Arguments about the future of teachers’ unions aside, I think the biggest challenge facing the Obama administration and our Secretary of Education elect, Arnie Duncan, is the persistent racial/ethnic achievement gap in American schools. Having written a book on the fat envelope frenzy (my term for selective college admissions mania), I can tell you that American high schools graduate thousands of super stars every year. The problem is not that we don’t educate students.
The problem is that we don’t educate all students.
You’ve all heard of the term “achievement gap” but what does it actually look like? Why should you care about it?
The Education Trust summarizes the gap as such:
“By the time [minority students] reach grade 12, if they do so at all, minority students are about four years behind other young people. Indeed, 17 year-old African American and Latino students have skills in English, mathematics and science similar to those of 13-year-old white students.”
From a purely pragmatic point of view, consider the fact that students of color are growing as a percentage of school-age children and the percentage of white students is shrinking. Then realize how the nature of our global economy makes education absolutely essential for American workers to remain competitive (in fact, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, American test scores in science and math are near the bottom of the list of 26 countries measured and have been steadily declining since 2000).
Now think about how important it is for us to do a better job of educating all students.
So, you’re probably wondering about Arnie Ducan’s record in closing the achievement gap in Chicago Public Schools. I know I was.
Eduwonkette did some NAEP number crunching (NAEP=the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also called “the Nation’s Report Card”) for white/black and white/Hispanic students in Chicago. She says:
There are no statistically significant declines in these gaps in 4th or 8th grade reading or math. In many cases – for example, 4th and 8th grade math and 8th grade reading – it’s not that the black-white achievement gap is declining, but not by enough to be statistically significant. These gaps are actually growing. Sigh.
Who else is sick of the streamline of bad news out of Chicago these days?
Besides the Blagojevich debacle, let’s not forget about the city’s nauseating youth murder rate.
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Kidz Today is a column about youth and education by Joie Jager-Hyman
touche: http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2008/12/did_achivement_gaps_grow_in_arne_duncans_chicago.php
Hi Chris.
First, thanks so much for this link. I think this blog post brings up some good points and pushes me to clarify what I mean when I talk about the importance of narrowing the persistent racial/ethnic academic achievement gap in schools.
Though it’s obvious that the data analysis you present does not dispute eduwonkette’s conclusions, I feel compelled to explicate my own post. I am not suggesting that achievement for white students should decline just to narrow the gap. My purpose in writing this column was to call attention to the importance of educating ALL groups of students and, unfortunately, students of color (who make up over 90 percent of the Chicago Public Schools) are still under-performing as compared with their white peers at CPS.
Obviously, if there were a simple solution to this problem, it would have been solved long ago. However, I still think this is the most important educational issue facing our nation.