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Seeing the Achievement Gap for what it is and what can be done

Posted on January 23, 2008 by Staff

 Steve Peha and Margot Carmichael Lester

No matter what gains we make in education, the Achievement Gap haunts us. If the Gap seems intractable, it’s because of the way we perceive it as a single phenomenon applying broadly to large groups within our society. In reality, academic achievement is more meaningful in individual contexts, and the Achievement Gap results from other gaps representing individual differences in how children experience school. The key to closing the Gap is closing those gaps.

Take the Instruction Gap. The poorest learners get the poorest teachers. More effective teachers enjoy increased mobility and better job opportunities. As a result, they gravitate toward positions that offer greater personal and professional satisfaction, many of which involve leaving the classroom altogether.

Some people have suggested rewarding those who teach in challenging schools with higher pay. But this often backfires as effective teachers fail to switch jobs for better pay and ineffective teachers are rewarded with higher salaries. Even when it does work, we succeed only in trading one problem for another as less effective teachers change places with their more effective counterparts. A better approach is to provide high-quality training to all teachers. Along with more rigorous certification requirements and improved on-the-job performance evaluation, better training would make school better for everyone.

Independent of the instruction students receive, we have created an Expectations Gap. In our thirst for educational testing, we have created a two-tiered system: a minimum competency tier for lower-performing students where we focus our efforts on helping them pass less rigorous state tests; and the traditional maximum achievement tier where college-bound students strive for ever higher scores on harder tests like the SAT. If we want to measure kids, we should measure them all by the same high standard. The SAT is a reasonable high school graduation test. Prior to high school, the NAEP test would also be a viable choice.

But we can also make progress in closing the Expectations Gap in individual classrooms. In our work in schools, we’ve helped groups of teachers establish thoughtful requirements that set high expectations for all students. When teachers are trained to provide students with the time and the tools they need to meet those expectations, kids rise to the challenge and achieve greater levels of success.

Still, other gaps persist. Take the Participation Gap. Some kids study more effectively than others both in school and out. To help all kids maintain high levels of engagement during the school day — and a more responsible approach to homework — we’ve helped teachers create explicit participation requirements. We also show teachers how to engage students in frequent self-assessment and goal-setting around their participation. Ironically, in an age where kids are tested over and over in an effort to hold them accountable for learning, research and common sense tell us that teaching kids how to hold themselves accountable is more effective. If student self-assessment was increased while teacher- and state-imposed assessment was decreased, levels of performance for all students would improve and gaps of all kinds would narrow.

As educators, we must tend directly to The Instruction Gap, the Expectations Gap, and the Participation Gap at school. But two other gaps exist that must be addressed, and least partly, in the home. Some kids have more academic help outside of school than others. This is the Support Gap. Some kids come to school with more knowledge than others. This is the Knowledge Gap. To address these gaps, cooperation is called for. Families must make education a higher priority, community organizations must work with their local districts and not against them, and educators must come up with practical ways to extend formal learning beyond the traditional 36-week school calendar and the 6-hour school day.

Schools and programs that target so-called “at-risk” students tend to share a common theme: more time on task. Kids who enter school behind must be helped to catch up. This means starting school earlier through extended kindergarten and pre-kindergarten programs. And from 1st grade on up, it means spending more time in school and more time studying outside of it. For kids who’d rather be playing with friends, this is a bitter pill. It’s also a hard lesson for our schools since few have comprehensive pre-k, after-school, and weekend academic programs. But it’s something we must do if we truly are committed to leaving no child behind.

Any community can narrow the Achievement Gap if it is willing to be honest about what that gap is and what needs to be done to address it. The key is to move from empty platitudes and meaningless demands to specific practices that improve kids’ learning lives. Without blame, and without inciting public outrage over historical injustices, we can make changes, one school at a time, to improve educational opportunity for all students, and to strengthen our school system for generations to come.

Steve Peha and Margot Carmichael Lester own Teaching That Makes Sense Inc., an education reform, advocacy and consulting company based in Carrboro.

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