Which Achievement Gap?

Abstract

The terms and are often bandied about in this era of NCLB. But is making AYP the same as closing the achievement gap? And shouldn't we be talking about multiple achievement gaps? The authors explain the finer points of these terms that are driving so much of today's education policy. ********** FROM the halls of Congress to the local elementary school, conversations on education reform have tossed around the term as though we all know precisely what that means. To some extent, of course, we do. As it's commonly used, refers to the differences in scores on state or national achievement tests between various student demographic groups. And the gap that has been a long-standing source of the greatest concern is that between white students and minority students, although other groups have been brought into the picture by No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Our present urgent concern with the achievement gap has a specific objective: improved achievement for all students. We want all boats to rise, but we want those lying particularly low in the water to rise faster. Seems straightforward, right? Wrong. Trying to define and measure this gap in ways that are accurate, meaningful, and useful to policy makers, educators, and the public can be a humbling experience. As with many measurement issues, the devil is in the details. And the details here are highly consequential. The adequate yearly progress (AYP) requirements of NCLB are designed to expose achievement gaps between groups of students, ostensibly so that schools will make greater efforts to close the gaps over time. But making AYP is not the same thing as closing achievement gaps. The great hope--still far from being realized--is that, as achievement improves across all student subgroups, the gaps will diminish as well. It is important to remember that, despite being the major preoccupation of most educators and policy makers, making AYP is not an end in itself; rather, tracking AYP is a means to the dual ends of closing achievement gaps and improving the performance of all students. WHAT IS THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP? Defining the is more difficult than it seems at first glance. But how we define the achievement gap and then measure it according to our chosen definition has significant implications for what we can know about it and what we can do with that knowledge. We can measure many types of gaps, even just within the realm of student performance. Historically, most studies and reports on the achievement gap have focused on differences in achievement scores between white and African American students on national tests, such as the SAT or the National Assessment of Educational Progress. However, NCLB shifts the focus down to the school level and asks how well racial and ethic subgroups in a given school are performing relative to their white peers. At the school level there are at least two kinds of gaps with particular salience for policy: the internal gap (average differences between distinct racial and ethnic groups and their white peers within a school) and the external gap (average differences between the aggregate school scores for each student subgroup in the school and aggregate scores for white students across the state). Arguably, both of these gaps are important, and both are relevant to school reform efforts. We believe that both internal and external gaps should be studied, for several reasons. Measuring the internal gap allows us potentially to identify--and learn from--schools that are accelerating the learning of minority students. This knowledge can be an important tool for focusing school improvement efforts. Measuring the external gap is necessary, however, so that schools with high proportions of nonwhite students are not excluded from analysis just because they don't have enough white students to report average scores. …