Challenging Assumptions about the Achievement Gap: Part Two

Abstract

Assumptions About Achievement Gap: Part Two As an educational researcher, it's gratifying to wonder about some problem of practice, undertake a systematic investigation, and discover that your speculation or gut feeling about issue proved right. This has been case in our study of gaps. Although today we are university professors with responsibilities for teaching and scholarship, other career experiences as teachers and school administrators also shaped our perspective on education. We questioned much of research literature about between minority and majority students. Our personal observations and experiences with diverse populations of students told us that was not a matter of race or ethnicity, but rather a question of personal challenges faced by individual students. We believe that key to policy development related to overcoming is more likely to be found by understanding differences within groups rather than between groups. In our first study, reported in Challenging Assumptions About Achievement Gap (Phi Delta Kappan, April 2005), we presented our findings from an examination of student among black, Hispanic (or Latino), and white students (Ramirez and Carpenter 2005; Carpenter, Ramirez, and Severn 2006). That research determined that singular definition of achievement gap (that is, difference between white and minority students) misrepresents complex and multi-layered dynamics at work in academic of black, Hispanic, and white students. Instead of dominant and singular understanding of the gap, we demonstrated that there are multiple gaps related to student and that more significant gaps were not between groups, but within groups. We concluded that casting as a white/minority dichotomy was a risky misconception that potentially promotes poor policy solutions. That research was based on an analysis of data from National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 (National Center for Education Statistics 2007). We recently expanded our research beyond typical measure of student performance on tests to high school dropout status. Once again, we looked at data from black, Hispanic, and white student cohorts using National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988. As in our earlier research, we examined differences in dropout status both between and within racial/ethnic groups, paying particular attention to differences or similarities in significant predictors for each group. Moreover, we explored whether predictor variables for three groups in our earlier study would also predict dropout behavior in same manner. We found that patterns of significant predictors for dropout status were not same as in earlier study, and in process we uncovered a new set of variables associated with dropping out. Yet, new set of significant predictors for dropout status did demonstrate some consistency with our earlier research. We found certain common patterns among white and Hispanic students, but we found no statistically significant differences in dropout status based on race/ethnicity. Thus, once again we found that within-group differences may be more significant than between-group differences (Carpenter and Ramirez 2007). WHAT WE RESEARCHED The overall thrust of our research has been to challenge conventional wisdom about gap, which is typically characterized as a difference in learning between white and minority students. In our first study of gaps, we looked at academic and found not one but many gaps, and most significant of these gaps existed within racial and ethnic groups themselves. That study tested a large index of predictor variables for each racial/ethnic group and identified these as most significant: * Socioeconomic status (for all three groups); * Participation in an English language acquisition program (for all three groups); * Time spent on homework (for black and white students); * Number of units of algebra taken (for Hispanic and white students); and * Level of parent involvement (for all three groups). …