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"Achievement gaps have also, however, taken on a very different role over the past 10 or so years. The sizes of gaps, and extent of "gap closing," are routinely used by reporters and advocates to judge the performance of schools, school districts, and states. In addition, gaps and gap trends are employed directly in formal accountability systems (e.g., states' school grading systems), in which they are conceptualized as performance measures. Although simple measures of the magnitude of or changes in achievement gaps are potentially very useful in several different contexts, they are poor gauges of school performance, and shouldn't be the basis for high-stakes rewards and punishments in any accountability system. Let's take a quick look at four problems with using gaps in the latter context."

There is widespread awareness that there is a very substantial gap between the educational achievement of the White and the Black population in our nation, and that the gap is as old as the nation itself. This report is about changes in the size of that gap, beginning with the first signs of a narrowing that occurred at the start of the last century, and continuing on to the end of the first decade of the present century. In tracking the gap in test scores, the report begins with the 1970s and 1980s, when the new National Assessment of Educational Progress began to give us our first national data on student achievement. That period is important because it witnessed a substantial narrowing of the gap in the subjects of reading and mathematics. This period of progress in closing the achievement gap received much attention from some of the nation's top researchers, driven by the idea that perhaps we could learn some lessons that could be repeated.

"Pundits love to make cross-state comparisons and rank states on a variety of indicators (I'm guilty too). A favorite activity is comparing NAEP test scores across subjects, including comparing which states have the biggest test score gaps between children who qualify for subsidized lunch and children who don't. The simple conclusion - States with big gaps are bad - inequitable - and states with smaller gaps must being doing something right! It is generally assumed by those who report these gaps and rank states on achievement gaps that these gaps are appropriately measured - comparably measured - across states. That a low-income child in one state is similar to a low-income child in another. That the average low-income child or the average of low-income children in one state is comparable to the average of low-income children in another, and that the average of non-low income children in one state is comparable to the average of non-low income children in another. LITTLE COULD BE FURTHER FROM THE TRUTH."

Analysts often examine the black-white test score gap conditional on family income. Typically only a current income measure is available. We argue that the gap conditional on permanent income is of greater interest, and we describe a method for identifying this gap using an auxiliary data set to estimate the relationship between current and permanent income. Current income explains only about half as much of the black-white test score gap as does permanent income, and the remaining gap in math achievement among families with the same permanent income is only 0.2 to 0.3 standard deviations in two commonly used data sets. When we add permanent income to the controls used by Fryer and Levitt (2006), the unexplained gap in 3rd grade shrinks below 0.15 standard deviations, less than half of what is found with their controls.

A recent statement by the New Jersey Department of Education (NJDOE) attempts to provide an empirical justification for that state's focus on the achievement gap - the difference in testing performance between subgroups, usually defined in terms of race or income. Achievement gaps, which receive a great deal of public attention, are very useful in that they demonstrate the differences between student subgroups at any given point in time. This is significant, policy-relevant information, as it tells us something about the inequality of educational outcomes between the groups, which does not come through when looking at overall average scores. Although paying attention to achievement gaps is an important priority, the NJDOE statement on the issue actually speaks directly to the fact, which is well-established and quite obvious, that one must exercise caution when interpreting these gaps, particularly over time, as measures of student performance.

Key findings from this study include the following: Achievement on state reading and math tests has improved for Title I students in most states with sufficient data. Gaps between Title I and non-Title I students have narrowed more often than they have widened since 2002, although trends were less encouraging at grade 4 than at grade 8 or high school.  When gaps narrowed, it was most often because achievement improved at a faster rate for Title I students than for non-Title I students. The size of achievement gaps between Title I and non-Title I students varied greatly among states but was often smaller than gaps for low-income students or for certain racial/ethnic groups.

In a dramatic illustration of the impact of income inequality on how children do in school, the achievement gap between children from high and low income families is far higher than the achievement gap between black and white students, a pathbreaking research report from Stanford University has shown.

A proponent of evidence-based policymaking, Ladd shows that our current school reform policies are not based on evidence. She cites research demonstrating that the gaps between the most affluent and the least affluent children more than doubled in the past half-century, and that the income-based achievement gap is now much larger than the racial achievement gap. She points out that the racial achievement gap narrowed from the 1970s to the 1980s and has remained stagnant since then.

With the release of the NAEP TUDA stats, there's been a lot of conversation swirling around achievement gaps and the efficacy of neo-liberal education reforms in urban districts. In particular, there's been some talk about how to judge Michelle Rhee's legacy, especially in light of the fact that that DC has the largest achievement gap between black and white students and one of the highest between poor and non-poor of all the cities featured in the report. Education journalists such as Alexander Russo weighed in here and Dana Goldstein offered some mostly solid analysis here.

"The phrase closing the achievement gap is the cornerstone of TFA's general philosophy, public-relations messaging, and training sessions. As a member of the 2011 corps, I was told immediately and often that 1) the achievement gap is a pervasive example of inequality in America, and 2) it is our personal responsibility to close the achievement gap within our classrooms, which are microcosms of America's educational inequality. These are laudable goals."

"While politicians and the media misrepresent the achievement gap in order to demonize schools and teachers, we have ample evidence that addressing the whole life of the child is the only avenue to closing an achievement gap."

The single greatest bi-partisan success of NCLB, the argument has been, is that the federal government began forcing all schools to address the achievement gaps among subgroups of students, impacting significantly how schools identified, tested, and displayed test data related to English language learners, African American students, and special needs students. Here, though, the use of the term "achievement gap" has never been challenged or examined for what agenda it fulfills or how it positions our entire national view of students, teachers, and schools.

But as we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century, we have neither fulfilled the dream laid at our feet by Jefferson and others nor protected our commitment to this crippled social institution we call universal public education. In fact, we have demonized schools for over a century and sit poised to dismantle our schools without ever having allowed them to succeed. For educators dedicated to the tradition stretching from Jefferson to John Dewey to Paulo Freire, we are faced with a paradox when we confront "What education do our children deserve?" Included in the paradox is that we need education reform because our bureaucratic schools are not supporting the agency of all children for a life as free people and that allowing and pursuing the public and political pursuit of educational reform are masking the need for social reform-addressing the crippling impact of poverty on the lives of children (Berliner, 2009; Hirsch, 2007). Therefore, I hesitate to offer what education our children deserve because I know that without social reform, all education reform will be distorted, if not fruitless. Against calls for education reform, educators must heighten our acknowledgement of and attention to the equity gap that exists in the lives of children, an equity gap that is reflected in the achievement gap in our schools. So as we examine and call for education reform, we must preface that call with context: To achieve the education our children deserve, we must also provide those children with the lives they deserve. 

Late yesterday, the New Jersey Department of Education Released its long awaited report on the state school finance formula. For a little context, the formula was adopted in 2008 and upheld by the court as meeting the state constitutional standard for providing a thorough and efficient system of public schooling. But, court acceptance of the plan came with a requirement of a review of the formula after three years of implementation. After a change in administration, with additional legal battles over cuts in aid in the interim, we now have that report.  The idea was that the report would suggest any adjustments that may need to be made to the formula to make the distributions of aid across districts more appropriate/more adequate (more constitutional?). I laid out my series of proposed minor adjustments in a previous post. Reduced to its simplest form, the current report argues that New Jersey's biggest problem in public education is its achievement gap - the gap between poor and minority students and between non-poor and non-minority students.  And the obvious proposed fix? To reduce funding to high poverty, predominantly minority school districts and increase funding to less poor districts with fewer minorities. Why? Because money and class size simply don't matter. Instead, teacher quality and strategies like those  used in Harlem Childrens' Zone do! Here's my quick, day-after, critique

A decade ago, the No Child Left Behind Act ushered in an era of federally driven educational accountability focused on narrowing the chasms between the test scores and graduation rates of students of different incomes and races. The result was a whole new way of speaking and thinking about the issue: "Achievement gaps" became reformers' catch phrase, and closing those gaps became the goal of American education policy.

Last Monday, a broad-based coalition of Providence community groups sent a letter to Governor Chafee announcing their opposition to the implantation of a network of Achievement First Mayoral Academies in Providence. It's a pretty long letter, but it's effectively summed upin the last paragraph, which reads: "Our repudiation of Achievement First is not an affirmation of the status quo nor is it a condemnation of all charter schools. The persistent achievement gaps that exist in our schools must be addressed, but no organization or methodology should claim to close those gaps while posting mixed academic results and undermining democratic processes. We implore your help in creating education policies, developed in conjunction with parents, teachers, students, and other local stakeholders, that help all young people enrolled in our public schools."

"New York City has seen some of the more far-reaching educational reforms over the past decade, as Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein set in motion an array of market-based reforms. Both Bloomberg and Klein argued vigorously that the New York City schools had substantially closed the achievement gap, pointing to a shrinking difference in the percentage of white students and Black and Latino students classified as proficient on the New York State English Language Arts and mathematics assessments administered in grades 3 to 8. Many scholars have demonstrated, however, that differences in proficiency rates are potentially misleading, and especially so if the tests have inflated scores reflecting predictable and easier questions. Has the achievement gap in New York City decreased over time? What happened to the achievement gap when the state of New York, recognizing the flaws in its testing system, raised the "cut scores" defining proficiency on its tests in 2010?"

Last week the New York Times provided valuable, disturbing information by reporting recent research on the growing educational achievement gap between rich and poor students, which has grown substantially over the past few decades, even while the achievement gap between black and white students has narrowed. As the author of one study put it, "family income appears more determinative of educational success than race." Yet, as is often true of the Times, what it gives with one hand, it takes with the other. For example, as the media watchdog group, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has long documented, while the paper of record frequently provides factual information about events, its interpretation of the facts buttresses against drawing the "wrong" conclusions about political-economic power relationships.

In this report, the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) claims that California charter schools are reversing the trend of low academic achievement among African American students and effectively closing the Black-White achievement gap. After a review of CCSA's analyses and findings, however, it becomes clear that the claims are misrepresented or exaggerated. In the years under study, African American students enrolled in traditional public schools outgained those enrolled in charter schools by a small margin, although the charter school students started and ended higher. In addition, the authors present a regression model, with Academic Performance Index (API) scores as the outcome variable, that accounts for only 3-6% of overall variance. Based on this model, the percentage of African American enrollment is negatively related to API scores in both charter and traditional public schools, a trend that will not reverse the academic standing for African American students. In fact, the gap continues to grow, albeit at a slightly slower rate in charter schools. Finally, the report's claim that charter schools are centers of innovation does not hold. Rather, as the authors eventually conclude themselves, there were no instructional practices observed in California charter schools that are not also present in traditional public schools.

The biggest problem in Connecticut is the achievement gap between wealthy and poor students, which largely correlates with the gap between white and minority students. The fact of the matter is that the gap has everything to do with poverty and not a whole lot of anything to do with tenure.