Addressing Achievement Gaps in US Education System

The United States school system has been struggling for years in the aspect of the child achievement gap. According to the NEA, achievement gaps are the all new reality in the present educational system. The National Education Association is the largest labor union in the United States determined to advance the cause of public education. Throughout the years, differences in education achievements between different groups of students have been hard to ignore. Those who fall under the categories of English language deficiency, poverty, racial and ethnic backgrounds and disabilities fall far behind than the rest of the students, and despite all that has been done in hopes of closing the gap, there has not been much of a change. Poverty in itself

The “No Child Left Behind Act” of 2001 was created in order to close the achievement gap by “providing all children with a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high quality education” (ESEA). In the year 2002, President George Bush signed the bill into a law with tremendous support. What this law does is require public schools to give English Language and Math tests every year to show and prove that indeed every child is learning. The students were expected to reach proficiency in both subjects by the year 2014. The schools that failed to reach those requirements received more federal aid to help improve their courses and obtain more resources that can help them get their students to reach proficiency in those two subjects. If, for any reason, public schools still do not reach those requirements even after federal aid, they will have to pay for the child’s own private tutoring, pay for buses to take children to another public school that is well educating, or be taken over and ran by the state. Due to the fact that everyone can and will be held responsible for the closing of their schools, the effectiveness of this is very high. This program serves around 15 million students all around the United States. Four crucial pillars of the bill include; Accountability,

We as a country have tried multiple solutions to quickly close the gap, some working out better than others, with little advancement. The achievement gap between children from low income and high income families is about 30 to 40 percent bigger than the children born 25 years earlier. The achievement gap has been growing for the past 50 years, and will continue to grow. As the years go by the only solution I believe there is, is to fix the problems right at the root. The act of actually rebutting those issues may be a very hard and difficult stretch, and will require the efforts of parents, teachers, students, school officials as well as government officials, and the country as a whole. The programs and acts like the ones talked about earlier have great intentions and have definitely made a difference, but there still is a long ways to go before everyone can be content with the work that has been