- George Washington Carver
While the sense of urgency about the achievement gap is relatively new, there is a deep body of research on the topic extending back several decades. James Coleman’s landmark study, The Equality of Educational Opportunity, was submitted to President Lyndon B. Johnson and the Congress fifty years ago in 1966, as a requirement of the Civil Rights Act. That study, which is commonly referred to as the Coleman Report, found that student background and socioeconomic status had more impact on education outcomes than school resources.
Much of the research, going back to and including the Coleman Report, has focused on two interrelated aspects of the achievement gap: race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status. There’s good evidence regarding differential achievement based on both sets of variables, and therefore, studies of both factors could provide clues for closing the gap. In 2011, Sean F. Reardon of Stanford University produced a valuable report that tracks changes in the socioeconomic and black-white achievement gaps over six decades.
The charts in Figure 5.1 and Figure 5.2 illustrate the socioeconomic achievement gap trend in reading and math respectively. For the purpose of this piece, I suggest that readers disregard the various points in the graph and focus instead on the lines. Those trend lines reflect a growing gap in both subjects when comparing achievement of students at the 10th and 90th percentile of family income between 1943 and 2001. It should also be noted that the years are birth years, so 2001 reflects a student who is 15 years old in 2016.
The gap in these charts is measured in standard deviation units. Reardon provides a helpful explanation on how to interpret the size of the gaps with those units:
One way to get a sense of the size of the gaps is to compare them to the amount that an average student learns during the course of a year. Data from the NAEP indicate that the average student gains 1.2 to 1.5 standard deviations in math and reading between fourth and eighth grade and between 0.6 and 0.7 standard deviations in math and reading between eighth and twelfth grade. Thus, a gap of 1 standard deviation is substantively very large, corresponding to roughly 3 to 6 years of learning in middle or high school. (pg. 10)
Greater residential income segregation may affect the school-quality differential between high- and low-income students, because high-income parents are better able to garner resources for their schools. (pg. 24)
David Berliner highlights that issue in the chart in Figure 7. At first blush, it doesn’t appear much different from any other graph that demonstrates the inverse relationship between achievement and poverty. But Berliner is showing the achievement of low-income and middle-income students within various levels of school poverty. The stunning takeaway in this data is that middle-income students do worse in high-poverty schools than low-income students do in affluent schools. Clearly, context matters.
It should also be noted that this data reflects averages, and there are many lighthouse school districts that have made tremendous progress toward eliminating achievement gaps among the students they serve. Our hope is that all schools will make this issue their highest priority, and in doing so, will learn from the successes others have achieved. Until that happens the door to freedom and prosperity will remain locked for many of our most vulnerable citizens.