Achievement Gap In Education

In education, when referring to the difference in performance between groups of students, often the phrase “achievement gap” is used rather than the more appropriate term, opportunity gap. The term ‘achievement gap’ further exemplifies the way society chooses to narrate this issue. This opportunity gap shows up in grades, course selection, standardized-test scores, dropout rate, and college-completion rates, amongst other success measures. A lot of the time the main focus is simply on the gap itself, and the conversation behind the cause of this is missing. They don’t want to talk about poverty or segregation, only about test score gaps. Despite politicians trying to address this issue by enacting policies such as the No Child Left Behind

Act, which began in 1965 and was reinforced in 2001, little progress has been made in thinning out this performance gap, greatly due to the inevitable racialization that is engraved in our society. “According to Editorial Projects in Education Research Center’s annual Diplomas Count report, while each major racial and ethnic group had more students graduate as of the class of 2008, massive gaps remained between different groups of students. While 82% of Asian students and 78.4 percent of white students in the class of 2008 graduated on time, that was the case for only 57.6 percent of Hispanics, 57 percent black and 53.9 percent American Indian students”(2011, Achievement Gap).

In order to make progress, a much greater emphasis must be placed on our children, who are not yet integrated into our society, and enable them to see that equal opportunity is the right of all American Citizens, ultimately stopping and correcting the interpolation

process.
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 focused on the lack of federal funding on education. In other words, the money isn’t going where it is supposed to go. To get a better visual, schools were required to separate performance information and test scores between varying groups. With The No Child Left Behind Act the issue is brought to the forefront, while extra programs for theses students are provided, no real closing of this gap is apparent even a decade after the law started. Because the money isn’t going where it is supposed to, the schools aren’t getting the same advantages more affluent neighborhoods are getting. These students in poorer areas are already interpolating that they are not worthy of the same advantages that their white peers are receiving, which weakens personal self worth and affects a person’s epistemology. “National Center for Education Statistics in 2009 and 2011 showed that black and Hispanic students trailed their white peers by an average of more than 20 test-score points on the NAEP math and reading assessments at 4th and 8th grade”(2011, Achievement Gap). If these scores aren’t increasing from 4th to 8th grade, the ability for these students to perform at a high school level and beyond will be increasingly difficult, frustrating, and seemingly hopeless. Failing to do well on these exams deteriorates their confidence in the capability of participating in classes considered academically rigorous, leaving the white and Asian Americans to take these classes at 2 times as likely than black and Hispanic students. This inequality in achievement scores are linked to socioeconomic factors. “According to 2009 data from the Census Bureau, of all children younger than 18 living in families, 15.5 million live in poverty, defined as a family of four with less than $21,947 per year. This includes 4.9 million, or about 10 percent, of non-Hispanic white children, and one in three black and Hispanic children, at 4 million and 5.6 million, respectively”(Annie E. Casey Foundation 2011). With limited money comes a limited amount of educational resource at home. With this in mind, the schools that these children go to should make available the same resources that higher-class students are receiving, if not more, to balance out this opportunity gap that continues to exist. In California, “black students are six times more likely than white students to attend one of the bottom third of schools in the state, and Latino and poor students are nearly four times as likely as white students to attend one of the worst-performing third of schools” (EdTrust West, 2010). The trend found in California, carry-over nationwide. And Nationwide the number of black and Hispanic students eventually dropping out of schools parallels to this. When trying to equalize student performance of all ethnic backgrounds, a lot of other factors need to be taken into consideration than just to simply look at test scores and trying to improve them. It goes beyond the classroom. Growing up in low-socioeconomic neighborhoods deals with a plethora of issues that are specific to these neighborhoods that children of more affluent neighborhoods simply do not face. These students need to learn important skills that will help them cope with growing up poor and lead them on a route to success. Many students do not simply dropout because of bad grades, but the mere fact that they do not believe in themselves to ever use this knowledge outside of the classroom and amount to anything in society. These children need a voice. The voice is their teachers.
Socioeconomic factors play a large part in lower academic levels. But what is often overlooked is how minority groups interpolate stigmas from a young age that are simply socially constructed. When you are treated a certain way in society, it becomes impossible to avoid being placed into these specific categories, that involuntarily each person starts to internalize and believe to be their true self. When given limitations in academic environments, these kids are starting to adopt this notion that this is all they are worth. With this happening, these children are stripped of the beautiful part of being a kid, seeing the world as big and full of endless opportunities and believing that they can achieve any single one of them. How can minority groups escape this box they have been put it, if the world around them already thinks that they can’t integrate into normal society? Anti-racism, feminist, and LGBT activist, Jane Elliott, born May 27th, 1933 from Riceville, Iowa puts this concept to an image when she does a discrimination experiment on her 3rd grade class. When Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, she heard white male reporters saying things like “’who’s going to hold your people together, what are they going to do, who’s going to control your people?” as they interviewed black leaders, as if they were subhuman and needed someone to control them. And they said things like, “when we lost our leader (JFK), his widow helped to hold us together, who’s going to hold them together?” The attitude was so arrogant, and so condescending, and so ungodly, that I thought if white male adults reacted this way what are my third graders going to do, how are they going to react?”(Jane Elliott) Her students studied a unit on American Indians and learned a Sioux Indian prayer that read, “oh great spirit keep me from ever judging a man until I have walked a mile in his moccasins,” and that next day after MLK was killed she knew that her kids were finally going to walk in another mans moccasins. That next day she conducted the experiment for the first time and by the 3rd time that this experiment was held in 1970 it was filmed and became what is known today as the ‘Eye of the Storm.’ In a class of all white students she separated them not by their skin but by the color of their eyes, convincing them that melanin is what made eyes different colors and the amount of melanin a person has measures their intelligence level. The first day blue-eyed children were deemed superior which allowed them to sit in the front of the classroom while the others had to sit in the back, five more minutes of recess where they were encouraged to only play with those of the same eye color, second helpings at lunch, and able to drink out of the water fountain while brown-eyed kids needed to use cups. Those who did not follow these rules were penalized, as Elliott verbally spoke about and created examples that further emphasized the difference between the two groups and to make them more apparent to the kids. The next day she switched roles and had blue-eyed as the inferior group and brown-eyed as the superior group. The results were mind blowing.
"I watched what had been marvelous, cooperative, wonderful, thoughtful children turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating little third-graders in a space of fifteen minutes. I had created a microcosm of society in a third-grade classroom," says Elliott. Once labeled as superior or inferior to the other group, these kids mentalities and performance completely transformed. The superior group grasped the mentality of having power over the inferior group instantaneously, deliberately putting them down for reasons they couldn’t even explain when asked to. Jane Elliot gave her students simple mathematical and reading tests, which she had given previously, and found that those who were on top performed at such high levels that seemed out of their ability beforehand. When on the bottom though, their performance deteriorated, even on tasks that were once simple. All Elliott had to do was convince these students that they were superior and they assumed they could enforce order, claimed power over others, and performance was increased because of it. When convinced that they were the subservient group they internalized this, over a short period of time began to truly believe it, and thus lost all confidence in themselves as a result of the power structure created in the classroom. Being subject to discrimination, the inferior groups gave up on themselves as a boy in Jane Elliott’s class puts it, “It seemed like when we were down on bottom everything bad was happening to us. The way they treated you, we didn’t even want to try and do anything.” Kids interpolate stereotypes given to different ethnic groups. Jane Elliott made this apparent within a few hours; society has done this for generations. It’s not a coincidence that the performance of the inferior group in Jane Elliott’s class declined; just like it is not a coincidence that minority group’s performance in today’s society is lower than their counterparts. 20 years later the same students met up and discussed what they had gone through together in the 3rd grade. They all agreed that this impacted them throughout their lives and changed the way that they viewed not only society but also how they acted towards a group deemed inferior. As this study evolved, Jane Elliott integrated more pre tests and post tests to further her findings on the performance levels after her students were submerged into a miniature replica of a discriminating society. Once these kids realized that they had control of what they could achieve- and that nothing but themselves could control that, their performance increased higher than ever before. When they became aware of this, student’s performance was significantly higher for the rest of the year. She found that after the experiment was conducted on each new class, the results remained constant.
Jane Elliott took a chance by performing this experiment, but she did what many white people are scared of doing- openly discussing race. Birgritte Vittrup, a doctoral student, conducted an experiment for her Ph.D. dissertation that examined if typical children’s videos with multicultural story lines actually have any beneficial effect on children’s racial attitudes. As parents watched these TV shows with their kids, they were then told to explain how people from different races and ethnicities often like the same things and that it is okay to be friends. Then ask, “If a child of a different skin color lived in our neighborhood, would you like to be his friend?”(Nuture Shock 48) They crazy part about this, was that these families who had volunteered knowing full-well that this was a study concerning children’s racial attitudes, began to quit the study. Two directly told Vittrup, “We don’t want to have these conversations with our child. We don’t want to point out skin color”(Nurture Shock 49). Out of the 100 surveys taken from these white families, barely any of them talked directly about race with their children. There is this common misconception that if you don’t discuss race then your child will grow up color-blind, but this is not true. In a 2007 study in the Journal of Marriage and Family “argues that children see racial differences as much as they see the difference between pink and blue- but we tell kids that “pink” is for girls and “blue” is for boys. “White” and “black” are mysteries we leave them to figure out on their own”(Nurture Shock 52). Parents actually spend time trying to break this boy-girl stereotype and seem pretty confortable in conversation, so what makes discussing skin color any different or less important? Skin color is just like differences in hair, weight, and gender- they are apparent. “The same way we remind our daughters, ‘Mommy’s can be a doctors just like daddies,’ we ought to be telling all children that doctors can be any skin color”(Nurture shock 62). Grouping people together is inevitable because our need to categorize items is a part of human nature. But this avoidance white parents face in discussing race is not only an ignorant and senseless way to be, but it doesn’t allow society to maximize its potential. To have a productive society everyone needs to see eye-to-eye, and stop ignoring the racial disparities that permeate society and work towards reformation. White parents need to start discussing skin color more but at the same time, minority parents sometimes discuss it too often. Dr. April Harris-Britt is a clinical psychologist who studies how minority parents help their children develop a racial identity from a young age. Minorities emphasize the importance of ethnic pride as a way to discuss race; to be proud of their ethnic history. Harris-Britt explains though, “If children heard these preparation-for-bias warnings often (rather than just occasionally), they were significantly less likely to connect their success to effort, and much more likely to blame their failures on their teachers-whom they saw as biased against them”(Nurture Shock 64). Being continuously made aware of ones skin color and limitations it may bring, seems to sometimes be as destructive as experiences of actual discrimination. The instinct of discrimination is partly a consequence of American culture, so if we don’t start talking to our kids about race at a young age in appropriate ways, how do we ever expect to become this multicultural society we claim to already be.
Our children not only need these discussions to exist at home but also within the schools, where they spend half of their time at.

Each member of the community should be conscious of the impact they have on these young kids and realize that they are the future of our country. They are like sponges; they absorb information at speeds that are hard to keep up with. The environment and those they interact with during this crucial time of development are what they will start to adopt within themselves and project into their futures. Where the main focus is on the gaining of knowledge and skills, teaching should be done in a way that allows students to make mistakes, take risks, and support each other when doing things that are unfamiliar to them; a place where knowledge is shared and bounced off one another. An approach by Newman and Holzman’s, influenced by Vygosky’s concept of the zone of proximal development (zpd) creates a place of education through improvisational activities. “According to Newman and Holzman (1993) the creation of zpd is not a took for the development of the individual-it is collective activity and what develops is the collective’s (i.e. dyad, group, class, etc.) ability to create zones of proximal development”(Lobman 1). In schools were teachers are trained in improvisational teaching, there is no line that separates the “more developed” from the “less developed,” which is almost always seen midst diverse schools. Instead of forcing knowledge onto students

we should be concentrating on the creation of it. The Developing Teachers Program (DTFP) is a program created by the East Side Institute for Group and Short Term Psychotherapy in New York City. It is a yearlong program held by local NYC teachers, where the schools play no part in funding, and is supported by volunteers and donations. Students accepted into this program, upon completion receive a 2,5000 stipend. These students are required to attend works shops every other Saturday, monthly mentoring, and a final presentational project. They are involved in improvisational activities designed to match up with the standard public school curriculum. Half of teachers working in urban areas leave their job after five years (Rowen, Corenti & Richard, 2002). If teachers don’t even want to stay in these learning environments, it makes it impossible to imagine students who want to be there either. Education seems to be turned into robotic influx of knowledge when the relationship between teachers and students should be a cooperative interaction, escaping the bad working conditions that circulate urban areas. “Rather than creating the environment where risks can be taken, where students can “be who they are not,” where students can co-create the environment for learning, schools tend to be environments where doing what one knows how to do is valued and rewarded”(Lobman 12). This study proves how valuable improvisational techniques can be if implemented in all schools. Instead of revolving education around test scores and performance of students in comparison to other students, we should be allowing students to share the knowledge that we each comprise of to create an environment where learning is approached in a supportive way. Students come into schools from parents with lower SES or higher SES and teachers have to be able to work with this opportunity gap by eliminating this separation between “more developed” children and “less developed” children. The want to learn should not stop when education stops, it should be continued throughout our lives. This strategy of learn-play is a great way to have our children’s respond positively and willingly to new topics and challenges, which are abilities needed through out all our lives.
Until politicians decide to shift their main focus of comparing test score statistics to major external factors, that they deem subtle, as an important part in closing this opportunity gap, it will remain stagnant. If a common structure needs to be met at all schools, then this structure needs to be transformed to fit the needs of underprivileged youth with the cooperation of those starting off with stronger abilities in the classroom- and build together. In a culture that promotes individualism, we contradict this notion by keepings schools so regimented, leaving little room for kids coming in with different initial abilities to adopt these standards. This gap continues to be discussed as an “achievement gap” which hides the issues of socioeconomic factors, lack of proper teaching techniques, and the interpolation process kids endure- presentation these ethnic groups as simply uneducated. Outside the classroom, white parents need to start integrating conversations of race with their children as minority groups do before society has a chance to manipulate their minds in ways that a lot of parents fail to see. Just because racial discrimination isn’t in our faces anymore doesn’t mean that they do not persist in today’s society. Society has just found a better way to cover it up.