No matter what gains we make in education, the Achievement Gap haunts us. If the Gap seems intractable, it’s because of the way we perceive it as a single phenomenon applying broadly to large groups within our society. In reality, academic achievement is more meaningful in individual contexts, and the Achievement Gap results from other gaps representing individual differences in how children experience school. The key to closing the Gap is closing those gaps.

Take the Instruction Gap. The poorest learners get the poorest teachers. More effective teachers enjoy increased mobility and better job opportunities. As a result, they gravitate toward positions that offer greater personal and professional satisfaction, many of which involve leaving the classroom altogether.

Some people have suggested rewarding those who teach in challenging schools with higher pay. But this often backfires as effective teachers fail to switch jobs for better pay and ineffective teachers are rewarded with higher salaries. Even when it does work, we succeed only in trading one problem for another as less effective teachers change places with their more effective counterparts. A better approach is to provide high-quality training to all teachers. Along with more rigorous certification requirements and improved on-the-job performance evaluation, better training would make school better for everyone.

Independent of the instruction students receive, we have created an Expectations Gap. In our thirst for educational testing, we have created a two-tiered system: a minimum competency tier for lower-performing students where we focus our efforts on helping them pass less rigorous state tests; and the traditional maximum achievement tier where college-bound students strive for ever higher scores on harder tests like the SAT. If we want to measure kids, we should measure them all by the same high standard. The SAT is a reasonable high school graduation test. Prior to high school, the NAEP test would also be a viable choice.

But we can also make progress in closing the Expectations Gap in individual classrooms. In our work in schools, we’ve helped groups of teachers establish thoughtful requirements that set high expectations for all students. When teachers are trained to provide students with the time and the tools they need to meet those expectations, kids rise to the challenge and achieve greater levels of success.

Still, other gaps persist. Take the Participation Gap. Some kids study more effectively than others both in school and out. To help all kids maintain high levels of engagement during the school day—and a more responsible approach to homework—we’ve helped teachers create explicit participation requirements. We also show teachers how to engage students in frequent self-assessment and goal-setting around their participation. Ironically, in an age where kids are tested over and over in an effort to hold them accountable for learning, research and common sense tell us that teaching kids how to hold themselves accountable is more effective. If student self-assessment was increased while teacher- and state-imposed assessment was decreased, levels of performance for all students would improve and gaps of all kinds would narrow.

As educators, we must tend directly to The Instruction Gap, the Expectations Gap, and the Participation Gap at school. But two other gaps exist that must be addressed, and least partly, in the home. Some kids have more academic help outside of school than others. This is the Support Gap. Some kids come to school with more knowledge than others. This is the Knowledge Gap. To address these gaps, cooperation is called for. Families must make education a higher priority, community organizations must work with their local districts and not against them, and educators must come up with practical ways to extend formal learning beyond the traditional 36-week school calendar and the 6-hour school day.

Schools and programs that target so-called “at-risk” students tend to share a common theme: more time on task. Kids who enter school behind must be helped to catch up. This means starting school earlier through extended kindergarten and pre-kindergarten programs. And from 1st grade on up, it means spending more time in school and more time studying outside of it. For kids who’d rather be playing with friends, this is a bitter pill. It’s also a hard lesson for our schools since few have comprehensive pre-k, after-school, and weekend academic programs. But it’s something we must do if we truly are committed to leaving no child behind.

Any community can narrow the Achievement Gap if it is willing to be honest about what that gap is and what needs to be done to address it. The key is to move from empty platitudes and meaningless demands to specific practices that improve kids’ learning lives. Without blame, and without inciting public outrage over historical injustices, we can make changes, one school at a time, to improve educational opportunity for all students, and to strengthen our school system for generations to come.

When the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) long-term achievement trends came out earlier this year, they verified that the gap between white 13-years olds and their black and Hispanic counterparts had actually grown between 1990 and 2007 on the NAEP in both reading and math. Furthermore, the gap widens as students progress through school – growing from 39 points for African American 13-year olds in comparison to their white peers to 53 points for the subset of African American 17-year olds who are still in school. Graduation rate statistics suggest this is only about half of the cohort of black youth in many urban districts. Those who have dropped out achieve at even lower levels.

Furthermore, international data on assessments like PISA show that the United States’ low rankings (35th out of the top 40 nations in math and 31st in science in 2006) are largely a function of inequality: White and Asian students score at or above the OECD average, while black and Latino students do significantly worse. The U.S. is one of the most unequal of the industrialized nations in both educational inputs and outcomes.

For all of the annual breast-beating about the achievement gap whenever test scores come out, American policymakers have shown little willingness to confront the most fundamental reasons it persists. International comparisons bring these reasons into relief.

First, the U.S. has the highest child poverty rate – at about 1 in 4 children – of any industrialized nation, and the most tattered safety net. High-achieving European and Asian nations provide housing and health care for all families, and generally ensure food security. After governmental transfers, U.S. levels of childhood poverty change very little, while those of other nations largely disappear.

Second, whereas high-achieving nations fund their schools centrally and equally, often with additional allocations of resources to the schools serving the neediest students, the U.S. funds schools more unequally than any industrialized nation, with the highest-spending schools receiving 10 times more than the lowest-spending. Within any state, ratios of 3 to 1 between high and low-spending districts are common. Affluent students are served by the highest spending districts. Meanwhile, the growing group of apartheid schools serving almost exclusively low-income African American and Latino students in poor urban and rural communities generally offers the lowest level of resources. As school finance suits in over 20 states have documented, these schools often feature crumbling buildings, a paucity of books, computers or other materials, no libraries, and a revolving door of underprepared teachers.

The unequal allocation of school resources is made politically easier by the increasing re-segregation of schools, which has worsened since the 1980s.

For these reasons and others, the U.S. rations high-quality curriculum to a minority of students through both inter-school disparities and within-school tracking systems, offering many fewer of our students the kind of “thinking curriculum” commonplace for all students in high-achieving nations.

Finally, factory model school designs inherited from a century ago have created dysfunctional learning environments for students and unsupportive settings for strong teaching. These environments allow children to fall through the cracks, rather than being carefully and personally nurtured, something the parents of affluent children take for granted as a prerequisite for success. Our factory model schools also fail to support teachers in developing and sharing professional expertise, thus reducing both opportunities and incentives for improving teaching. And all of these factors feed psychological barriers that can sabotage success. Bring the five together, and you have the leading causes for our achievement gap.

Only after understanding these factors, can we really get at the core of closing the achievement gap. How? In an upcoming book, The Flat World and Education, I describe how previously low- and inequitably-achieving nations have risen to the top of the international rankings by making intensive long-term investments in the quality of teaching, removing barriers to access to knowledge caused by now-abandoned examination and tracking systems, and creating strong learning environments for educators and students guided by standards and curriculum aimed at critical thinking and performance skills.

I also describe how states like New Jersey, now arguably now the highest-achieving state in the U.S. if student demographics are taken into account, raised overall achievement and cut the achievement gap in half after being pushed by 30 years of school finance reform litigation to substantially increase spending in its poor urban districts. New Jersey – serving 45% minority students and a large and growing number of new immigrants – ranks in the top 5 states on NAEP on every measure and is first in the nation in writing, having invested in quality preschool for all children and quality pedagogy, with a focus on early literacy now expanding to other subject areas.

States like Connecticut and North Carolina also showed extraordinary gains in the 1990s by making strategic investments focused on more equitably distributed high-quality teaching. They did so by addressing core instructional issues. They used state funds to raise and equalize salaries, along with teacher and principal licensing standards, investing in better preparation, stronger recruitment, mentoring for beginners, and professional learning throughout the career.

After starting down this path in the 1990s, North Carolina, for instance, posted the largest student achievement gains of any state in math, and made substantial progress in reading. It was the most successful state in closing the achievement gap in the 1990s. And in 2007, it remained the top-scoring southern state in math, ranking on par with states like Idaho and Maine, which had many fewer poor and minority students. Connecticut became the nation’s top-achieving state in nearly every area by 1998, even while the proportion of low-income, minority, and new immigrant students had increased throughout the decade. As is often true in the U.S., however, both states have slipped in their policy commitments and investments since then. While they maintain some of the advantages of their earlier investments, inequality is re-emerging once again.

We have trouble in this country maintaining focus and commitment to closing the educational opportunity gap. For decades now, the education community has sought to “solve” the achievement gap. In that time, we have learned one important fact. We cannot address issues of inequity and lack of access by simply doing the same things harder. If we are to provide a truly equal, high-quality education to all students – the only true long-term solution to the achievement gap – we must start by acknowledging the inequalities in the system we currently operate, and we must focus on providing all students with well-trained, effective educators and all educators with the training, support, and resources necessary to lead today’s classrooms.

We must first speak honestly about the crisis in public education and acknowledge that eliminating the racial and ethnic education achievement gap is the civil rights issues of our generation. Fifty-five years after Brown vs. Board of Education, forty years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and twenty-five years after the publication of A Nation at Risk, we must confront the shameful national reality: if you are an African American or Latino child in this country, the probability is high that our public education system will fail you, that you will not graduate from high school, that your ability to function successfully in the twenty-first Century economy will be limited, and that you will have no real prospect of achieving the American dream.

Despite the urgency of the need and the righteousness of the cause, public education today not only serves most poor children badly, but shows little prospect of meaningful improvement. Instead, education policy leaders have been doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, which is a textbook definition of insanity.

The entire system needs to change. Changing our public education system so that it better meets the needs of all students will require not only a shift in our collective thinking, but also a shift in power. As the civil rights movement itself made clear, such transformations inevitably generate resistance and political conflict. We must no longer shirk that struggle. We cannot risk losing another generation of children.

In practical terms, this means that we must take immediate steps:

• For teachers and principals – pay them as the professionals they are, give them the tools and training they need to succeed, and make tough decisions about those who do not.
• For parents – give them the ability to select where their children are educated, including public charter schools.
• For parents and students – demand personal responsibility: we must ask more from ourselves and more from our schools.
• At the system and school level, for teachers, principals, and central administrators –create transparent, data-driven accountability for educational success at every level, from the classroom straight up.
• For district administrators – abolish enrollment policies that consign poor, minority students to our lowest-performing schools.
• For elected officials – address head-on the crucial issues that created and perpetuate this system: provisions within teachers’ contracts and state policies that keep ineffective teachers in classrooms and too often make it nearly impossible to get our best teachers paired up with the students who most need them.
• For voters – elect brave leaders who are prepared to tackle the status quo and make key decisions based upon the only metrics that matter: Will this help children succeed? Will this narrow the achievement gap?
• For all of us – stand up to any political force or special interest that seeks to preserve the failed education system.

As a nation, we must commit ourselves to making every education decision—including whom we employ, how money is spent, and where resources are deployed—with a focus on what will best serve our students, regardless of how it affects all other interests. This is the mission of the Education Equality Project (www.edequality.org), of which I am the director. Our focus is single-minded: eliminate the racial and ethnic achievement gap.

The achievement gap can be closed but not if we continue to believe only the schools can fix it. Oh no, you say, not another one of those apologies for educators.

I’ve spent all of my life outside of schools, advocating for change and for low income children. I’ve spent some of that time creating programs in communities that give children opportunities my kids took for granted. And I am plumb worn out with those with solutions du jour for the problems created by this nation’s persistent refusal to deal with poverty. So I’m not a very good apologist for educators.

I learned about the achievement gap from the Harvard Graduate School of Education Faculty that spent years analyzing and reanalyzing the data from the Coleman Report. Everyone kept looking for school factors that affected achievement scores. My particular contribution was to debunk the notion that larger schools were better—that rural school consolidation was just the ticket to get those poor rural kids above average like all their cousins in Lake Woebegone. I took away from those years an understanding that perfect schools might close the gap by 20 to 25%.

Facts are stubborn things, they say. No research since then has changed the fact that that gap is caused by a whole bunch of things that schools can’t fix. But some other things can be changed that would affect the gap.

Early childhood education is the current exciting emphasis. Good idea. The gap exists early and widens. Good health care for mothers, children, everyone would help. Lots of community supports for struggling children and families would help. Again I send everyone to the Bold Approach analysis and recommendations (www.boldapproach.org). Those of us who worked on the report spent a lot of time sifting what we knew for sure from what we only hoped was true and the recommendations flow from that analysis.

Schools matter and good teaching matters and if we closed the resource gap, we would make more progress overall in closing the achievement gap. Montgomery County, Maryland, has made progress over 10 years in closing some of the gaps. But that affluent suburb is worlds away from the Corridor of Shame down I-95 in South Carolina or rural New Mexico or the coalfields of my Appalachian home. And the gap in expenditure is just as large as the distance.

State school funding systems and Title I of ESEA are supposed to fix or at least ameliorate these inequities. Title I rewards those states that already have lots of resources and penalizes places that are small and poor. Fixing that would be a good start on closing the resource gap. Then maybe the school’s contribution to closing the gap would improve.

The achievement gap can be closed but not if we continue to believe only the schools can fix it. Oh no, you say, not another one of those apologies for educators.

I’ve spent all of my life outside of schools, advocating for change and for low income children. I’ve spent some of that time creating programs in communities that give children opportunities my kids took for granted. And I am plum worn out with those with solutions du jour for the problems created by this nation’s persistent refusal to deal with poverty. So I’m not a very good apologist for educators.

I learned about the achievement gap from the Harvard Graduate School of Education Faculty that spent years analyzing and reanalyzing the data from the Coleman Report. Everyone kept looking for school factors that affected achievement scores. My particular contribution was to debunk the notion that larger schools were better—that rural school consolidation was just the ticket to get those poor rural kids above average like all their cousins in Lake Woebegone. I took away from those years an understanding that perfect schools might close the gap by 20 to 25%.

Facts are stubborn things, they say. No research since then has changed the fact that that gap is caused by a whole bunch of things that schools can’t fix. But some other things can be changed that would affect the gap.

Early childhood education is the current exciting emphasis. Good idea. The gap exists early and widens. Good health care for mothers, children, everyone would help. Lots of community supports for struggling children and families would help. Again I send everyone to the Bold Approach analysis and recommendations (www.boldapproach.org). Those of us who worked on the report spent a lot of time sifting what we knew for sure from what we only hoped was true and the recommendations flow from that analysis.

Schools matter and good teaching matters and if we closed the resource gap, we would make more progress overall in closing the achievement gap. Montgomery County, Maryland, has made progress over 10 years in closing some of the gaps. But that affluent suburb is worlds away from the Corridor of Shame down I-95 in South Carolina or rural New Mexico or the coalfields of my Appalachian home. And the gap in expenditure is just as large as the distance.

State school funding systems and Title I of ESEA are supposed to fix or at least ameliorate these inequities. Title I rewards those states that already have lots of resources and penalizes places that are small and poor. Fixing that would be a good start on closing the resource gap. Then maybe the school’s contribution to closing the gap would improve.

One of the benefits from NCLB is the spotlight placed on the troubling and persistent achievement gap - revealing systems that just have not worked for too many students. In addition to the ideas mentioned in this forum for closing the achievement gap, I want to focus on three other areas of reform:

1. Enhance Data Systems: The Data Quality Campaign, along with federal funds, has helped states expand and enhance their data systems to link disparate elements to answer important policy questions. However, these systems tend to only have snapshot data from the pervious month, quarter, or year. As a result, these systems are often not as immediately helpful to teachers who need more timely data – from the last day or week - to help inform their instruction today. What is needed are systems that can combine data from instructional management systems, formative assessments, tutoring/SES results and then provide immediate actions that the teacher or student can take. This requires presenting not just numbers and graphs, but employing sophisticated technology to identify patterns and link assessment with instruction. Teachers and principals should have not just aggregated attendance numbers but early warning drop out indicators and student proficiency forecasts. The same sort of technology that powers recommendations from services such as Amazon and Netflix needs to be used to provide instructional recommendations aimed at closing the achievement gap.
   
   
2. Reform Human Capital Systems: If we want teachers to focus on the achievement gap, then we need to restructure the way we prepare, recruit, support, retain, and reward teachers and principals. Models like the Teacher Advancement Program are working with states and districts to completely redesign their human capital systems to give teachers the opportunity to grow professionally, be rewarded based on performance, and receive higher compensation in exchange for taking on more responsibilities (e.g. Mentoring new teachers). The National Math and Science Initiative's AP Incentive Program also uses financial incentives to reward minority and low-income students (and their teachers) who receive passing scores on AP exams. We need to replicate these and other models funded by the Teacher Incentive Fund and the recently announced Race to the Top competition offers states and districts the opportunity to bring these reforms to scale.
   
   
3. Explore Student Incentives: As economists will tell you, incentives matter. Exploring what incentives are most effective at motivating students can help close, along with other reforms, the achievement gap. There have always been informal incentive systems that reward student performance ranging from pizza parties to trophies, to even the promise of a principal doing some outlandish activity to help encourage students to do well. Roland Freyer, an economist from Harvard School of Economics, has designed a series of interesting pilots in DC, NYC, and Chicago that use financial incentives to reward student attendance, behavior, homework completion, and grades. The programs are showing some early promise, particularly with at-risk youth. The Learning Makes a Difference Foundation has also worked on a similar program to encourage students to take more advance levels of math and science.
   

Earlier posts in this week’s discussion eloquently lay out the moral imperative for closing the achievement gap—something that has long troubled hearts and consciences. While that alone should spur the nation to act, we now have something potentially more powerful in creating demand for change—data that prove that achievement gaps matter to all of us. McKinsey & Company’s recent study documents the tragic consequences of the gaps not only for individual students, but also for our collective standard of living, finding that the persistence of achievement gaps imposes the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession on our country. Findings like this are made possible by the wealth of data generated by NCLB, NAEP and international assessments. We finally live in a data-rich world in education—and we must use that data strategically now to make gap-closing efforts far more effective, even as we work to generate more meaningful information (from improved standards, assessments, and curricula).

The Commission on No Child Left Behind believes that NCLB has been a critical driver in pushing the nation to confront the achievement gap and must be reauthorized now—because the gains we’ve seen are not big enough or occurring fast enough to meet the challenges we face. Our comprehensive analysis of the law in 2007 recommended preserving the law’s core principles but making needed changes to accelerate progress toward achieving its goals, particularly in the areas of teacher and principal effectiveness, robust accountability and data, higher academic standards, stronger high schools, and increased options for students.

But much has changed since we released our recommendations, including new ESEA regulations and pilots (such as Differentiated Accountability), passage of the stimulus/American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—the reform provisions of which align to the Commission’s key recommendations—and new energy to develop more demanding standards. The Commission will soon announce and launch a renewed public hearings and outreach effort to take stock of these important developments and reassess where we are on NCLB, what we’ve learned, and where we need to go in order to update and strengthen the law. We believe that it is critical that those invested in this reform agenda move with urgency and work together to generate momentum for an effective reauthorization.

Previous contributors have provided many fine ideas about addressing the achievement gap: improved teacher quality, equitable and adequate school funding, and quality leadership at the school and district level. As a fifth grade teacher in an under-funded, inner-city school I offer an additional idea: teachers need to use methods that address the varying academic levels and learning styles of their students. Some call this differentiated instruction. I call it common sense.

With 75% free and reduced lunch, 18% special education students, and large numbers of English language learners in my bilingual (English/Spanish) school, the English reading levels of students in my classroom range from kindergarten through seventh grade. A one-size-fits-all, test-driven, or scripted curriculum would be a disservice to my students.

I team teach 50 to 60 students with one other teacher. We attempt to differentiate our curriculum by using a structured project approach. Students are required to do five spiral-bound book projects throughout the school year, showing their work at student-led parent-teacher conferences in October and March, and to the entire school community at an end-of-the year exhibition in June. The projects incorporate reading, writing, science, math, geography, and social studies: An Autobiography (in English), An Animal Endangered with Extinction (in Spanish), A Bilingual Poetry Book (which culminates in a public poetry reading at a neighborhood bookstore), A Biography of a Famous Person who Fought for Social Justice (bilingual), and “My Journey Through Elementary School” (bilingual) in which students choose work from their portfolios from previous grades and reflect on their work, their experience, and themselves as bilingual learners.

This approach has allowed us to tailor group and individual instruction in ways that address the varying needs of our diverse set of students and help reduce gaps in achievement. All students are challenged to work to their fullest potential: academically challenged students receive considerable individual assistance and find success, while the stronger students are challenged to go beyond the projects’ core requirements.

Both students and parents have praised this approach. By integrating such projects into the parent teacher conferences, public poetry reading, and an exhibition, student and teacher accountability has increased. We all labor hard to make sure our students do the best work they’re capable of.

These types of rigorous teaching approaches that take into account the varying individual needs of students should be promoted through educational policies, not hamstrung by one-size-fits all approaches to accountability and innovation.

Although the achievement gap continues to persist, we are, in many ways, in a better position to address this critical issue than we were a few years ago. Not only does the need to rebuild our economy and ensure that students are ready for work and college remind us of the importance of this issue, but we also have solid data and research that shows what works to transform teaching and learning – to make sure that ALL students are prepared for the 21st Century global economy. To date, however, only some schools and districts in some states have truly transformed teaching and learning; and these programs have not yet been brought to scale to reach the students across the country. While technology is certainly not the silver bullet, technology has been an accelerator of change for many of these schools and districts that thoughtfully implement systemic reform to help close the achievement gap and improve achievement.

For example, the eMINTS program, which started in Missouri almost 10 years ago and has now been replicated in at least 10 other states, has again and again shown dramatic improvement in student achievement and in closing the achievement gap. Students and teachers in these programs have a technology-rich 21st Century learning environment, and teachers participate in over 200 hours of job-embedded, on-going professional development to change how teachers teach and children learn. Achievement on state high-stakes assessments increase; but students also see gains in 21st Century skills, like critical thinking and collaboration, as they utilize relevant and often digital content to solve and learn about real world problems and issues. It is important to note this is not about putting computers in a classrooms, rather it is about providing the technology and tools that are available, just like in other industries and businesses, to facilitate the teaching and learning. Other findings from research in eMINTS include:

• Teachers in eMINTS classrooms at all grade levels (3-12) report significant increases in student attendance and significant decreases in student behavior disruptions.

• One rural Missouri eMINTS school district saw its teacher retention rates rise from 76% percent to 98% after just one year.

• In Utah, achievement of students in the eMINTS classroom was repeatedly over 10% higher than those in the control classrooms in the same school.

• After 6 years of data in Grade 4 Mathematics, eMINTS students in special education, and Title I programs have reduced the gap in test scores between their performance and their peers by up to one-half of the difference attributable to their program classification. The achievement gap is closing for these students.

eMINTS is not alone in leading to these significant results. The Technology Immersion Pilot (TIP) program, a state-led initiative in Texas, has also led to double digit achievement gains, reduced discipline referrals, and access to higher education, for students often plagued by the achievement gap. In one district, Floydada, TX, the program not only led to huge gains in achievement on the state tests, but students also had the opportunity to take on-line college courses before they graduated from high-school. In this district where the closest community college is 70 miles away, equalizing the access with other students in the country to a relevant experience in their own schools and to college opportunities helped prepare these students for post-high school, but also allowed these students to see themselves as college students with the same opportunities as others. In Bryan, TX, students have been given opportunities to publish their own work and to see a world beyond their own. This was once again accomplished by providing the 21st Century learning environments, but more importantly by ensuring that teachers have on-going training and support to transform their teaching and the student’s learning.

By replicating programs like these, we truly can close the achievement gap for more students across this country, but we need the vision, will, and hard work of educators and the general public to make this happen. People in my neighborhood, community, and around the country outside of the education community are frequently shocked when I mention that our country has a 30% drop out rate or that the achievement gap continues to be a very serious problem. It is important that the general public understands and hears about the very real connection between these problems and our country’s economic future. Programs like eMINTS and TIP, that maximize the potential of technology and lead to solid outcomes and achievement gains, are often only available to a few schools in a few states or districts. We can help to ensure that all students receive this education to ensure that they are prepared for college and/or work in the 21st Century.

For more information, please go to http://www.setda.org.

Throughout the years, several attempts have been made to close the achievement gap. And while we’ve seen progress in a few pockets of excellence around the country, these efforts have, by and large, fallen short.

Despite what some would have us believe, the existence of this troublesome gap doesn’t owe only to poor teaching, nor is it simply a natural consequence of poverty. It exists, rather, because of a historical tendency towards partisan debates that take ideology seriously and the fates of our children lightly, allowing us to avoid taking serious action to solve the problems that plague our schools.

But there are those who’ve rejected this course, choosing instead a path of reform that puts the future of our kids first. Institutions like KIPP schools in the Harlem Children’s Zone and others across the country where innovation and reform have helped poor kids and kids of color excel at high levels. And thanks to an aggressive reform push at the local and state levels, my home state of Colorado was one of only 4 states to narrow the achievement gap in 8th grade math from 1990-2007.

Studies consistently show that nothing makes a greater difference to student learning than great teaching. If we are going to close the achievement gap across the board, one thing we have to do is get, and keep, the best teachers at high need schools.

Yet, our current system of hiring and compensation, designed deep in the last century, is utterly inadequate for attracting new teachers to the profession and keeping the ones we already have in the classroom. The system we have now was designed in a time where women’s career choices were limited to being a nurse or a teacher. In order to support current teachers and attract new ones, we need to make systemic changes in the way we recruit, train, develop, support, pay and promote teachers.

We need to remove barriers for entry into the profession and make it easier for schools to recruit and retain the best teachers where they’re needed most. We need to develop meaningful ways to collect data that actually tells us whether a teacher is being effective and improving student achievement. And we should make sure we’re supporting those in the profession and providing them with the resources they need to help our kids succeed.

While hiring and retaining the best teachers in the classrooms is perhaps the most effective way to close the achievement gap, teachers cannot and should not have to do it alone. Increasing the access and quality of early childhood education is critical to ensuring that kids start school on an even playing field. And we have to work to ensure that our kids are not going to school hungry, and that they have access to a doctor - not just when they are sick, but before they get sick - which means consistent, reliable and affordable preventative health care and quality nutrition.

Our schools should be centers for communities, delivering services, providing opportunities for families to learn together, and engaging entire communities in raising expectations for our students.

If we expect failure from our schools, that's exactly what we'll get. Communities must own outcomes, and challenge the status quo. If a city does not pick up the trash, or shovel the snow, there is public outrage. Surely, we can muster that kind of outrage in response to what is happening to our kids.

When I was a superintendent, I was often asked if I was afraid of the unintended consequences of the changes we were making. My reaction was, and still is, that the burden of proof is not on the people who want to change the system. The burden is on people who resist change, and work to keep the system the same. We have to break free from existing policies that don’t work and never will, and we have to learn from our mistakes. Our kids are depending on us to show the courage to change. Let’s get to work so we can meet this challenge.

I want to build on what Richard Rothstein and High Price wrote.

Rothstein emphasizes the importance of access to services like health care. Children with a toothache or asthma cannot learn nearly as well as children who have those problems taken care of. This is common sense.

Of course, we ambitious education activists must help work for the day when children come to school with their toothache taken care of or their asthma treated. Whether the solutions be “liberal” or “conservative,” we must pursue them if we want more children to come to school ready and able to learn.

Price is talking about the influence that parents and culture have on education success (and the achievement gap) and I think this factor is also vitally important. And it’s not true that parents’ impact is pre-determined by income.

Take a look at California and compare the achievement of low-income Asian students with low-income Latino students, as measured by California state tests. In 2007, 53% of low-income Asian students were scoring proficient on California’s mathematics standards – compared to just 22% of low-income Latino students. Why?

My high-achieving Asian friends, rich and poor, tell a similar story. “I did well in school because I didn’t have a choice…my parents made sure that I did.” More Asian parents prioritize learning and teach their children that doing well in school is something they need to do for the family.

We need a huge dose of that kind of thinking in America now. Our children should feel the expectations of their parents, their ancestors and their society: Doing well in school is an obligation you have. We insist on this because we want you to be all you can be and we want you to be able to fully participate in and contribute to our family, community and nation.

And then there is the issue of parent skills. In addition to setting high expectations, parents have the opportunity to make a huge difference in their children’s education by cultivating character traits that promote school success, supporting learning at home and school, choosing high-performing schools, and guiding their children to college or other postsecondary training. We have to build parents’ skills so they can do these things better.

This kind of cultural transformation and parent skill-building may be even harder than “school reform,” but it will be immensely powerful. Just closing a modest portion of the “parent expectations gap” between low- and high-income parents would have the equivalent impact on student achievement and success as replacing hundreds of low-performing schools with high-performing ones.

This is the core of what we’re working on at GreatSchools.

The achievement gaps are deeply rooted, pervasive and complex. And few people know that better than the front line educators working in America’s public schools.

We go to work every day to educate the next generation of lawyers, plumbers, farmers, educators, engineers and, yes, presidents, while at the same time coping with, and at times, adjusting to the many factors beyond our control—inadequate and inequitable funding, outdated textbooks, crumbling buildings, and crowded classrooms, to name a few.

While there’s no silver bullet to eradicate the achievement gaps, we know that programs—like quality prekindergarten and afterschool mentoring and tutoring—can help level the playing field for children who are falling behind.

We know that smaller classes make it possible for every child to get more individual attention from their teacher.

And we know that a punitive approach to testing will not help the children who are struggling in school.

There are many areas in which front line educators are engaged to close the achievement gaps one student at a time, one classroom at a time, one school at a time.

The good news is that the NEA is looking hard at the problem, engaging in research and advocacy, and proposing strategies we can pursue—individually and collectively—to help eliminate those gaps. It will take sustained commitment and long-term actions to close the achievement gaps.

For example, since 2005, 31 NEA state affiliates have received NEA Grants to Close Achievement Gaps.

These grants are designed to support the adoption of public policies that positively affect schools throughout a state. More specifically, the grants support three policy-related activities: 1) secure statewide legislation that will help close achievement gaps; 2) change state regulations to address issues related to closing achievement gaps; and 3) modify the scope or content of local contracts/negotiated agreements so they address issues that will help close achievement gaps.

To date, NEA affiliates have had over 50 policy successes with the support of these Achievement Gaps Grants, including securing funds for early childhood education and mandatory kindergarten attendance, improving state poverty indices and aid formulas for students who are most at-risk of experiencing achievement gaps, and adding instructional days during the summer for at-risk primary grade students to help ensure they are reading successfully by third grade.

While we are doing our part, we do believe closing the achievement gaps is a shared responsibility.

Elected officials, along with the community and business leaders, have a responsibility to ensure public schools have adequate funding, so all students have the same opportunities to learn and succeed in life.

And parents have the responsibility to ensure that students come to school ready to learn.

For additional information regarding what NEA is doing on achievement gaps, please visit www.nea.org.

Steve Peha, President of his own Education Consulting Company, Teaching That Makes Sense, submitted the following:

No matter what gains we seem to make in education, the Achievement Gap still haunts us. If the Gap seems intractable, it’s primarily because of the way we perceive it as a single phenomenon applying broadly to large groups within our society. In reality, academic achievement is more meaningful in individual contexts, and the Achievement Gap results from other gaps representing individual differences in how children experience school. The key to closing the Gap is closing those gaps.

Start with the Instruction Gap. The poorest learners tend to get the poorest teachers. More effective teachers enjoy increased mobility and better job opportunities. As a result, they gravitate toward positions that offer greater personal and professional satisfaction, many of which involve leaving the classroom altogether.

Some people have suggested rewarding teachers who teach in challenging schools with higher pay. But this doesn’t appear to work as teachers are simply not that sensitive to improved compensation. Even if it did work, we would only be trading one problem for another as less effective teachers swapped places with more effective teachers. A better approach would be to provide high-quality training to all teachers. Along with more rigorous certification requirements, better training would improve instruction for all students.

Independent of the instruction students receive, we have created an expectations gap by establishing lower goals for lower achieving students. In our thirst for educational testing, we have created a two- tiered system: a minimum competency tier for lower-performing students where we focus our efforts on getting these kids to pass less rigorous state tests; and the traditional maximum achievement tier where college-bound students strive for ever higher scores on harder tests like the SAT. If we want to measure kids, we should measure them all by the same high standards. The SAT is a reasonable high school graduation test. Prior to high school, the NAEP test would also be a viable choice.

But we can also make progress in closing the Expectations Gap in individual classrooms. In our work in schools, we have helped groups of teachers establish thoughtful requirements that set high expectations for all students. When teachers are trained to provide students with the time and the tools they need to meet those expectations, they rise to the challenge and achieve greater levels of success.

Still, other gaps persist. Take the Participation Gap, for example.
Some kids study more effectively than others both in school and out.
Not surprisingly, they learn more. To help all kids maintain high levels of engagement during the school day, and a more responsible approach to homework, we have helped teachers create explicit participation requirements. We also show teachers how to engage students in frequent self-assessment and goal setting around their participation. This helps them understand the level of participation required and what they need to do to meet it.

The Instruction Gap, the Expectations Gap, and the Participation Gap are three gaps we as educators must tend to in our schools. But two other gaps exist at home. Some kids have more academic help outside of school than others. This is the Support Gap. Some kids come to school with more knowledge than others. This is the Knowledge Gap. To address these gaps, we have to extend our efforts beyond the traditional school calendar and school day.

Schools and programs that target so-called “at-risk” students tend to share a common theme: more time on task. Kids who enter school behind must be helped to catch up. In many cases, this simply means that they will need to spend more time in school and more time studying outside of it. For kids who would probably rather be playing with their friends, this is a bitter pill to swallow. It’s a hard lesson for our schools as well since few have comprehensive after school and weekend academic programs. But it’s something we must do if we truly are committed to leaving no child behind.

We can narrow the Achievement Gap if we’re willing to be honest about what it is and what needs to be done to address it. It’s time to move from empty platitudes and meaningless demands to specific practices that improve kids’ learning lives. Without blame, and without inciting public outrage over historical injustice, we can make changes, one school at a time, to improve educational opportunity for all students, and strengthen our schools for generations to come.

The unfinished journey of African Americans from chattel slavery to racial equality and social justice has been, and continues to be, a long and arduous struggle. Although many dangerous and deadly barriers have imperiled this noble journey, none has been able to stand up to the power and determination of authentic African American leadership of past years. No barrier—whether embedded in law, rooted in social or economic custom, or enforced by racial terror—has been able to stand up against their powerful and unwavering commitment to African American advancement. That is, until now.

Certainly, vestiges of racism and discrimination linger to this day. But for the most part, they are only episodic. Those that were systemic in nature have been rooted out, with one insidious exception— the Black-White achievement gap.

Perhaps the achievement gap is virtually overlooked by the contemporary African American leadership community because it is a different kind of barrier and thus has yet to be identified as a major civil rights problem. Perhaps it is not as clearly visible as the oppression of yesteryear. It is much more innocuous and much more subtle. In a way it is almost invisible to society at large; and unlike segregation, slavery, and discrimination, which were imposed intentionally by a racist society, no one is forcing this barrier to exist. Yet it does exist, and it is standing in the way of African American progress.

On almost every measure of academic performance, be it the SAT, ACT, or state mandated examinations, African American student performance trails, on average and by large margins, that of their White peers. The average African American public school twelfth grader’s performance on academic measures approximates that of the average White ninth grader. Not only do African American students trail their White peers on academic tests, they also experience higher college dropout rates and a tendency to shy away from majoring in hard sciences and mathematics disciplines.

In their great book, The Black-White Test Score Gap, Jencks and Phillips put it best when they wrote “…if racial equality is America’s goal, reducing the black-white test score gap would probably do more to promote this goal than any other strategy that commands broad political support. Reducing the test score gap is probably both necessary and sufficient for substantially reducing racial inequality in education attainment and earnings. Changes in education and earning would in turn help reduce racial differences in crime, health, and family structure, although we do not know how large these effects would be.”

Viewing the Black-White achievement gap from this perspective, one would have to conclude that it is the civil rights imperative of our time. And if that civil rights challenge is to be answered, we must look to leadership from the traditional civil rights community. We must look to leadership from those who have throughout history conquered every other barrier impeding African American progress toward the twin goals of racial equality and social justice in America.

In 1956 when I began teaching, I worked with a group of low income, minority 7th graders. Within that cohort, we built community and they were exposed to subjects and ideas not typically shared with students in their neighborhood, including financial literacy. This cohort continued to work together throughout their high school years and the students went on to reach their full potential. I credit the students’ success to the strong sense of community that was built in addition to the exposure they received beyond the basic school curriculum. Today, the success of strong school community and early exposure is more widely understood. However, as with many best practices, these strategies are not replicated enough.

Suggestions and strategies have already been shared in earlier posts but there exists no single solution to closing the achievement gap. There are examples throughout the country of cities and schools that have made significant progress in narrowing the achievement gap and they have done so using a myriad of ways. Richard Rothstein highlighted in an earlier post that the black-white achievement gap begins as early as a child’s nine month old mark. We must create systems to support students with a continuum of high quality education programs from birth to college, and ensure that parents are well equipped to support their children. The widely acclaimed anti-poverty program, the Harlem Children’s Zone, has created a pipeline to do just that. And indeed, the fourth grade class at the organization’s charter school, the first cohort to enter the program at birth, produced test scores in Math and English indistinguishable from their white counterparts. The programs of the Harlem Children’s Zone are not a new phenomenon; however, the emphasis on supporting children at birth, providing continual support, and educating parents to support their child’s development yields its groundbreaking results. The specific approach to close the achievement gap may vary based on local needs, but every strategy should consist of a plan to support youth at birth, offer continued support for every stage of development, and educate and empower parents.

New Jersey stands out for narrowing the gap in both mathematics and reading at the forth grade, as gains among Black students outpaced those of whites, especially since 2005. While being cautious about drawing causal connections from NAEP data, this notable progress coincides with implementation of the so-called “Abbott” remedies in the state’s urban school districts, among the poorest and racially isolated in the nation.

Arising from the Abbott v. Burke school funding litigation, the broad outline of these remedies include:

· Well planned, high quality preschool for all three- and four-year olds, with full day/school year programs staffed by certified teachers in small classes, using early learning standards aligned to the state’s K-12 content standards. Over 42,000 urban children are now enrolled in a mix of public school, community provider and Head Start programs, all operating under rigorous state quality standards.

· Adequate state K-12 funding to deliver curriculum in all state content areas and enable students to achieve state assessment standards. These “foundational” resources have allowed low wealth districts to upgrade curriculum, recruit and retain qualified teachers, provide professional development, and reduce class size.

· School level reforms targeting supplemental state and Title 1 funds to intensive early grade literacy programs in reading and math, social and health services, school safety and other essential supports for students and teachers in high poverty schools.

· State level accountability focused on capacity building and providing assistance to under performing schools and districts, along with strong planning and budgeting protocols to drive funding to effective school level staffing, programs and reform.

The states are legally obligated to educate the nation’s children. The Abbott remedies offer a framework for states to work systematically to close their achievement gaps by ensuring disadvantaged students the opportunity to learn, beginning at age 3. Federal policies should advance, and not distract from this type of comprehensive approach, allowing us to hold states fully accountable for achieving education equity.

As other responders have pointed out, educational achievement gaps in our country have many causes, and they are persistent and difficult to address, but closing them is critical to our collective future. There are pockets of progress and lessons that we can learn from states and individual schools that are improving. In particular, it is encouraging to see new efforts to align standards and expectations for student achievement at each grade level.

While the roots of educational achievement gaps extend into family life, individual responsibility, state and local policies, and society itself, it would be a mistake to assume that educational institutions have no capability or responsibility to address them. The gaps may emerge at early ages and extend into K-12, but higher education also has an obligation to address them. In particular, America’s community colleges, which enroll the most diverse student body in higher education, have a special responsibility.

The colleges, which in the past focused almost exclusively on providing access and opportunity, are now also focused on improving student learning and success. Initiatives such as Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count have made significant progress in closing educational gaps for our most at-risk students (racial minorities, first-generation college students, and students from low-income families) while also improving outcomes for all students. What we are learning from initiatives like this one is that an intentional focus on student success makes a significant positive difference. Colleges that create a “culture of evidence” and use data to find out what works are making progress. For example, we know that students enrolled in early college high schools that are located on community college campuses are graduating at a higher rate than students of similar backgrounds in other schools. Students who participate in concurrent or dual enrollment programs, taking college classes while still in high school, do better in college than those who don’t. Students who take a college success skills or study skills class in their first term in college succeed at higher rates than those who don’t. Students who participate in “Learning Communities” and are engaged with faculty members and other students in common classes persist at higher rates than those who don’t.

The Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, recently completed a study of the management practices that were effective in promoting student success in community colleges. The community colleges that were most successful with their students

· had an institutional focus on student retention and outcomes, not just on enrollment;

· offered targeted support for underperforming students;

· had well-designed, well-aligned, and proactive student support services;

· provided faculty development to improve teaching;

· experimented with ways to improve the effectiveness of instruction and support services;

· used institutional research to track student outcomes and improve program impact; and

· managed the institution in ways that promoted systemic improvement in learning outcomes.

Initiatives like Achieving the Dream are making a difference, but changing educational culture is a slow process that requires a relentless focus on improving outcomes. Fortunately, we have had the support of foundations to provide funding to build the research capacity, to provide the necessary coaching, and to support the sharing of promising practices between institutions. Perhaps the most important thing we have learned is that it can be done—we can close achievement gaps and improve educational success rates for all students.

Long Beach is Closing Achievement Gaps

The Long Beach Unified School District this year was named for the fifth time among the top five school systems in the nation by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. The honor goes to school systems which are systematically closing achievement gaps. School districts cannot apply for the annual award. Instead, an independent panel reviews vast amounts of student achievement data from 100 big-city school districts nationwide. Of these 100 school systems, only five are chosen as finalists. Long Beach now will compete with four other districts for public education's largest prize, The Broad Prize for Urban Education, which will be announced on Sept. 16 in Washington, D.C.

Among the reasons for Long Beach’s selection was that in 2008 its African-American, Hispanic and low-income students achieved higher proficiency rates than their counterparts statewide in reading and math in elementary, middle and high school. Between 2005 and 2008, Long Beach narrowed achievement gaps among Hispanic and white students in math at all grade levels, as well as in middle and high school reading. Between 2006 and 2008, Long Beach increased both the participation rate and the average score for Hispanic students taking the SAT. In addition, Advanced Placement enrollment here shows nearly a 60 percent increase since 2004, with African American students’ participation up by 61 percent, and Latino students’ participation up by 79 percent. Since 2004, the number of AP tests taken by African American students and Latino students grew 118 percent and 106 percent, respectively. We are moving aggressively toward closing the achievement gap. Even as the number of AP tests taken by white students has increased 48 percent, the impressive gains made by African American and Latino students are bringing us ever closer to our goal of parity.

Here in Long Beach, we recognize that closing achievement gaps is the civil rights issue of this century. Despite our progress here, we know that we can and must do better. That’s why we are seeking complete flexibility as to how we spend the limited funding that we receive from the state of California. Our rationale for such a proposal is described in the following commentary piece, recently published in our local newspaper:

lbschools.net/Main_Offices/Superintendent/Public_Information/
Newsroom/articleDetails_NEW.cfm?articleID=1068

The most important thing we can do to narrow the persistent gaps in achievement and attainment is make good on the good school promise: every American family deserves access to at least one good public school and every student deserves a good teacher.

NCLB had these intentions but fell short in large part because states failed to make the promise real; thousands of struggling schools have received only limited improvement efforts and chronic failure has been accepted far too long. Duncan’s encouragement to replace or transform the worst 5% of American schools is a step in the right direction. State leaders like Paul Pastorek have worked aggressively to fix or replace the lowest performing schools. Perhaps a push and a check from Duncan will encourage more state leaders to follow Pastorek’s lead.

To make real the good school promise we need vigilant advocacy. EdTrust, the historical leader in gap advocacy, has been joined by the Education Equality Project and state groups like ConnCAN. These groups are sweating the technical issue of standards, resource allocation, and equitable choice. But more importantly, advocacy connects policy to community. EEP, ConnCAN, and Parent Revolution are mobilizing historically underserved communities to demand that the ‘good school promise’ be made real in every neighborhood. As Kevin Chavous says, we need to make the promise real “by all means necessary.”

We can better understand the new NAEP report on the persistent test score gap by examining it in combination with another study, also just released, that shows the cognitive gap well-established long before children enter school.

Commissioned by the Council of Chief State School Officers and prepared by a research team at Child Trends, it is based on an analysis of a federal data set, the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study – Birth Cohort (ECLS-B). Like NAEP, these data track a nationally representative sample of children, in this case infants born in 2001. The children were then assessed when they were nine months old, and again at age two.

The NAEP report shows (Figures 13 and 15) that, for example, in fourth grade reading, the black-white difference is about 26 to 27 scale points, or about 0.8 standard deviations. The ECLS-B report shows that at nine months old, the cognitive gap[1] was already almost 0.2 standard deviations. By two years of age, the cognitive gap[2] was over 0.6 standard deviations.

In other words, ¾ of the black-white test score gap at age nine is already established by age two.

The ECLS-B analysis also shows that much of this early black-white gap is associated with differences in family income and maternal education. At two years of age, for example, the cognitive gap between toddlers whose mothers have less than a high school education and those whose mothers have a bachelor’s degree is more than 0.8 standard deviations.

We've known all this for a long time, of course. Study after study has concluded that most of the variation in student achievement is attributable to relative student social and economic disadvantage, and a much smaller part is attributable to the quality of schools.

And we know why. Many, including I, have documented this: disadvantaged (low-income and minority) children get less routine preventive medical and dental care, leading to more school absences as a result of illness. They are more prone to asthma, resulting in more sleeplessness, irritability, and lack of exercise. They experience lower birth weight as well as more lead poisoning and iron-deficiency anemia, each of which leads to diminished cognitive ability and more behavior problems. Their families frequently fall behind in rent and move, so children switch schools more often, losing continuity of instruction. Disadvantaged children are, in general, not read to aloud as often or exposed to complex language and large vocabularies. Their parents have low-wage jobs and are more frequently laid off, causing family stress and more arbitrary discipline. The neighborhoods through which these children walk to school and in which they play have more crime and drugs and fewer adult role models with professional careers. Such children are more often in single-parent families and so get less adult attention. They have fewer cross-country trips, visits to museums and zoos, music or dance lessons, and organized sports leagues to develop their ambition, cultural awareness, and self-confidence. Each of these disadvantages makes only a small contribution to the achievement gap, but cumulatively, they explain a lot.

Do we really think that better schools alone, and more accountability for teachers, can overcome all of this?

This does not mean that what schools do is unimportant, or that we should not do everything we can to improve school quality so that the achievement gap can be narrowed. But the tragedy is that for decades now, the central assumption of national education policy has been that if only schools were good enough, they could completely, or substantially undo the achievement gap that exists before, indeed long before, children enter pre-school.

This assumption is implausible. Its advocates often point to particular schools that have allegedly "closed" the achievement gap, and argue that if these schools can do it, any can. But the exceptional schools that purportedly close the gap are typically schools of choice whose parents are more motivated and supportive than typical parents; or their excellence is only episodic – they post high test scores only in one subject (math or reading), only in one grade, and only in one year, not consistently in all of these; or their excellence is defined narrowly as meeting a low proficiency point on a standardized test, not as excellence in a broad, well-rounded curriculum.

These allegedly exceptional schools may indeed be excellent, even if their claims to close the achievement gap are overblown. There is certainly a wide range of school quality and we should do everything we can to replicate the best ones. But this is different from expecting schools to substantially narrow the achievement gap.

Kati Haycock's post, below, properly notes, for example, that in Delaware, big test score gains for minority students have been realized by a series of smart state policies: Delaware "added reading specialists in schools to coach teachers and work with struggling students, and districts began using stronger curricular materials emphasizing vocabulary and writing." But take a look at the Delaware data (Figure 22 on page 37) in the new NAEP report that is the subject of this discussion: in fourth grade reading since 1998, the scores of black students increased by 24 scale points, about 2/3 of a standard deviation. But white scores also increased (though not as much), so the black-white gap narrowed by less than 1/3 of a standard deviation.

This is often the case when we focus on achievement gap data. We note that the achievement gap has not closed (or has done so only slightly) and denounce schools for failing to close it. But in doing so, we ignore the substantial improvement in both minority and white student achievement. The most glaring example of this is in the national math data. The NAEP report shows (see Figure 1) that in math, black 9-year olds now (i.e., 2004) perform at a level as high as white students performed in 1986. This is a phenomenal improvement, for which we give very little notice, because the white-black gap (about 23 scale points) is nearly unchanged.

In 1966, the Coleman report focused national attention on the foolishness of a national policy that put disproportionate emphasis on school reform, to the exclusion of improvements in the conditions that send children to school less ready to learn. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, along with Frederick Mosteller, two policy giants, both recently deceased, studied the Coleman report and had this to say:

"To the simple of mind or heart, such findings might be interpreted to mean that 'schools don't make a difference.' This is absurd. Schools make a very great difference to children. Children don't think up algebra on their own. It took a whole sequence of civilizations even to invent it. But given that schools have reached their present levels of quality, the observed variation in schools was reported by [the Coleman report] to have little effect upon school achievement. This actually means a large joint effect owing to both schools and home background (including region, degree of urbanization, socioeconomic status, and ethnic group), little that is unique to schools or homes. They vary together."[3]

Whether children learn algebra has everything to do with schools. But which children learn algebra better than other children results from differences both in home background and in schools (with most of the impact from the former).

The Child Trends report concludes its documentation of the nine-month and two-year cognitive gap by recommending an emphasis on policy to address the cognitive shortcomings of disadvantaged children before they are ready for school. It endorses, for example, the research-validated Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP) program that President Obama proposes to fund. NFP provides first-time teen mothers with home visits from a public health nurse who advises and supports prenatal care, child development and family planning. These home visits begin during pregnancy and continue through the child’s second birthday. Child Trends also endorses high quality early childhood center-based programs that combine parental education, professional care-givers, and adequate physical space to develop children's small motor skills that are essential for cognitive development. And it calls attention to the federally funded (but limited) Early Head Start program that provides comprehensive home- and center-based support for low-income mothers, infants, and toddlers.

A year ago, the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education (BBA) campaign issued a statement calling attention to "solid evidence that policies aimed directly at education-related social and economic disadvantages can improve school performance and student achievement. The persistent failure of policy makers to act on that evidence—in tandem with a school-improvement agenda—is a major reason why the association between social and economic disadvantage and low student achievement remains so strong."

The BBA statement urged that school improvement be pursued, but in combination with provision to disadvantaged children of high-quality early childhood programs, of routine and preventive health care in school based health-centers, and of high-quality after school and summer programs (because the socioeconomic influences that depress achievement in the pre-school years continue to operate later in the out-of-school hours).

There is, of course, one way that school reform alone can close the achievement gap. Examining, again, the data in the NAEP report, if Delaware had denied white students access to literacy coaches and to an improved curriculum, we could have depressed white achievement sufficiently so that the improvements in black students' literacy alone could have closed the gap. Likewise, if white students' fourth grade math performance nationwide had not improved at all since 1986, we would have entirely closed this achievement gap because of the substantial gains posted by black children.

But this is not what anyone seriously advocates. If we want to narrow the achievement gap as well as raise student achievement, we have to pursue policies like those advocated by Pedro Noguera and others, in their posts below, by Child Trends and by the Bolder, Broader Approach campaign – combine school improvement with narrowing the socioeconomic inequalities that influence children's development outside of school.

[1] For nine-month olds, the cognitive gap was assessed by observation of exploration of objects, purposeful exploration, expressive jabbering, early problem solving, and naming of objects.

[2] For two-year olds, the cognitive gap was assessed by observation of receptive vocabulary, expressive vocabulary, listening/comprehension, matching/discrimination, and early counting/quantitative skill.

[3] Frederick Mosteller and Daniel P. Moynihan. 1972. "A Pathbreaking Report." In Frederick Mosteller and Daniel P. Moynihan, eds., On Equality of Educational Opportunity. New York: Random House, p. 21.

Why aren't we closing the achievement gap? In short, because we’ve never been serious enough about doing it. Part of the answer has to do with what we mean by "we." The U.S. has the most de-centralized education system of any nation with a highly-developed economy. We have a history of segregation and discrimination that has terrible lingering affects even though overt discrimination has subsided. We also fund our schools more inequitably than other developed countries with too little regard to targeting funds on students with the greatest needs.

This is part of the price of having a federalist democracy, and it means that serious solutions to problems that boil down to what transacts in classrooms are most likely to come from the local or state level. If we're serious about closing the achievement gap nationwide, it's necessary to focus energy around translating promising local and state practices to other jurisdictions. And this is precisely the logic of the Race to the Top Fund, which offers competitive grants to states willing to document in scrupulous detail their progress on a set of four common metrics that spring from evidence that some districts and states have struck on ways to address the achievement gap.

The Race to the Top metrics, listed below, honor the work of states like Massachusetts, which took the high-road of accountability by setting high standards, Louisiana for shedding light on the relationship between its teacher preparation programs and the achievement of their graduates' students, and Tennessee for investing in the infrastructure of measuring teacher effectiveness and pioneering the use of student achievement data to inform teacher compensation. No district or state has it all figured out, however, so we need initiatives like the Race to the Top to showcase what works and to bring successful approaches to scale. And, crucially, the Race to the Top is voluntary. Elected officials and organizations who choose to keep their states on the sidelines will make it much easier to answer the question of why we aren't closing the achievement gap in the future.

• Adopting internationally benchmarked standards and assessments that prepare students for success in college and the workplace;
• Recruiting, developing, retaining, and rewarding effective teachers and principals;
• Building data systems that measure student success and inform teachers and principals how they can improve their practices; and
• Turning around our lowest-performing schools (Source: http://www.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/factsheet.html)

Gloria Ladson-Billings, former president of the American Educational Research Association, correctly re-named the "achievement gap" as the "educational debt." That is, the learning gaps by "race" and class exist due to deep-rooted, historical, wide-ranging differences in social and educational opportunities. The assumption that schools alone can solve the problem of differential inputs, processes and outcomes is dangerous because it ignores all the other social areas while consequently blaming schools for what they cannot do by themselves. It often excuses the radically unequal funding the US allots to schools serving mostly poor versus mostly wealthy children.

That said, schools can be far better: more intellectually stimulating and challenging, more socially and emotionally supportive, and more connected to the life of community. These improvements can alter for the better the life experiences and learning outcomes of children. What we have seen instead has been a narrowing of curriculum and instruction, to the confines of what can be readily measured by mostly multiple-choice standardized tests. This impoverishment of schools, intensified by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) mandates, has damaged good schools and undermined the possibility of significantly improving schools for low-income youth. No other nation tests so much, or possibly so poorly, as the US

One consequence of the current testing mania is that scores on state exams rise quickly as curriculum and instruction narrow, but there is far less improvement on neutral measures such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). In fact as pressure increased under NCLB, the rate of NAEP score increases slowed for almost all tests, grades and racial-ethnic groups compared with the period before NCLB.

So what should be done, what role can schools play in improving learning outcomes? They can focus on the education of the whole child. They can teach to rich but flexible expectations. They can create a supportive climate. They can ensure curriculum is intellectually stimulating, with rich content and engaging processes. They can be culturally supportive and inclusive. They can use a variety of appropriate assessments in the instructional process and as evidence of student attainment. They can use a range of kinds of data to guide school improvement efforts. In short, they can learn from the best of progressive education (which always has focused on strong content, not only skills and processes, contrary to those who denigrate it), from culturally responsive institutions, and from the assessment and evaluation knowledge at hand. (See Forum on Educational Accountability; Broader, Bolder Agenda; and Forum for Education and Democracy, as well as FairTest.)

But to move in this direction and not narrowly focus on boosting test scores runs the risk of failing to meet federal Adequate Yearly Progress requirements and suffering the largely unproven sanctions mandated under NCLB. Using test scores in teacher evaluations, as Education Secretary Duncan’s "Race to the Top" initiative pushes states to do, will exacerbate this problem by adding yet more pressure for educators to focus exclusively on the tests.

If NCLB is not significantly overhauled, the nation will continue to see illusory test gains and curriculum narrowing that will most harm children of color, English language learners, students with disabilities and low-income students. Meanwhile, most of what is necessary to be an effective citizen, a lifelong learner, a successful participant in the economy will be increasingly ignored in schools that are racing to the test-score top. In this scenario, the nation and its policy makers may delude themselves that the "achievement gap" is closing, but the real world evidence will sadly show that is not the case.

Our nation can change course, but right now it is steadily closing doors that need to be open, leaving behind the children who end up with test-prep drill and kill. The questions, then, are whether the national will seriously address the educational debt, and in doing so redefine "achievement" as far more than test scores and "reform" as more than simply inflating scores.

Despite all of the attention that has been focused on the achievement gap for the last several years, we have consistently ignored the most obvious factor perpetuating the gap: the inadequate learning conditions to which poor children, especially children of color, are exposed. In most urban areas and in most communities where poor children are concentrated, the quality of education provided is generally inferior to that made available to more affluent children. Many poor children attend schools that are unsafe, over-crowded, under-resourced and subject to high turnover of key personnel.
There are, of course, notable exceptions to this pattern of failure among a handful of high performing public, charter and private schools that specialize in serving poor kids. Such schools provide us with powerful evidence that we can make tremendous progress in closing the gap if we do two things: 1) focus on the conditions of learning, namely the quality of instruction and the coherence, relevance and rigor of the curriculum, and 2) enhance the capacity of schools to meet student needs by increasing the availability of personalized academic support services, afterschool and pre-school programs and, most importantly, by enabling schools to respond to the non-academic social and emotional needs that invariably impact learning.
Of course, we must recognize that there are important political and economic reasons why we have not focused on these obvious strategies and have, instead, concentrated on those that are important but less significant, like devising new data systems or adopting new reading curricula. Policymakers have also tended to rely on quick fixes like scripted teaching programs or, more recently, politicized remedies like merit pay and zero tolerance discipline policies. These issues and the debates they have raised have distracted us from addressing the most critical issue: the gross disparities in resources between poor and affluent children.
There are also important differences between the educational obstacles facing poor minority kids in segregated schools and middle class minority kids in suburban, integrated schools. I'll save my comments on those issues for another blog.

While I’ve been critical of the heavy-handed involvement of the federal government in administering the No Child Left Behind Act, I think its overall goal was the right one. NCLB exposed a troubling pattern of systematically leaving certain children behind in our schools. Despite a narrowing achievement gap and an increase in achievement for all students in recent years, much work remains.

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act became law more than 40 years ago – clearly, federal intervention alone is not the silver bullet. In fact, I have been very encouraged by the work of the business community and others in the “accountability movement” to partner with teachers, principals, and private sector providers to target those students most at risk of being left behind at the local level. Washington alone cannot solve all our problems; rather, we need to give local districts greater flexibility to find what works for their individual students.

The success this flexibility can bring is evident in high-performing charter schools. It allows them to deploy creative strategies – longer school days, modified curriculum, or school uniforms, for example – that may seem impossible in the traditional public school system. Replication of these high-performing charter schools is one obvious opportunity for bipartisan education reform.

We also need to improve school leadership, strengthen teacher training, and implement meaningful teacher and principal performance pay systems that reward excellence. And let’s not forget challenging curriculum, high expectations, and early intervention. I could go on. The point is that there is no single, one-size-fits-all strategy. What works in Lakeville, Minnesota may not work in Los Angeles, California or Louisville, Kentucky.

When Congress finally does reauthorize and reform the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, elimination of the achievement gap will undoubtedly be among our most pressing goals. While none of us has all the answers on how to achieve those goals, I, for one, will be focusing on giving our states, schools, and local communities the flexibility and tools to meet their specific needs.

What Kati said.

This is a frustrating issue because many of the barriers are political and institutional. The outcome disparities we see are the result of a host of policy choices and social policies. If we focus on systemically improving key levers such as American education's approach to human capital, customization and choice, curricula, and teaching reading (it looks like no one has yet mentioned that we did have a billion dollar reading program targeted at the early grades that was eliminated in a political crossfire a few years ago) to students in the very early grades we'll see marked improvements -- all else equal. If policymakers chose to address social policies that impact low-income students more generally, we'd see even more progress.

Updated at 5:11 p.m. on July 28.

The first step to doing more to close the achievement gaps is to recognize the progress we've made. With respect, your account of where we are is inaccurate. Since we have made progress, I would suggest that knowing the dimensions of the progress and understanding how and why we made it may offer clues about what our next best steps might be.

That we need to do much more, as Kati writes, is incontestably right. The gaps are large and unjustifiable.

But let's understand the gains first. Here is a link to the summary of the recent NCES report on the black-white gaps: http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/studies/2009455.asp

And here are its main points:

1. Nationwide gaps in 2007 were narrower than in previous assessments at both grades 4 and 8 in math and at grade 4 in reading.

2. At both ages 9 and 13, gap closing may have been limited because math scores for both black and white students were higher in 2004 than in any previous assessment. That both groups are going up, I would think, is a good thing.

3. For age 9 reading, again, scores for both black and white students were higher in 2004 than in any previous assessment.

Now let's look at the highlights of the recently released long term NAEP results:

Scores of Hispanic 9 year olds went up in math from 213 to 234 from 1999 to 2008. This equates to an astonishing improvement of 2 grade levels. It's the largest gain in history. It represents a closing of the white-Hispanic gap at that level from 26 to 16 points. And, while we have much further to go, Hispanic 9 year olds are now performing about as well in math as whites were in the 90s. This is nothing short of a major civil rights achievement.

Black 9 year olds made a gain in math from 1999-2008 that matched their largest gain in history, 13 points. This gain was particularly refreshing because black improvement had stalled entirely in the 90s.

This same turn up in the slope for the most recent decade characterizes math improvement for black and Hispanic 13 year olds.

As impressive as these results are, consider the reading results.

Black 9 year olds went from 186 to 204 from 1999 to 2008. The black-white gap closed from 35 points to 24 points, all while white scores went up. But, best of all, this decade's growth equalled the growth of the 70s, when the fruit of the civil rights era was finally ripening. Truly remarkable.

The reading scores of black 13 year olds actually went down from 1988 to 1996, from 243 to 234. Yet, from 1999-2008, they've come back from 238 to their highest point ever, 247.

Hispanic 9 year olds were stuck in a range of 183-193 from 1975 to 1999. Their scores are now at all time highs, 207.

We still have morally unjustifiable gaps. We also have a lot of work to do in our high schools. But we will have little success with those challenges unless and until we recognize the progress we've made, when it began, and what we started doing differently in the mid-90s that caused the rapid uptick in the last 10 years in performance in elementary and middle schools.

In my view, briefly, the main change agent since the mid-90s has been the flowering of standards based reform and accountability. This movement begain largely in the states in 1993-1994; it was furthered by Clinton's IASA in 1994; and it was pushed ahead by NCLB in 2001. Other states and localities and reform-based schools, on their own or under the influence of these ideas, pressed ahead in their own ways. The world has changed since pre-1990, and the results show it.

Should we fix and continue to improve these reforms? Yes. Should we devote more, better targeted resources to education? Yes. But my principal recommendation today is that we strengthen and accelerate these reforms dramatically and aggressively . The ARRA steps are good extensions - principally more effective teachers, more evenly distributed. Also, better data used to improve instruction and real and effective steps to turn around low performing schools - these steps can help close gaps further, too.

BUT, if we weaken accountability or take the pressure off schools by reducing reliance on valid and comparable measures of progress, going back to looking at aggregated measures of schools, or taking away pressure from the feds and states to impose consequences where poor students and students of color are not achieving adequately - if we do any or all these things, we put in peril the gains we have made and could actually go backward instead of forward in further narrowing of the gaps.

Hugh B. Price, former president of the National Urban League and visiting professor at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University, submitted the following:

America’s well-being and global competitiveness hinge on how well prepared our children are. Our children are the human infrastructure in today’s knowledge economy. The U.S. economy relies increasingly upon Latinos and African Americans. Minority students surged to 42 percent of public school enrollment nationally, up from 22 percent merely three decades ago. Yet these economically indispensable students, along with low-income youngsters generally, consistently lag farthest behind academically.

The “Achievement Gaps” report released on July 14th by the National Center for Education Statistics shows Black and White students making progress as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). In 2007, both groups scored highest ever in reading and math. But the gaps between races are still large, and the narrowing is primarily limited to the 4th grade.

Another NAEP metric that I monitor closely is the barometer of whether students lack the rudimentary skills needed to function in society and the economy. I refer to the proportions of youngsters who score “below Basic” according to the NAEP Achievement Levels. There has been progress since 1992, but the picture is still alarming. The percentage of African-American fourth-graders who were below Basic in reading declined from 68% to 54% in 2007; in mathematics from 78% to 36%. For Hispanics, the percentage at below Basic in reading declined from 61% to 50%, and in math from 66% to 30%. In other words, only about half of African-American and Hispanic fourth-graders are performing at or above Basic in reading and around two thirds are doing so in math.

There are other disturbing phenomena that illustrate the daunting challenges: an estimated half of African-American and Hispanic students drop out of high school, and we have a large number of students repeating grades. Less documented but no less ominous is student disengagement. The bottom line is: despite encouraging signs of progress reflected in the most recent NCES reports, the pace of improvement is too sluggish.

What should we do to accelerate progress? We need to improve schools and schooling, of course. But we also need to address developmental deficits that impact students’ capacity, motivation and readiness to learn, as illustrated by Paul Barton’s study of in-school and non-school factors that influence achievement.

This is the centerpiece of the report by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) on educating the whole child, and it has also been the lifelong focus of my school reform guru — Dr. James Comer of the Yale Child Study Center. These days there is broad agreement about expanding the quality of early childhood education, improving the quality of teachers, etc.

I want to concentrate on two other potential contributors to progress: the lessons we can learn from the military on educating and developing young people that might help struggling students and schools; and the role of communities in motivating youngsters to achieve.

Growing up in Washington, DC in the 1950s, I noticed that many classmates who dropped out of school subsequently joined the military and turned around their lives. The military has a reputation for having the ability to reach, teach and develop young people who are rudderless. In the military, the effective training and development of young people is a matter of life and death. The armed services have proven competence in training, team building and managing diversity.

They are the foremost among all U.S. institutions in advancing minorities. They invest heavily in understanding human development. Many aspects of the military approach are worth emulating in public education. These include: belonging; teamwork; motivation and self-discipline; structure and routine; accountability and consequences; safe and secure learning environments; valuing and believing every youngster can succeed; functional context education for those barely literate; mentoring and monitoring; and rewards and recognition.

The National Guard Youth ChalleNGe Program is a five-month quasi-military corps serving school dropouts. The eight core components reflect its commitment to educating and developing the whole adolescent. They are: academic excellence; leadership/followership; responsible citizenship; service to the community; life coping skills; physical fitness; health and hygiene; and job skills.

ChalleNGe is one of a number of quasi-military programs, which also include JROTC, public military schools and careers, and the Army Preparatory School. MDRC conducted an evaluation of ChalleNGe and found striking gains for participants vs. controls. For instance, 46 percent of participants have earned a high school diploma or GED certificate as opposed to 10 percent of non-participants. Participants were more likely to be working and taking college courses .

JROTC participants have slightly better academic performance and a 10-15% higher graduation rate than peers in the same high school. Their participants also experience better attendance and fewer disciplinary infractions.

Students in the Public Military Academy/Leeds in Philadelphia outperformed district averages in reading and math on the Terra Nova test. They also outperformed the district average in reading and matched it in math on the state test. Students had a 93% attendance rate vs. 89% district-wide, while teacher attendance was 96% vs. 74% district-wide.

The Army Preparatory School operates at Ft. Jackson in South Carolina. Young people who want to enlist but lack high school diplomas or GED certificates go there to strengthen their academic qualifications so they can join the Army. Roughly 99% of the first contingent of 400 would-be soldiers earned their GED at the school. West Philadelphia High School is not overtly military, but it borrowed the military’s sense of firm and consistent rules. The proportion of seniors who graduate is up to 87% from 60%, while violent acts declined by 52% and attendance increased by 10% to 85%.

How can we utilize the research, experience and knowledge embedded in these military and quasi-military methods and models to help more low achievers and “tuned-out” youth? I want to make one thing perfectly clear—I’m not proposing that we militarize public schools. But I think there are promising ideas to consider.

We could offer reading and math immersion programs for low achievers who fail to progress in traditional summer school. We should establish new middle schools and high schools that embrace the generic attributes of programs like these, but are not military per se. We should implement key military-like models and methods in troubled schools; create quasi-military public boarding schools, and create intensive transitional academies patterned after ChalleNGe for youngsters who have dialed out or dropped out. In addition, we should establish ChalleNGe-like programs for youngsters in juvenile corrections systems so they can be released earlier and get on with their lives.

Millions of students are marginalized academically and destined for social and economic oblivion. The military knows how to nurture and unleash the potential of aimless youth. By demilitarizing and deploying military methods and models, we can transform troubled and troublesome adolescents into valued social and economic assets to our nation.

My second topic is “mobilizing the community to help students succeed.” This was the focus of my book published by ASCD. It is derived from the National Urban League achievement campaign that was the centerpiece of my tenure as CEO.

Communities need to create a culture of achievement and encourage youngsters to achieve. Schools cannot do it alone and should not go it alone. A study released by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform found that constructive community organizing can contribute to improved student performance in school, strengthened support for better-qualified teachers, and heightened school-community trust.

In writing my book, Mobilizing the Community to Help Students Succeed, I found plenty of research to support the importance and the role of community. Student motivation actually does matter. It’s critically important for young people to feel valued by teachers and adults in lives. And to belong to positive peer groups and be recognized publicly for their constructive accomplishments.

The community is an untapped resource that sets and affirms values, and recognizes and rewards youngsters. There are a variety of community mobilization strategies—some proven, others promising -- that can be implemented:

· Achievement Month

· Celebrating Youngsters Who “Do the Right Thing”

· Getting Communities into the Literacy Game

· Achievement “Gangs”

· Achievement Fairs

· Annual achievement parades

· Recognition ceremonies

To effectively motivate students, we need a continuum of activities that encourage, recognize and reward achievement throughout the school year. We need, in effect, to create a constant drumbeat for achievement that reaches every school, every classroom and every community. Imagine a calendar of events roughly along the following lines:

· September — Achievement Month rallies and festivals to herald the resumption of school, the dawn of a new opportunity to achieve.

· October — “Doing the Right Thing” assemblies and events in schools, community centers and churches, all staged on the same day across the community.

· November — Awards ceremonies for the community groups that did a wonderful job of promoting literacy and achievement during the previous school year.

· February —Achievement fairs focused on literacy, math and/or science that are patterned after county fairs that enable youngsters to explore and demonstrate academically relevant projects of their choosing.

· May — Achievement Day parade for all fourth and eighth graders who pass the state-mandated examinations in reading and/or math.

· June — Induction ceremony for community-based achievers society.

· June — Recognition receptions for graduating seniors who earned B averages or better throughout their high school careers.

How do we jumpstart such a program? At the local level, school boards, superintendents, and principals, as well as the PTAs could team up with community organizations, business and civic groups, and faith-based organizations and churches to mount these kinds of activities.

At the state level, governors, chief state school officers, and state boards of education could take the lead in convening these community groups and encouraging them to launch achievement campaigns in their school districts.

Nationally, just imagine the impact if First Lady Michele Obama and/or Secretary of Education Duncan took this on as a high priority cause. They could kick it off by convening a White House Summit of leading civic, religious, business and community-based groups. They could exhort the groups to spread the gospel of achievement and stage activities that recognize youngsters for doing well in school. Perhaps there could even be high profile annual awards given by the First Lady or Education Secretary to local groups that do the best job of motivating youngsters to achieve.

Research and real-world experience show that the community is a sleeping giant that could become a significant force in creating a culture of achievement and encouraging students to succeed in school.

We have done a pretty good job of identifying and measuring the educational achievement gap in our country over the last 20 years. In fact, we can quantify the achievement gap from early childhood education and track it all the way through college completion. We can disaggregate our data and track our achievement gap by race/ethnicity and by family income. Unfortunately, measuring the achievement gap alone has not translated into a significant closing of this gap.

As a researcher, it is humbling to acknowledge that identifying and measuring the achievement gap alone is not enough to mobilize our polis to close the gap. At Excelencia in Education, we have spent a great deal of time identifying the achievement gap and increasing awareness of the current condition of Latinos in education. We have learned that increasing awareness is only a first step to mobilizing and compelling action to accelerate student success. The second step we’ve taken is to identify what is working to accelerate student success. There are programs and services all across the country improving student success, and we try to highlight them. However, these efforts are not being brought to scale or replicated in a manner that will substantially close our achievement gap. We obviously have to do more if we are to achieve a goal of closing the achievement gap.

Nationally, we have created legislation and programs in an attempt to close the achievement gap. The question for us lies in how to close that gap in a judicious, increasingly efficient, and effective way. There are many across the nation who will continue to make strides in closing the achievement gap—one student at a time. However, given our limited progress in closing the educational achievement gap overall, we have to ask ourselves whether we are we really committed to closing this gap at the scale necessary. Providing information and analysis is obviously not enough. Identifying what is working to improve student success in programs serving 25-50 students at a time is obviously not enough. Can we articulate a clear plan that will improve achievement for all students generally while simultaneously accelerating achievement for African American and Latino students? That is the only way that we can close the achievement gap.

I am a firm believer that intentionality matters. How we articulate our goal to close the achievement gap, how we engage our communities to address this goal, how we invest our political clout, and how we target our limited resources all matter. We may have all the elements we need to close the achievement gap, but we haven’t found the right combination of elements yet.

The hard work of educators and students has yielded important progress in recent years. Elementary-level achievement is higher than ever for all groups of students, and the gaps between them are narrowing.

But despite this progress, we’re nowhere near where we need to be. Improvement in the lower grades has failed to translate into better performance among high schoolers. Students in other countries still outperform students in the United States. And though our achievement gaps are getting smaller, they remain miserably wide.

Conventional thinking suggests that these gaps are “inevitable,” that our schools can never be expected to get low-income students and students of color to achieve at high levels. But that thinking is dead wrong. While no state or school district is yet where it needs to be, some are improving at much faster rates than others:

• Leaders in Delaware put a statewide focus on literacy, tying strong accountability to higher expectations for all students. To support new demands, the state added reading specialists in schools to coach teachers and work with struggling students, and districts began using stronger curricular materials emphasizing vocabulary and writing. That intensive effort has resulted in big gains: Since 1998, Delaware’s fourth-grade reading scores are up 18 points, including a 24-point increase for African Americans, 42 points for Latinos, and 25 points for low-income students.

• Arkansas made education reform a similar objective, ratcheting-up expectations, linking instruction to standards, and emphasizing cross-curricular instruction. As the expectations bar was raised, so too were the minimum scores required on annual state assessments. Though the state still has a long way to go, Arkansas in 2007 posted some of the nation’s biggest gains in fourth-grade and eighth-grade mathematics and eighth-grade writing, significantly narrowing the gaps and decreasing the number of students scoring below the “Basic” achievement level.

Results in such states as Delaware and Arkansas, and in such schools as Capitol View Elementary in Atlanta and Elmont Memorial Junior-Senior High in Nassau County, N.Y., show us that there is no magic strategy for improving learning among some groups of students versus others. Regardless of skin color, native language, or family income, when it comes to learning at higher levels, all students need the same things: high standards; rich curriculum; strong, focused instruction; and rigorous assessments.

Unfortunately, we often take the students who come to school behind and give them less of everything they need to succeed. In fact, poor and minority students are less likely to be taught by strong teachers who know their subject matter. They are less likely to be exposed to a rich, challenging curriculum. And the schools that educate them typically receive less state and local funding than the ones serving mainly white, more affluent students.

These inequalities undermine the education of low-income students and students of color as well as their life chances and, ultimately, our nation’s future. Each student takes a single, short journey through school. If we don’t get it right for them the first time, we don’t get a second chance. We can’t afford to watch another generation of young people sit on our nation’s sidelines because we failed to stand up and address, once and for all, these gaps that plague America’s schools.

Some leaders are already doing what it takes, helping schools like Capitol View and Elmont Memorial work for all kids. The question is, when will the rest of us follow their lead?

How Can We Do Better At Closing The Achievement Gap Given Our Country's Limited Progress In This Arena?

The first step to closing the achievement gap is to understand it. For example, there’s not just one education achievement gap but several.

There’s a gap that opens in pre-school and kindergarten between children who are getting a structured preschool education and children who are essentially being baby-sat with no intellectual stimulation. There’s an elementary school gap between children who receive a strong, fundamental education and those—many of them minorities, but low-income and rural white children as well—who are being taught by teachers not certified for the grade level or subject they’re teaching.

And of course there are the achievement gaps we all know about: the high school and college achievement gaps that result in the fact that of every 100 black children who start in kindergarten, only eighteen on average graduate from college. The report for white students isn’t anything to write home about either: Of 100 white kindergarten students, only 33 will, on average, graduate from college.

This multiplicity of achievement gaps, taken together, tells us something very important: Education isn’t a point in time, a grade in school. It’s a continuum, a pipeline. If our children don’t get started right, if they aren’t educated right all along the pipeline, their odds of emerging at the other end with a college degree become very long.

Research tells us what needs to happen to keep students in the P-16 pipeline. Three examples:

• Students need good, highly qualified teachers in every classroom. Having teachers who are certified for the subject and grade level they’re teaching measurably increases student achievement.

• All children need to be taught the challenging academic subjects—advanced mathematics and science, the critical reading and writing skills, and the habits of mind that will prepare them for the increasingly demanding workplace or further post-secondary formal education, (i.e., a certification or an associate’s or bachelor’s degree). Rigorous academics--the foundation for future learning and, increasingly, for the high-skilled jobs that will drive 21st century economies--should not be rationed to a small elite.

• Students have to spend longer school years and longer school days in class and on task. Research indicates, for example, that as much as two-thirds of the ninth-grade achievement gap between lower- and higher-income youth can be explained by unequal access to summer learning opportunities. Longer school days and years not only prevent the achievement gap from widening, but start closing it.

Reform-minded school systems like those in New York and Washington, D.C. are starting to implement these and other changes, and they are starting to see results. Less than two weeks ago, for instance, the Washington Post reported that, two years into Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s tenure in Washington, the gulf between black and white secondary math students shrank from seventy to fifty percent—far from where we need to be, but far from where we were, and headed in the right direction.

Charter schools like the KIPP Academies around the country, Promise Academy in Harlem and the MATCH School in Boston, all offer intensive reading- and writing-based curricula, relentless tutoring, high expectations of faculty and staff, and family engagement as key factors for closing and, in select cases, even inverting the achievement gap.

Students who graduate from these innovative charters and from good public high schools are college-ready. But far too many students either do not graduate from high school or graduate without the rigorous courses that prepare them for college coursework. Many of them, especially minority and low-income students, will have to devote precious college semesters and scarce family resources or financial aid dollars to remedial courses. Approximately 30% of all entering college students take at least one remedial course and, depending on the type of institution and state, the share of students academically unprepared for college can range from 24% to 42%. This number is significantly higher for black and Latino students.

Along with inadequate pre-college preparation, the biggest obstacle to college access and college completion is financial. The obvious response here is financial aid, like the federal Pell Grant program, and like the 400 scholarship programs UNCF offers. Colleges also need to control increases in tuition levels.

But just as financial pressures are not the only barriers to college completion, financial aid and tuition containment can’t be the only responses. Students from low-income families not only have fewer financial resources that can be applied to college expenses, they come from different backgrounds. More than half of the students who attend UNCF member colleges and universities are first-generation learners—the first in their families to attend college. Many need support with developing the habits of mind necessary for staying in college: living away from home for the first time and budgeting study time, for example. They may need help balancing their need to stay in school with their families’ need for the income they could be earning. Such conflicts can cause students to leave school to help their families over the immediate term, even when that will mean in the longer term that they will earn less because they lack a post-secondary degree.

Giving students this "ethic of care,” and knowing when and how to give it, while still containing tuition increases, is something that the small, private historically black colleges and universities that belong to UNCF have decades of experience with. “My number one assignment is to know you,” a professor at one of our member universities tells his students. “I need to know you before I can teach you.”

Providing both financial and psycho-social support, in fact, are the guiding principles of UNCF’s largest scholarship program, the Gates Millennium Scholars Program (GMS). UNCF-GMS scholarship awards are true four-year, last-dollar scholarships, not only covering students’ unmet need, but reducing the pressure on them to work while attending college. GMS also offers an array of support services: leadership training, mentoring, and assistance from GMS relationship managers, who are there to help avoid and solve the problems that are part and parcel of going to college.

The results are remarkable: GMS students—all low-income members of minority groups--have a graduation rate of 80 percent in five years. That’s more than 45 percent higher than the overall college graduation rate of 55 percent in six years.

We need more programs like GMS. We need more innovative public school leaders and more good teachers in more classrooms. And we need the political will to make it happen.