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The Notorious G-A-P

THE GAP is back. Actually, the differences between the achievement of white and Asian students and that of black, Hispanic, and other minority students never completely disappeared, but so much progress was made during the 1970s and 1980s that there seemed to be a tacit assumption that the gap would eventually close altogether. The standards and assessment efforts of the past decade were at least partly meant to speed up the process of closing the gap. If districts, schools, and parents are chafing under accountability measures (often hastily and thoughtlessly implemented), it is because state policy makers were under the gun to find ways to close the gap even further. Federal laws, especially Title I, said that all students were to be held to the same high standards, a mandate that rippled through state policies for all districts and schools. The requirement that assessment data be disaggregated by race and ethnicity also ensured that the problem of the gap would remain public. Indeed it did, especially in a rash of reports released as the new school year began, including the annual release of SAT scores from the College Board. One who believes, as I do, that the standards-based movement is essential to closing the gap, must conclude that not enough schools are using standards-based reforms to give low-performing students, especially minorities, access to the same curriculum as everyone else. The latest trend report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tells the story of the gap for the past 25-plus years. And it was a good story for a long time. Between 1970 and 1988, the gap between the NAEP reading scores of black students and those of white students was cut in half; the math score gap, cut by one-third. Obviously, schools were doing something right, and black students were showing they could indeed learn when given greater opportunities to do so. Then in the 1990s, the progress stopped. Actually, it stopped for everyone (at slightly higher levels than in the 1970s), but black and Hispanic NAEP scores climbed aboard a roller coaster. They fell back, began to improve in some subjects, then regressed again. By 1999, the scores of black and Hispanic students were far below the records set in 1988. Trying to put a good face on a disturbing picture, NAEP officials and Secretary of Education Richard Riley pointed to steady improvements overall in math scores and higher rates of enrollment in more advanced math classes. The same arguments were heard with the College Board's release of the 2000 SAT scores: last year's seniors posted the highest math scores since 1969; verbal scores were unchanged. The percentage of minorities taking the SAT has increased 47% since 1987 and would be expected to pull the average scores down, so this was good news. However, the gap remains very wide, with blacks scoring 104 points lower than whites on the math portion of the SAT and 94 points lower on the verbal portion. These score gaps on the SAT actually widened during the 1990s. So what happened? At a time when state statutes, a general consensus about content standards, improved professional development, greater knowledge from research on learning, and pressure for accountability have been working more or less in tandem, why have the academic gaps grown larger? Researchers are scratching their heads on this one. David Grissmer of RAND points to the unprecedented resources made available to low-income schools by the War on Poverty as one factor in narrowing the gap and to a rising black middle class as another. However, he couldn't explain why the progress ended. His most recent research, described in Improving Student Achievement (RAND, 2000), uses the improvement of fourth- and eighth-grade NAEP math scores as the context for making state comparisons. The rise in scores in some states, he says, is a result primar-ily of both higher per-pupil expenditures and how the money is spent. …