Monday, April 21, 2008

Black-White Gap Widens Faster for High Achievers

The most difficult issue surrounding closing the white-black test score gap is finding those factors that are good for all children, but that disproportionately benefit disadvantaged children.

When schools finally began addressing this problem (in the mid-90s) we quickly found that the implementation of typical school programs had the tendency to produce gains - but the white kids we growing faster than the black kids - thus expanding the achievement gap, rather than narrowing it. Initially some schools approached the problem by lowering standards, or by placing all of their resources in traditional remediation programs. Both approaches failed.

As resources moved away from top students, now comes a study that suggests the students who lose the most ground academically in U.S. public schools may be the brightest African-American children. As African American students move through elementary and middle school the test-score gaps between them and their better-performing white counterparts grow fastest among the most able students and the most slowly for those who start out with below-average academic skills.

Some researchers believe the patterns have something to do with the fact that African-American children tend to be taught in predominantly black schools, where test scores are lower on average, teachers are less experienced, and high-achieving peers are harder to find.

Education Week reports:

For his analysis, Sean F. Reardon, an associate professor of sociology and education at Stanford University, analyzed reading and mathematics scores for nearly 7,000 elementary students taking part in a federal study known as the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort. From kindergarten to 5th grade, he found, the achievement gaps grew twice as fast among the students who started out performing above the mean than they did among lower-performing children.

A second report from economists Steven G. Rivkin and Eric A. Hanushek (whose testimony in school finance cases like Young v Williams should come with a warning label) shows "The higher the initial achievement score, the researchers found, the more scores diverged over time between black and white students."
“It appears on average to be worse for a child to be in a school with a high black enrollment share, but it’s not clear why,” said Mr. Rivkin. “It could be important given the recent [U.S.] Supreme Court decision on desegregation,” he added, referring to a ruling in June of last year that sharply limited schools from using race to assign students to schools."
A third paper by Lindsay C. Page, a Harvard University researcher, found that differences between the schools that black and white students attend began playing an increasingly important role in recent decades in the growth of racial achievement gaps at the national level.

That analysis also determined that the national gap, which narrowed in the 1970s and 1980s and then widened again in the 1990s, tracked closely to changes in the percentages of white and black parents with more than a high school education.

This mirrors findings from Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phllips who found the greatest gains made by black students came between 1968 and 1980 and were explained by the civil rights movement, the War on Poverty and school-based improvements. The trend was reversed following "Reaganomics."

As Brandeis University law and social-policy professor Thomas Shapiro understood, "the wealth gap is not just a story of merit and achievement; it's also a story of the historical legacy of race in the United States."

Changing that legacy will require a fully-funded and efficient system that provides the resources students need to attain high standards; greater access to pre-school and kindergarten programs, more help for English-language learners and special needs students, and additional school days. It may also require attention to the social needs of the poor. It will require a comprehensive approach.

But the most recent meeting of the Kentucky legislature revealed no understanding of the problem or any motivation to fix it.

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