EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIP AND THE ROLE IN CLOSING THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP

Educational Leadership and the role in closing the achievement gap

Educational Leadership And The Role In Closing The Achievement Gap

Introduction

To amplify the accomplishment levels of minority and low-income students, we require focusing on what actually matters: high standards, a challenging curriculum, and high-quality teachers. There's been a lot of talk recently about the attainment gap that separates low-income and minority young people from other adolescent Americans.

For more than a generation, we focused on improving the education of poor and minority students. Not surprisingly, we made real gains. Between 1970 and 1988, the achievement gap between African American and white students was cut in half, and the gap separating Latinos and whites declined by one-third. That progress came to a halt around 1988, however, and since that time, the gaps have widened. (Bradbury & Greaves, 2005)

Although everybody wanted to take credit for narrowing the gap, nobody wanted to take responsibility for widening it. So, for a while, there was mostly silence. But that is changing. Good. Because if we don't get the numbers out on the table and talk about them, we're never going to close the gap once and for all. I worry, though, about how many people head into discussions without accurate data. And I worry even more about how many education leaders have antiquated—and downright wrong—notions about the whys beneath the achievement gap.

I want to respond to both these worries by putting some crucial data on the (Bradbury & Greaves, 2005) table and by sharing what both research and experience teach us about how schools can close the gaps between groups of students. (Bradbury & Greaves, 2005)Most of the data are from standard national sources, including the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), as well as from states and local school districts that have been unusually successful at educating poor and minority students.

Explanation

Closing the Achievement Gap

Understanding Achievement Patterns

The performance of African American and Latino youngsters improved dramatically during the 1970s and 1980s. The 1990s, however, were another matter. In some subjects and at some grade levels, the gaps started growing; in others, they were stagnant Reading achievement among 17-year-old African Americans and Latinos climbed substantially through the 1970s and 1980s, but gaps separating them from other students widened somewhat during the 1990s. (Bradbury & Greaves, 2005)

The patterns in mathematics achievement look similar for 13-year-olds, with the African American and white gap reaching its narrowest in 1990 and the Latino and white gap narrowing until 1992, and the gaps widening thereafter. In 1999, by the end of high school Only 1 in 50 Latinos and 1 in 100 African American 17-year-olds can read and gain information from specialized text—such as the science section in the newspaper (compared to about 1 in 12 whites), and Fewer than one-quarter of Latinos and one-fifth of African Americans can read the complicated but less specialized text that more than half of white students ...