills because the teachers assigned to their groups are less qualified (Molnar, 2003). The curriculum design for the minority group is also less challenging and provides less opportunity for advancement in their academic fields. The peers as well as the teachers of the students belonging to the lower tracking educational group labeled them as slow learners. This greatly affected their self-confidence and motivation to continue their studies, which resulted to increasing minority school dropouts. Concerned psychologist claimed that the school’s tracking group’s outcomes might not be beneficial to all groups (Molnar, 2003). They cannot identify any lasting benefit to the grouping.

Chapter 2