May/June 2001
Teachers and administrators are becoming
researchers as they work to narrow the black/white achievement gap in
schools
By Michael Sadowski
Things finally seemed to be moving in the right direction. After years
of wide, persistent gaps between the performance of black and white students on
the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the 1970s saw the
beginning of a turnaround. The gap began to narrow, and this trend continued
through most of the 1980s. Christopher Jencks of Harvard University and
Meredith Phillips of UCLA, editors of the 1998 book The Black-White Test
Score Gap, noted that the reading gap between black and white 17-year-olds
(as measured by the NAEP) had narrowed more than 40 percent from 1971 to 1994
and that the math gap had also narrowed, though less dramatically. Jencks and
Phillips also saw hope in research showing that black students’ test
performance responded well to changes in the social and cultural environment.
In an editorial for Education Week, the researchers wrote, "Narrowing
the test score gap would require continuous effort by both blacks and whites,
and it would probably take more than one generation. But we think it can be
done."
But data released in September 2000 show very different trends from
those that seemed apparent just a few years earlier. While overall scores have
increased in reading and mathematics, the differences in scores for black and
white students in virtually every NAEP subject area and for every age group are
greater than they were in the late 1980s. Perhaps even more disturbing, these
gaps seem to be getting wider each year. Even when researchers control for
socioeconomic status, level of parental education, and other factors that
contribute to scholastic achievement, the score gap between white and black
students persists, and no one is really sure why.
Of course, theories abound. Some researchers blame low standards, a lack
of resources, and what they consider to be less-skilled teachers in schools
that serve large numbers of black students. Others cite a change from the
emphasis on basic skill development, which helped to boost scores of the lowest
performing students in the 1970s and 1980s, to one on higher order skills, for
which students may be less well prepared. Still other researchers insist that,
despite controlled study, the effects of racism simply cannot be disentangled
from the host of other economic and social factors that affect black students
and their success in school.
National Problem, Local Solutions
Frustrated by the persistence of the achievement gap in their districts,
administrators and teachers have started to look for answers within the walls
of their own schools. They’re studying school records, disaggregating test
score and grade data, interviewing students and teachers, administering
questionnaires—essentially, becoming researchers—to identify exactly
where problems exist and to design solutions.
"When you’re really serious about closing the achievement gap, you
have to be very deliberate in identifying what your problems are," says Thomas
Fowler-Finn, superintendent of the Fort Wayne (IN) Community Schools. "You have
to know what specific steps to take, and when you take them, you have to know
if they make a difference."
Fort Wayne, a district of approximately 32,000 students, 26 percent of
whom are black, is one of many schools that are now taking a close look at the
achievement gap through a research-based approach. Rather than just focusing on
test scores, however, Fort Wayne’s plan involves looking at the
gap—and therefore the schools—in a much broader context. School
officials are also investigating black/white differences in discipline
referral, dropping out, educational aspirations, and perceptions of the school
climate.
Through student surveys, for example, Fowler-Finn says that district
staff have discovered some key differences in the way black and white students
experience school. Black students feel less connected to school and believe
they have more negative relationships with their peers and with teachers than
their white counterparts. The good news, however, is that the gap in responses
to the school climate questions has narrowed by about 60 percent in two years.
Fowler-Finn attributes this success to several changes. The district has
implemented diversity training for staff, developed school improvement plans
with the input of representative groups across age and racial lines, and
revised curriculum to include better representation of the cultural
contributions of people of color. There are new mentoring programs as well as
an orientation for high school freshmen called Straight Talk, in which students
learn skills for making the transition to high school successfully. "Straight
Talk is good for all students, but it may especially benefit those who are
coming in less well prepared," Fowler-Finn says.
The Fort Wayne educator-researchers also found gaps in the way students
perceive the role of discipline in their school lives. "There’s a
perception that if you do the same thing, you’ll get a worse punishment if
you’re black," Fowler-Finn notes. The district has begun to track
discipline reports and pinpoint patterns by changing certain variables in the
equation, such as the personnel monitoring doorways, the locations where buses
drop students off, and the consequences for behavioral infractions and whether
these are consistent along racial lines. School staff have also reviewed their
discipline codes, and the district has hired a full-time conflict mediator for
each middle and high school.
All of these factors, Fowler-Finn believes, affect black students’
perceptions about school and, in turn, their academic achievement. And, though
the issues are still being studied and interventions are still being designed,
some encouraging academic results have emerged. The dropout rate for black
students was 10.4 percent in the 1993–94 school year. For the last school
year, this rate had dropped to 2.6 percent, less than one percentage point away
from the dropout rate for white students.
Score gaps on the state-mandated Indiana Statewide Test of Educational
Proficiency (ISTEP) have also begun to narrow. The score difference between
black and white 8th-graders in Fort Wayne, for example, has narrowed by 2.8
percentage points for reading, 1.4 points for math, 1.0 point for language, and
1.5 points for the full battery of tests in the past three years. While those
numbers may sound relatively modest, Fowler-Finn points out that this narrowing
is significant because it has occurred in the context of healthy test score
gains for both black and white students.
Based on his experiences, Fowler-Finn has concluded that closing the
achievement gap requires a comprehensive approach to studying the overall
school experience: "If it were just a matter of achievement, then your approach
would be to only focus on improving teaching and curriculum. We’ve learned
that that will not be adequate."
Dedicated Networks
Fort Wayne is one of a growing number of school districts that are
pooling their intellectual resources in an effort to find solutions to the
achievement gap puzzle. Fowler-Finn is president of the Network for Equity in
Student Achievement (NESA), a group of 15 larger urban school systems that
share data, resources, and ideas with the ultimate goal of closing the racial
gap and raising achievement for all students.
The NESA was inspired by another group of school districts with a
similar mission but a different set of common characteristics: the Minority
Student Achievement Network (MSAN), which consists primarily of school
districts in ethnically diverse suburban towns and small cities. Many MSAN
member districts are located in university towns such as Ann Arbor, MI;
Berkeley, CA; Cambridge, MA; and Madison, WI. The relative affluence of these
communities means that member schools can study the achievement gap amid less
interference from such factors as poverty and severe school underfunding. And,
the location of the schools near major colleges and universities enables staff
to work closely with key researchers in this field.
"The schools in our network share specific characteristics: a historical
commitment to racial integration, a willingness to share the bad news about the
gap in achievement and a commitment to eliminating that gap, a history of
academic excellence—although [there is] an uneven involvement of black and
Latino students in that excellence—and significant financial and
educational resources," says MSAN member Laura Cooper, assistant superintendent
for curriculum and instruction at Evanston Township (IL) High School. "Because
we are often in very liberal communities that have supported and continue to
support racial integration, we often have little in common with our suburban or
urban neighbors. So we’ve banded together to share data and do real
research on our efforts."
MSAN holds annual conferences that bring together teams from all of its
member districts. These teams are deliberately composed of cross-constituent
groups that include teachers, parents, board members, and administrators.
Responding to a lack of student representation on the teams, MSAN added a
student conference to its agenda in 2000, and future plans include teacher
conferences at which educators will share findings from the action research
projects going on in their classrooms. Though the MSAN’s work is just
beginning, some ideas aimed at closing the gaps are already being shared among
member districts. Minority students in Evanston, for example, now participate
in a program called QUEST (Questioning, Understanding and Educating Students
Together), whereby they visit middle schools and talk to younger students about
academic achievement. Programs like QUEST also exist in several other MSAN
districts. "We’re under no illusions that we’ll have eliminated this
gap in six months," Cooper says. "We know this work is very complex. We’re
not looking for just one answer."
University Researchers’ Role
In addition to conducting their own research and designing targeted
interventions, some MSAN members are working with university-based researchers
to understand what specific factors affect minority achievement in their
schools. Ronald Ferguson, an associate professor at Harvard’s Kennedy
School of Government, has studied the Shaker Heights (OH) Public Schools for
several years.
Just as in Fort Wayne, Shaker Heights educators are finding out that
understanding minority students’ perceptions about school may be at least
as important as monitoring their test scores. Using a survey developed by John
Bishop at Cornell University, Ferguson found that on most measures of effort
and academic motivation, black students score as high as—and sometimes
higher than—white students. "The picture we’re starting to get is
that there’s really no resistance to achievement among black students," Ferguson says. He also notes, however, that there may be other factors that
stand in the way of black students performing better in school.
According to the survey, black students in Shaker Heights spend as much
time, and often more time, doing homework as their white peers, but they tend
to complete their work less often. Ferguson speculates that "stereotype
anxiety" (a concept attributed to psychologist Claude Steele) may be a key
factor in this failure to complete and pass in homework: "Students may think
it’s better to look like you’re not trying than to look stupid. You
really don’t want to feed the stereotype of ignorance."
Moreover, when asked what factors make students popular, white students
are most likely to cite being outgoing and self-confident, whereas black
students most often mention "acting tough." "So, what teachers see are kids
with this tough persona who don’t hand in their homework," Ferguson says.
"Black students are just as interested in school, but [when these data were
released] this was news to a number of teachers."
The student attitude survey is now being used at a number of other MSAN
schools, and Ferguson, along with the 15 member districts, is working on a
large-scale study using data from more than 51,000 middle and high school
students. As Ferguson notes, having teachers and administrators involved in
research is essential: "Practitioners know a lot. We need to draw their
expertise into the research process. We’re kind of learning as we go about
how this can happen. But if we want to get projects into the districts,
we’ve got to get the people in those districts involved. We can’t
just offer a menu of things for them to do."
Classroom-Level Research
One of the most glaring disparities between black and white students is
in their enrollment in Advanced Placement and other higher-level courses.
Researchers like Ferguson have found that some teachers’ expectations for
black students are lower than they are for white students, and these factors
affect tracking decisions as well as students’ perceptions about their own
abilities throughout their learning careers.
Joan Cone, an English teacher at El Cerrito (CA) High School in the San
Francisco Bay area, has made closing this aspect of the gap a priority at her
school and has used research techniques to get at the root of the problem.
Using a combination of interviews and analysis of students’ personal
writing, Cone found differences in student perceptions similar to those that
have emerged in Fort Wayne and Shaker Heights. "I was interested in collecting
data on how teachers and students co-construct low achievement," Cone says.
"What I found was that students of color in 10th and 11th grade were not taking
advantage of the choices they had."
Cone’s findings have resulted in a restructuring of the English
department at El Cerrito High. Rather than being tracked into English classes
throughout high school, students are now heterogeneously grouped in grades nine
and ten and have a menu of electives from which to choose in the upper grades.
The curriculum in some of these electives is strongly centered around
literature by writers of color. In addition, Cone’s department has opened
up enrollment in the school’s AP courses.
Now, more than 20 percent of the students in Cone’s AP classes are
African American, and an additional 8 percent are Latino. While acknowledging
that merely being placed in an AP course cannot completely reverse the damage
caused by years of low tracking, Cone sees more students of color raising their
academic aspirations. "There are kids taking AP now who would never be given a
chance at other schools," she says. "Will they all pass the AP exam? Maybe not.
But at least we didn’t say that they couldn’t."
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina have also seen
dramatic increases in the number of African American students taking
higher-level courses. More than a quarter (26%) of African Americans in the
class of 2000 were enrolled in at least one AP or international baccalaureate
course, up from 21 percent the previous year and 14 percent for 1996. Overall,
there were 974 blacks enrolled in AP courses last year, up from just 77 in the
1991–92 school year.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg is one of five North Carolina school districts
that last year took on a special challenge from the state to raise test scores
among six subgroups, including black students. Staff in schools where scores go
up within each subgroup will receive cash bonuses. Charlotte-Mecklenburg is
already making strong progress in closing gaps on statewide tests: black
students’ scores on the North Carolina End-of-Grade reading test have
risen by 18 percentage points since 1995–96, and the gap between black and
white students has narrowed by nine percentage points.
Superintendent Eric Smith says the renewed effort to raise test scores
has resulted in a districtwide focus on research: "We’ve all become
researchers. This school system is totally data-driven. We live by the results
of the data we see, right down to my contract and compensation." The district
disaggregates test scores according to a number of factors, including race, and
school officials have begun collecting data on the attributes of its highest
and lowest performing schools. One of the major differences they have found
between these two groups of schools is in teaching. According to Smith, their
research has found that lower performing schools tend to be staffed by teachers
who have less experience, fewer advanced degrees, and higher absenteeism.
Changes in response to these findings include programs to help teachers earn
their master’s degrees and revisions of the staffing formula to reduce the
student/teacher ratio in schools where student are identified as having "high
need."
A Tall Order
People calling for schools to take the lead in research on the
achievement gap—or any other issue—acknowledge that this is a tall
order, given all of the day-to-day responsibilities educators face. "It’s
a challenge to do methodical research in schools," says Cooper of the Minority
Student Achievement Network. "It’s kind of like trying to change the tires
on a car while you’re driving down the highway."
Nevertheless, the unique characteristics of school cultures and student
populations suggest that the most meaningful changes may depend on research
that is locally driven. "So far, researchers have only done research that tells
them what they already know: that there is a gap," says Pedro Noguera, a
professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a member of the
MSAN’s Research Advisory Board. "What educators need is research on how to
change their practices so that they can create the conditions that foster high
minority achievement."
And, as the cases profiled here demonstrate, creating these conditions
may involve a lot more than just raising standards. Districts may need to
conduct home-grown research on student attitudes, teacher satisfaction, class
size, tracking, and a myriad of other factors before they understand what goes
into—and what can change—student learning.
For Further Information
Reaching the Top: A Report of the National Task Force on Minority
High Achievement. New York: College Board Publications, 1999. Available
online at www.collegeboard.org
C. Jencks and M. Phillips, eds. The Black-White Test Score Gap.
Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1998.
R.C. Johnston and D. Viadero. "Unmet Promise: Raising Minority
Achievement." Education Week, March 15, 2000: 1, 18–19.
R. F. Ferguson. "A Diagnostic Analysis of Black and White GPA
Disparities in Shaker Heights, Ohio." Brookings Papers on Education Policy,
2001. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, forthcoming.
S.T. Gregory, ed. The Academic Achievement of Minority Students:
Perspectives, Practices, and Prescriptions. Lanham, MD: University Press of
America, 2000.
D.J. Hoff. "Gap Widens Between Black and White Students on NAEP."
Education Week, September 6, 2000: 6.
S. Jurich and S. Estes. Raising Academic Achievement: A Study of 20
Successful Programs. Washington, DC: American Youth Policy Forum, 2001.
Available online at www.aypf.org/pubs.htm
R.D. Kahlenberg. All Together Now: Creating Middle Class Schools
Through Public School Choice. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution,
2001.
Minority Student Achievement Network, Evanston Township High School,
1600 Dodge Ave., Evanston, IL 60204; 847-424-7000.
www.eths.k12.il.us/MSA/msanetwork.html
Network for Equity in Student Achievement. Contact:
Superintendent’s Office, Fort Wayne
Community Schools, 1200 S. Clinton St., Fort Wayne, IN 46802;
219-425-7200.
C. Steele. "A Threat in the Air: How Stereotypes Shape Intellectual
Identity and Performance." American Psychologist 52, no. 6 (June 1997):
613–629.
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