3: The Immovable Object: the “Achievement” Gap
A view of the Achievement Gap in education, its impact on individuals and the economy, and our continued failed efforts to eliminate it.
People who have never spent time looking at the Achievement Gap can find the ubiquitous nature of this gap across all academic measures almost surreal--made up even.
It is especially staggering when we pause to consider a massively important truth; race is a social construct. It is not a real thing. We made it up. Race is a fictitious idea that has been carefully crafted over centuries. I promise we will spend some time on this later. Yet, made up or not, a gap in academic outcomes by racial category goes back as far as we have measured educational progress.
The Data
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)[1] is a congressionally mandated large-scale assessment that evaluates educational progress within the United States and compares the performance of US students to that of students in other countries. It is given in a number of subjects but prioritizes Math and Reading in 4th and 8th grades.
In the following charts of NAEP scores you will see that in both 4th and 8th grade, and in both math and reading, the student performance for White and Asian students is above the student performance for Black and Latinx/a/o students. These differences – the Achievement Gap – persist over time and do not narrow despite two decades of improving outcomes.
4th Grade NAEP Math Scores - National
4th Grade NAEP Reading Scores - National
8th Grade NAEP Math Scores - National
8th Grade NAEP Reading Scores - National
Now, if we focus on Chicago, the city where I live and work, we see the same trends. For brevity’s sake, I only include graphs for 4th grade Reading and 8th grade Math for Chicago. I assure you though, feel free to check all of the subject data for Chicago, as well as other jurisdictions. Pick a subject, time frame, and location, and you will find that when you are comparing student outcomes by race, the Achievement Gap is always there.
4th Grade NAEP Reading Scores - Chicago
8th Grade NAEP Math Scores - Chicago
And to go at this gap another way, here is a chart capturing college enrollment rates by race and gender in Chicago Public Schools that clearly showcases the same Achievement Gap we see in 4th and 8th grade Math and Reading NAEP scores.
College Enrollment in Chicago Public Schools by Race and Gender (Data Tools from To&Through Project, University of Chicago)
And here is yet another, which shows 3rd through 8th Grade Chicago Public School students who met or exceeded proficiency standards on the Illinois Assessment of Readiness (IAR).
Chicago Public School’s 3rd through 8th Grade Meets/Exceeds by Race/Ethnicity on Illinois Assessment of Readiness (IAR)[2]
We could go on but there really isn’t much point in posting essentially the same chart over and over again. And while I only show overall national and Chicago student outcome data here, these results aren’t really all that different from anywhere else in the country. The gap also doesn’t change when we include the last few years of data from the pandemic. In fact, in many places, it gets wider. Later we can unpack why it widens through COVID, which is evidence of the gap’s actual root causes. But for right now the point I want you to takeaway is that the gap is ever-present – with White on top and Black on the bottom.
Quick Aside: Asian Performance
For some of you, this is the moment you will begin asking yourself about Asian performance, noting how that category is consistently high on these charts. That is also a topic we will come back to, as the performance of Asians is often propped up as evidence that the meritocracy within our education system is working. Why can’t Black and Latinx/a/o kids perform better when Asian students are able to? That will be its own post. If you are really curious and want to dig in on that topic now you can pick up a copy of The Asian American Achievement Paradox by Lee and Zhou. If you don’t want to read a whole book, you can also check out this article.
Here is a teaser though; cultural arguments for Asian success are inevitably racist arguments. They suggest a superiority across racial lines that ultimately diminishes Black and Latinx/a/o and props up White people. They ignore the substantial diversity within the Asian category and don’t account for how and when those populations came to the US. Asian “success” is a shorthand and simplistic way to land back on White superiority relative to Black and Latinx/a/o.
Back to the Gap, What It Costs Us, and Efforts to Close It
Before we try to figure out what it means that the Achievement Gap is universal while race is a made-up concept, let’s focus for a minute on the fact that a 2009 McKinsey study estimated the cost of the Achievement Gap to the US economy was between $310 billion and $525 billion each year, an amount equal to two to four percent of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP)[3].
Across our country, the Achievement Gap is a consistent weight on our economy. Pick a city, or a school, and it is there, holding back our potential as a society.
Numerous education improvement efforts have been attempted over the past fifty-plus years in an attempt to close the distance between these student groups. Some of these “reforms,” as they are often called - reforms in how we measure progress, teaching practices, school models, and more - have shown success, but never on a large scale.
There are routinely outliers demonstrating exceptional results for Black and Latinx/a/o students that do prove that students of all racial groups can achieve at the same levels as their White counterparts, but these exceptions do not provide a viable pathway for all students. It feels as if no matter how much outcomes improve for Black and Latinx/a/o children, White students are always performing at a consistent level above them.
Prior to the pandemic, Chicago Public Schools had seen more than fifteen years of straight gains in academic outcomes. Graduation rates that were once under 50% are now topping 80%. Measures for student progress for racial subgroups across nearly every metric look the same - graph lines climbing in parallel between these populations, but the gap between them never closes. Included here is a graph of graduation rates in Chicago, which is just one more example of the persistent gaps in education outcomes we see between racial groups.
CPS 4-year graduation rates (CPS Data Portal 4-year graduation rate data)
McKinsey’s recent update to their 2009 report captures this hard truth best, stating that, “despite the enormous attention devoted to the achievement gap, it has remained a stubborn feature of the US education system.[4]”
Zoom out a little, and we see these same trends across Chicago Metropolitan Area districts, and even within the same schools, where Black and Latinx/a/o students underperform their White counterparts. Zoom out even further and we see this as an American issue, existing in every city in the country. Countless reforms[5] have been enacted to address the challenge, and even when gains are realized, the gap between these students remains.
This is because we are searching for the wrong thing in these reforms. In most of our efforts, we look at the student as the origin of this gap. We ask ourselves: why can’t these children learn more and why can’t they do better? If we just put them in a dedicated program or do this much more in a school day or focus on these particular standards, we will see Black and Latinx/a/o students achieve above and beyond their White peers.
We do see some positive value in many of these efforts. We know that great teaching and mentorship can have a profound positive effect on young people, boosting achievement and long-term life outcomes. But data also show us that these Black and Latinx/a/o urban students who demonstrate amazing outcomes are very often the outliers from the mean, a fact that should cause us some concern.
This realization does not undermine the critical nature of what great schools are providing. Excellent schools are arming urban Black and Latinx/a/o students with amazing educations through high-quality teaching that inspires children from any background to develop critical thinking skills and achieve mastery in vital academic content.
These schools also supply both powerful affirming mentorship and curriculums that build students’ self-confidence and resilience. These places, which are unfortunately rare exceptions to the rule for Black and Latinx/a/o children, are home to excellent instruction and deep learning.
Every city has these proof points. In Chicago, we have Chavez Elementary in Back of the Yards, Ellington Elementary in the Austin neighborhood, CICS West Belden Elementary in Belmont Cragin, Lloyd Elementary in Hermosa, and the Noble Network of High Schools throughout the city, as examples of outstanding, and importantly open-enrollment, public schools serving predominantly low-income Black and Latinx/a/o students.
These schools, which any student can enroll in without having to meet special admission requirements, generate consistently strong results, with their students going on to enroll in top-performing selective high schools or enrolling and persisting in college at significantly higher rates than national public school averages.
Importantly, many of these places are doing more with fewer resources than predominantly White affluent schools, even after many are able to draw additional resourcing to support their students as a result of their exceptional outcomes.
It is also worth noting that the outcomes these schools show are still not comparable to our nation’s highly resourced wealthy public schools--Hinsdale High School and New Trier High School in Winnetka as Illinois examples, or elite private schools such as Deerfield and Phillips Academies. These schools see nearly all students go on to college, and perhaps more critically, become part of powerful social networks that showcase life outcomes and wealth that far exceed national averages.
The Context of Structural Racism
We know these student outcomes correlate with socioeconomics, and Black and Latinx/a/o students are more likely to be in poorer communities and come from poorer backgrounds. However, even when we control for socioeconomics we still see Black and Latinx/a/o students performing below White students[6].
Moreover, this Achievement Gap between similarly economically situated racial groups widens as these children progress in school[7]. In the end, we must recognize that the challenge we are facing is much bigger and much deeper than just providing excellent teaching and learning.
When in our genuine efforts to see Black and Latinx/a/o children achieve at the levels White affluent children do at scale, we inadvertently put the full burden of achievement on the learning, and thus on the children. In doing so, we fail to account for the discriminatory systems they have been victimized by - systems like housing, healthcare, employment, policing, and more, and the role their legacy and current structures play in educational outcomes today. We neglect to acknowledge the burden Black and Latinx/a/o children will have to overcome, a discriminatory system surrounding them that has been there through generations, impacting their ability to learn before they ever set foot in a classroom; maybe even before they take their first breath.
If we want to actually address the longstanding intractable problem of the Achievement Gap, we must initially acknowledge that race is a factor in this gap. To specifically understand how to close this gap in Chicago schools, we must more deeply understand how we created these racial gaps in the first place.
When we look at the history of schools in Chicago in a future post, we’ll see that these gaps are not organic. While there was significantly less diversity when public schools were starting in the region, there were no existing academic racial gaps like there are today. Our policies and discrimination are what gradually created the Achievement Gap. Understanding that history is crucial in undoing the harm it has caused.
In other words, we don’t have an Achievement Gap. We have a Discrimination Gap.
This is deeply personal to me. I spent my childhood assuming that due to my Blackness I was trapped within the line at the bottom of all of these charts. Whenever I had outcomes that placed me beyond Black student averages, I was labeled exceptional, or due to my Mixed heritage, had my outcomes credited to my “White-side,” often implicitly and sometimes explicitly. Many times those external perspectives didn’t even matter, as my own internalized self-doubt did enough to inhibit my performance.
I despise the Achievement Gap, as it defined me in my youth and now defines the war I wake up every day to wage, as I try to see it destroyed. And as I have come to understand the Achievement Gap more fully, it is clear to me that it is one of those great American lies -- a social construct in its own right -- one that marks the preservation of power and the oppression of people.
Yet, while it is personal for me, it should matter to you too. Every day we accept the Achievement Gap in educational outcomes as proof of racial differences rather than evidence of an unfair system, we deny our own collective progress – as a country, as a region, and as individuals.
This Achievement Gap is just a marker really. It’s one of our many measuring sticks of human progress and potential. Perhaps the most critical one, as it flags how well we are educating our future generation, and education is the tool that has allowed humanity to evolve and go from living in caves to exploring the stars.
It is the mechanics within society that create and sustain this Achievement Gap, which in turn inhibits us from achieving our full potential as humans - economically, socially, emotionally, and more.
[1] https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/
[2] CPS Data Portal - https://www.cps.edu/about/district-data/metrics/assessment-reports/
[3] McKinsey & Company. (2009, June 1). The economic cost of the US education gap. McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/education/our-insights/the-economic-cost-of-the-us-education-gap
[4] McKinsey & Company. (2020, June 1). COVID-19 and student learning in the United States: The hurt could last a lifetime. McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/education/our-insights/covid-19-and-student-learning-in-the-united-states-the-hurt-could-last-a-lifetime
[5] University of Chicago Consortium on School Research. (2011). Trends in College Access and Persistence: University of Chicago. https://consortium.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/2018-10/Trends_CPS_Full_Report.pdf
[6] Kuhfeld, Gershoff, E., & Paschall, K. (2018). The development of racial/ethnic and socioeconomic achievement gaps during the school years. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 57, 62–73. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appdev.2018.07.001
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