A national injustice
“Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, find its mission and fulfill it or betray it.”
- Frantz Fanon, Martinican scholar and psychiatrist
The achievement gap is one of the greatest injustices — and callings — of our time.
Across the country, children of color and children of poverty face unequal access to education. As a result, they do worse on nearly ever measure of student achievement: test scores, grades, high school graduation rates, college attendance and graduation rates.
The disparities are shocking. The average black twelfth grader reads at the same level as the average white eighth grader. Only one in ten children growing up in a low-income community will graduate from college.
One slice of the achievement gap. Source: The College Board
What caused the achievement gap?
For most of the twentieth century, conventional wisdom held that the achievement gap was caused by genetics. IQ tests showing that, on average, African-Americans underperformed whites seemed to prove that some races were less capable of achievement than others.
Over the last few decades, this has begun to change. New research on children shows that babies of all races are born with the same level of intelligence. New research into the nature of intelligence is showing that IQ is as much as product of nurture as nature. And a new generation of inspired teachers is proving that, given the opportunity, all children can learn.
Another slice of the gap. Source: National Assessment of Educational Progress
Why hasn’t it gone away?
This is a topic of intense debate. I believe the achievement gap has persisted because its underlying causes have not gone away:
Children who grow up in low-income communities face extra challenges
Some of these challenges are material: access to adequate health care, nutrition, and housing. Others are less tangible. Children who aren’t exposed to quality educational experiences early on, at home or in pre-school, don’t develop the cognitive and non-cognitive skills they need to succeed at school. Children raised in dangerous communities develop skills that help them survive on the streets, but get in the way of their formal education. Children without positive role models may never develop the motivation to achieve academically.
Schools do not yet have the capacity to meet these needs
Too often, the students who need the most from school get the least. America’s public schools were designed to prepare children from low-income families for labor, not college. As a result, students in low-income communities get less-skilled teachers and administrators, dilapidated buildings, and less access to enriching experiences inside and outside of school.
In many schools, low-income children continue to face the soft bigotry of low standards and lower expectations. Even in schools where expectations are high, teachers and students struggle with curricula that were not designed to bridge the gap between low-income backgrounds and college-level aspirations.
How can we solve this problem?
While the data clearly shows that some students face greater challenges, it also shows that schools and school systems can help students meet those challenges. Across the country, innovative schools and teachers are proving that, when given the opportunity, children from low-income communities excel.
I had the good fortune to teach in one of these schools, located in what used to be America’s worst school district, Washington, DC. In my forthcoming book I tell the story of my struggle to give my students a first-class education, a struggle I shared with thousands of teachers, young and old, in communities across the country.
Like them, I believe that all children can learn, a belief that doesn’t sound that radical until you’ve been inside a school where children aren’t learning. I want you to experience firsthand the enormous obstacles that children in America’s low-income communities face, as well as the magic that happens when we tap into their innate potential to learn.
This struggle is one of our generation’s defining missions. My hope is that my writing will, in some small way, inspire you to join it.