Thursday
April 17, 2008
[via Joanne Jacobs] EdWeek summarizes the results of a few research papers presented at the AERA conference a few weeks back, and discovers a new twist for our understanding of the “achievement gap”:
New research into what is commonly called the black-white “achievement gap” suggests that the students who lose the most ground academically in U.S. public schools may be the brightest African-American children.
As black students move through elementary and middle school, these studies show, the test-score gaps that separate them from their better-performing white counterparts grow fastest among the most able students and the most slowly for those who start out with below-average academic skills.
So, the black students who start school with the highest ability levels and readiness to learn tend not to fulfill their potential in their years in school.
This phenomenon is not independent of the fact that most black students attend schools that are predominantly black. One of the researchers, Sean Reardon, theorized that,
[B]ecause schools with predominantly African-American enrollments tend to have lower average test scores, high-achieving black children may be further from the mean, academically, than is the case for top-scoring white children.
“If instruction is aimed more to the middle of the distribution, then black children are less likely to have cognitively stimulating opportunities.”
Though he adds, “not because anyone is being racist”—still, ouch.
It does make me wonder, though, what kinds of things are we as teachers doing to make sure that we’re nurturing the kids at the top of the class in struggling schools?
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