Our Achievement Gap Mania
Last week, the quarterly journal National Affairs published my essay “Our Achievement Gap Mania.” As I’d suspected it might, the piece seems to have angered a number of educators and reformers who I like and respect. So, I thought I’d try over the next couple days to explain what the fuss is about and why I felt compelled to challenge a well-intentioned, deeply ingrained consensus.
A decade ago, the No Child Left Behind Act ushered in an era of federal educational accountability marked by relentless focus on closing race- and income-based “achievement gaps” in test scores and graduation rates. The language has become instinctive, with a generation of would-be reformers learning to focus on closing achievement gaps. For all the subsequent critiques of NCLB, both deserved and undeserved, this has been universally hailed as an unmitigated good. It is not. It has shortchanged some children. It has undermined public support for reforming schools while ghettoizing school reform. It has narrowed the scope of schooling and stifled educational innovation. Oh, and its moral philosophy is, at best, shaky.
A year ago, Berkeley High School in Berkeley, California, moved to eliminate after-school science labs for Advanced Placement classes and five science teachers so that the resources and faculty could be devoted to struggling students, in a push to address “Berkeley’s dismal racial achievement gap.” The New York Times has reported that, in Sacramento, California, low-performing students are only permitted to enroll in math, reading, and gym, in a mad dash to help close the achievement gap. The Center for Applied Linguistics has reported that the share of U.S. elementary schools offering foreign language classes fell by one-fifth from 1997 to 2008. Instruction in foreign language and advanced science have come to be seen as frills.
The all-consuming push to “close achievement gaps” has meant focusing, to the exclusion of nearly all else, on boosting math and reading proficiency and the graduation rates of poor and minority children. The Education Trust, perhaps the nation’s most influential K-12 advocacy group, explains, “Our goal is to close the gaps in opportunity and achievement.” The National Education Foundation has launched its own “Closing the Achievement Gaps Initiative.” The California Achievement Gap Educational Foundation was launched in 2008 to “eliminate the systemic achievement gap in California K-12 public education.” Elite charter-school operator Uncommon Schools says its mission is running “outstanding urban charter public schools that close the achievement gap and prepare low-income students to graduate from college.” Education Week, the newspaper of record for American education, ran 63 stories mentioning “achievement gaps” in the first six months of this year.
Indeed, at the elite level, there’s a bipartisan consensus on this question. President Bush bragged in 2008 that NCLB “focused the country’s attention on the fact that we had an achievement gap that–you know, white kids were reading better in the 4th grade than Latinos or African-American kids.”
Echoing Bush, President Obama has termed education the “civil rights issue of our time” and declared that his agenda is intended to address “the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan repeated the familiar formulation last year at the National Press Club, declaring, “The achievement gap is unacceptable. Education is the civil rights issue of our generation.”
Such sentiments are admirable. And it’d be hard to argue that any of this is bad on its own terms. The legacy of achievement gap mania isn’t necessarily undesirable. Focusing on the neediest students is admirable, as far as it goes. With limited time, talent, and resources, we can’t do everything–and it’s not unreasonable that some think our priority in every case should be the most in need.
The real problem has been the unwillingness of gap-closers to acknowledge the costs of their agenda or its implications. And yet, the groupthink consensus that the business of education is “closing achievement gaps” has made it tough to talk honestly about the costs–for fear of being branded a racist or thought unconcerned with inequities. It has dreadfully narrowed the potential coalition for reform. It has distorted the way we’ve approached educational choice, accountability, and reform. It has warped and retarded the pace, reach, and power of school improvement efforts. And it has yielded a stifling and ultimately troubling vision of schooling. If you’re curious as to how I can say such things, check out the essay here.
-Frederick Hess
This post also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.
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The same preoccupation with helping the lowest achieving students has found its way into individual classrooms. Schools put forth monumental efforts to intervene with failing students and administrators are under a great deal of pressure to “raise the floor,” so to speak.
That is, of course, a noble endeavor. The problem, though, is that the effort to dedicate the bulk of resources to the bottom end of the spectrum has overlooked the needs of higher achieving students. We may have raised the floor, but we’ve also lowered the ceiling.
As a classroom teacher, I can expect to be called to the principal’s office for having too many failing students. I’ve seen teachers give the vast majority of their students A’s, and no one so much as raises an eyebrow.
We have whole committees and programs dedicated to intervening on behalf of failing students, but no such committee or program exists to ensure our brightest students are given challenging work in their classes.
Teachers are constantly pressured to slow things down to accommodate the lowest achieving students – who constitute the minority – to the detriment of the most capable of students.
I’m all for helping struggling students, but it does a disservice to the majority of my students when I am asked to expend the limited time and resources to raise the floor and slow things down.
there is a presumption that we cannot teach the challenged without hurting those higher up on the rung.
you teach BOTH… it’s not impossible at all.. if you set up to do that… to start with… and it’s demonstrably successful as many schools who DO achieve NCLB prove it.
We don’t have a mania about achievement gaps – we have a reality about not successfully competing for world-class jobs that other countries are taking away from us while we whine about our own lack of commitment to deal with the realities.
every kid with a normal IQ who does not get a sufficient workforce education is going to require entitlements from those that did get a good education.
think about this.. walking away from these kids hurts who in the end?
it hurts US… it hurts US on getting our share of 21st jobs and it hurts US in higher and higher taxes for entitlements, subsidies and incarceration.
we’re NOT helping struggling students – the ONLY justification for taxing people to provide public education is that it ultimately benefits everyone.
if that’s not what we are about – then we need to go back to private schools and walled homes.
LarryG, no one is suggesting we abandon struggling students. The problem is that schools invest enormous amounts of time and resources to struggling students to the detriment of higher achieving students.
Because classrooms are de-tracked, the presumption that we cannot teach the challenged without hurting those higher up on the rung is accurate, given that we do not have infinite time or resources.
I agree that helping lower achieving students is good for everyone, but the overwhelming effort to achieve that goal has been largely ineffective and our brightest students are suffering as a result.