By Marty Solomon
For over a decade now, our public schools have been focused---almost paralyzed---over eliminating the Academic Achievement Gap in test scores between poor and more affluent students. But it has been to no avail because the schools cannot eliminate this gap. There are hundreds of legislators, teachers and researchers who will tell you that they have the secret program of study or the magic bullet. And although almost all "solutions" have been attempted, none have generally worked while, at the same time, the gap persists in every state. Educators are now required to tell the public that their goal is to close the gap. Some even believe that they will do it, although there is no scientific evidence or reasons to believe it is possible. Oh sure, there are isolated cases where a school seems to close the gap, but it is not scalable and we are not even sure in those cases whether scores were fudged or the test was taught.
But ask yourself, what would closing the gap mean? Would it mean that we want scores of better students to fall so the difference is smaller? Of course not. Do we want the scores of poor students to rise while the scores of the others remain stagnant? We don't want that either.
Because brain development and important learning skills begin at birth, by the time children enter school, too many poor children are already two laps behind. This is because poor parents must often work two or three jobs with little or no time for nurturing, reading, teaching letters or numbers or words. Many kids live in environments that actually make academic achievement near impossible. This is different for children from more financially able families.
Thus, it is high time for teachers and administrators to stop beating themselves up for their inability to eliminate the gap, which has always been here and will always be here as long as we have such a disparity between rich and poor. Instead of concentrating on the gap, we need to focus on providing each child the best education possible. Since each child has different interests and abilities, each has a different maximum potential. Helping each child to achieve that maximum potential should be our goal, regardless of what the other kids do.
To demonstrate this phenomenon vividly, we need only look at the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests, the Nation's report card that is administered throughout the U.S. every few years. The graph below shows math test scores for 4th-graders from 1996 to 2005. Even though a ll children seem to be doing well, the gap between poor and not-poor remains about the same over the 10-year period. Graphs of reading scores or scores for other grades show the same situation.
People make a terrible mistake in judging schools and teachers by average test scores. Test scores in wealthy areas will almost always be high as compared with schools in poor neighborhoods. If you took all of the teachers in the suburban schools and transferred them to the poor communities, and vice-versa, little would likely change. That is because education is a value-added process where you can only build on the knowledge that children already possess.
An actual example says it all. About ten years ago, children in a dirt-poor, small, rural South Carolina school district had test scores so low that the State took over the schools. In the next six years, the State sent in dozens of expert teachers and development specialists and spent millions of dollars in the process. They tutored the teachers and parents, provided professional and economic development, hired new teachers and did everything humanly possible. Guess what? After six years, test scores had improved somewhat but were still near the bottom in the state. What had not changed? The families were still dirt-poor.
In spite of the inability to eliminate the gap, the hard work of teachers is paying off because educational accomplishment is improving for all. Clearly our schools are working in the right direction. Today National Assessment of Educational Progress scores in math and reading are keeping up, in spite of a societal malaise that is engulfing too many of our youth into gangs, crime, drugs and prison and SAT scores are at a 30-year high. If we do not discourage our hard-working teachers and administrators by asking them to do the impossible, our public schools can continue to make progress.
Marty Solomon is a retired University of Kentucky professor and can be reached at [email protected]
