The Achievement Gap

As I discussed in my first post, standardized tests do not actually test what we think they do. Rather, as Deborah Meier says, "they are designed for sorting students" (107), and a lot of that sorting falls along racial lines.

Harold Berlak, in his essay entitled "Race and the Achievement Gap," describes the discrepancies between achievement levels of white students and students of color:

Even when parents' income and wealth is comparable, African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, and immigrants for whom English is not a first language lag behind English-speaking, native-born, white students. The evidence for the gap has been documented repeatedly by the usual measures. These include drop-out rates, relative numbers of students who take the advanced placement examination, who are enrolled in the top academic and "gifted" classes and/or admitted to higher-status secondary schools, colleges, graduate, and professional programs. And last but not least, are the discrepancies in scores on standardized tests of academic achievement, on which teachers' and students' fate so heavily depend.

Students of color, as a whole, consistently fall behind white students in every standard measure of achievement. For a long time, researchers argued that this fact proved that racial disparities in intelligence were natural and biological (see: Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein's The Bell Curve). This argument has been torn down by other studies, which have in turn presented their own explanations for the achievement gap.

*Tracking: A study described by Berlak, run by Professor Samuel Meyers Jr. at the University of Minnesota, was performed to see what effect poverty had on the poor performance of Black students on the Minnesota Basic Standards Test. A causation was expected to be found, but "contrary to expectations, test scores were not statistically related to school poverty, neighborhood poverty, racial concentration, or even ranking of schools." Instead, "success on the tests was positively correlated to how an individual had been tracked."

I do not entirely agree that poverty is not a primary cause of poor school performance, because, like Meier says, "surely the fact that some schools are less well funded matters" (146), and socioeconomic status must have some effect on how students are tracked. But without getting into an entirely different essay about tracking, it is clear that different tracks breed different levels of learning and achievement. When more white students than students of color have access to "gifted and talented" programs, and white students perform better on the tests, it seems clear that the link is not just arbitrary.

*Stereotype vulnerability: A series of studies conducted by Claude Steele (which Berlak describes in greater detail) found that black students perform worst on tests when the stakes seem highest, and when the stakes threaten their self-respect. Meier writes that:

When told that a test will measure their intelligence or academic competence, the most highly successful black young people do worse than when they are told that the test is just to help researchers understand how we all think. (150)

Since black students, and other students of color, are most apt to be seen by others as having limited cognitive ability, they are more likely to be intimidated when taking a test that will supposedly measure academic capacity. If they perform poorly, that score might not be seen as just a bad score, but rather a reflection on their overall ability and that of their entire racial group.

Those who participated in the study were Stanford students -- people who had to be smart and successful to have been admitted to the university. It seems quite clear that racial stereotypes and racist attitudes play a big role in perpetuating the achievement gap, which brings me to the next point.

*Racist attitudes: Racism still runs rampant in U.S. society. As I wrote in my affirmative action essay, "Although explicitly racist slurs and remarks have become taboo and unacceptable in the mainstream, structural and institutional racism remains." Although students of color are disproportionately placed in underfunded schools with fewer resources, even when they do attend the same high-performing schools as white students, they still perform worse than their white counterparts. As Meier says:

The gap persisted even when black kids attended schools and classes that predominantly served white kids and thus supposedly got exactly the same services. Then, said black educators, the problem must be subtler than we thought. There is something in the ideological assumptions in schools--whether they be progressive or conservative--that undermines our kids; something in the subjective mind-set of teachers that carries with it damaging messages to black kids. (140)

Schools and teachers can send very powerful messages without actually saying anything. Just as we saw in Charlestown High and St. John's Prep, where there seemed to be very differing ideas about trusting the students, schools can also send implicit racist messages -- "you're not as good, you're unable to, you can't" (140). When the culture of schools is overwhelmingly white (mainstream Euro-centric curricula, white teachers and administrators, the stereotype vulnerability), students who do not fit in that white mold will not feel as welcome and will not perform as well on "objective" evaluations because they are structured to reflect the very white culture that they are not a part of.

Further, studies have shown that, because of the white culture of schools, students of color may resist academic achievement to hold on to their own sense of self. Berlak describes one such study by Signithia Fordham:

...patterns of academic success and underachievement are a reflection of processes of resistance that enable them [African-American students] to maintain their humanness in the face of a stigmatized racial identity. ...Even the most academically talented African-American high school students expressed profound ambivalence toward schooling and uncertainty that they will reap the rewards of school success.

Not only are students of color largely set up to fail by being tracked into lower-level classes and judged based on tests with built-in racial biases, but these students are also hesitant to see their education as the key to "making it" when the school culture around them is not set up to make this a believable message. Some students react to this message by actively rejecting school culture, which includes ambivalence toward standardized tests, while others buy into the "school as meritocracy" ideal, but still find it hard to succeed because the barriers in place are largely invisible. Either way, implicit and explicit racist practices in schools are a great force in keeping the achievement gap alive.

*How we measure achievement: One final explanation for the achievement gap is one that Meier clearly favors, and which I discussed in my first post: standardized tests aren't measuring what we think they are. Berlak describes standardized tests as:

a particularly invidious form of institutionalized racism because they lend the cloak of science to policies that have denied, and are continuing to deny, persons of color equal access to educational and job opportunities. An educational accountability system based on standardized testing -- though predicated on "standardized" measurements which are purportedly neutral, objective, and color-blind -- perpetuates and strengthens institutionalized racism.

When we base a student's achievement level on a test score that, by design, will be higher or lower depending on his race, a red flag should go up immediately that this is not an accurate or fair evaluation system. By measuring achievement with standardized test scores, we are reinforcing "the very qualities of schooling that do the damage to start with" (Meier 149). Test scores have not been proven to be accurate predictors of future success in life, yet schools continue to give them incredible weight and importance. Schools that continue to measure achievement by using standardized test scores "undermine the life smarts upon which intelligence builds--and over time convince kids they haven't got what it takes. Tests become a cause of failure, not a mere documenter of it" (150). This point, in addition to my previous post about standardized tests in general, is the exact reason why the current evaluation system cannot continue as is. If we want to close the achievement gap, we have to reevaluate how we judge achievement.

As Meier notes:

A gap exists, and we can do much to make it smaller. But if I expect to make a difference in the real gaps, I'll have to invent different kinds of schools and different ways to hold them accountable for their work, ways consistent with the trust that needs to exist between learner and teacher, school, and family. (151)

The "achievement gap" that is so widely discussed -- that is, the wide difference in test scores between racial groups -- is largely one that schools themselves have created by tracking, promoting (intentionally or unintentionally) racist attitudes, and putting so much weight on tests. Real disparities do exist in such areas as high school and college graduation rates, career tracks, and income level, and education can lead the way in closing those gaps. Simply working to improve the test scores of students of color, though, will not work because (a) scores of those who already test well will also increase, keeping the gap constant, and (b) we will be working on too small a scale, ignoring the larger structural issues involved. For education to be the key, structural changes need to happen: more multicultural curricula, less tracking, and movement away from standardized testing.