Creating the Opportunity to Learn

Moving from Research to Practice to Close the Achievement Gap

A. Wade Boykin, Pedro Noguera

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781416614074
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

"Unless we believe that those who have more are inherently superior to those who have less, we should be troubled by the fact that patterns of achievement are often fairly predictable, particularly with respect to students' race and class."

In Creating the Opportunity to Learn, Wade Boykin and Pedro Noguera help navigate the turbid waters of evidence-based methodologies and chart a course toward closing (and eliminating) the academic achievement gap. Turning a critical eye to current and recent research, the authors present a comprehensive view of the achievement gap and advocate for strategies that contribute to the success of all children.

Boykin and Noguera maintain that it is possible to close the achievement gap by abandoning failed strategies, learning from successful schools, and simply doing more of what the research shows is most effective. Success is founded on equity, but equity involves more than simply ensuring students have equal access to education; equity also entails a focus on outcomes and results.

If we want to bring about significant improvements in those outcomes, we have to do more to address the context in which learning takes place. In short, we must create schools where a child's race or class is no longer a predictor for how well he or she might perform.

Before undertaking efforts to eliminate the disparities in academic outcomes that, in most districts, correspond to the race and class backgrounds of students (what we now refer to euphemistically as "closing the achievement gap"), it is essential that educators understand the nature of the gap and why it exists. Absent a clear understanding of the causes of the gap, it is easy for schools to adopt strategies that either do not work or, in some cases, even exacerbate the problem. We have a long history in this country of pursuing "quick-fix" reforms—phonics-based reading programs, smart boards and computer-based learning programs, scripted curricula, "teacher-proof" curricula—that promise a great deal but often seem to deliver little.

In many schools, it is also common for educators to fall into the trap of blaming others for the underperformance of their students. Uninvolved parents are a frequent target of blame, as are students typically accused of being unmotivated and not working hard enough. Misplaced priorities of district administrators and politicians are also commonly cited as reasons why more progress in raising student achievement has not been made. Although these issues may not be irrelevant to the persistence of the achievement gap, it would be a mistake for them to be treated as the cause. In the following chapters, we show that the achievement gap is actually a multidimensional phenomenon—one that must be confronted with an awareness of how the dimensions interact. Unless such an approach is taken, it is highly unlikely that efforts to counter the achievement gap will succeed. Importantly, to the degree that a school or district is mired in debate over who is to blame for the existence of the gap, and there is a reluctance to accept responsibility for finding solutions, there is little chance that the achievement gap will be closed or even reduced.

Chapter 1

What Are the Dimensions of the Gap?

In the United States, there are striking, persistent achievement gaps between Black and Latino students (both boys and girls) and their White counterparts.¹ These gaps show up even before students start formal schooling—in their knowledge of vocabulary, for example (Jencks & Phillips, 1998). Gaps in math and reading achievement have been documented at the beginning of kindergarten, and these gaps tend to widen over the course of the kindergarten year (Barbarin, 2002; Chatterji, 2006).

Gaps grow even wider within the same cohort of children by the 3rd grade, and the disparities are more pronounced in higher-order skill domains such as deriving meaning from text, drawing inferences beyond the literal text, and understanding rate and measurement in mathematics (Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, 2004; Murname, Willett, Bub, & McCartney, 2006). Black–White achievement gaps have been captured over time in results from the "nation's report card," the product of the periodic National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Over the last 30 years, test score disparities have shown up in successive cohorts of 9-, 13-, and 17-year-olds in reading, mathematics, and science (NAEP, 2005).

It is widely documented that the gap is multidimensional. Achievement and attainment gaps are revealed through a host of schooling indexes, including grade point averages; performance on district, state, and national achievement tests; rates of enrollment in rigorous courses; and differential placements in special education and gifted-and-talented programs, as well as across behavioral indicators such as school dropout, suspension, and referral rates.

These achievement and attainment gaps show up across the spectrum from preschool to college and across the full range of academic skills and content areas (Ryan & Ryan, 2005). It is instructive, for example, to examine math-performance differences inside high schools that serve White, Black, and Latino students together. James Byrnes (2003) has done so by examining NAEP math proficiency scores. Results gleaned from this national data set show that, overall, these mixed-race schools enrolled 79 percent, 13 percent, and 8 percent White, Black, and Latino students, respectively. Yet among the students who scored at or above the 80th percentile in math proficiency, 94 percent were White, whereas only 3 percent were Black and 3 percent were Latino. Representing these numbers somewhat differently, 26 percent of all the White students enrolled in these schools performed at or above the 80th percentile, but this was the case for only 7 percent of the Black and Latino students. White students were almost four times more likely than Black and Latino students to reach this performance level.

Moreover, when U.S. students are compared with students from other nations, especially in Europe and Asia, and with those students' tests of achievement in reading, mathematics, and science, they fall in the middle of the pack, suggesting that there is room for improvement for U.S. students in general. For example, data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) show that 4th and 8th grade students in the United States fall significantly behind the math performance levels of students from nations such as Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Belgium, the Netherlands, Hungary, Slovenia, and the Slovak Republic (Mullis, Martin, Gonzalez, & Chrostowski, 2004; TIMSS, 2003).

Closing these achievement and attainment gaps is a laudable goal for us as a society. However, whatever methods we use should not aim merely to catch up Black and Latino students to the levels of their White counterparts. We must also raise achievement for all students so we can close the gaps between the performance of U.S. students and their counterparts from around the world—but also simultaneously raise levels at a steeper rate for certain students of color. This should be our goal (Hilliard, 2003). Even successful schools and school districts cannot afford to rest on their laurels. If they are not proactively closing achievement gaps, raising achievement for all students, and preparing their students for the demands of the 21st century, they will soon fall short of what our society and communities require of them.

This examination of schooling calls for a two-tiered scheme to capture academic performance outcomes. We refer to these two levels as first-order and higher-order learning outcomes. First-order outcomes are those that have historically been used as the measuring sticks for student performance. They include what we would call basic knowledge and skill accumulation. In language arts, this would encompass such factors as mastering the alphabetic code, word reading fluency, comprehension, vocabulary, and language conventions (grammar, syntax, etc.); in math, it would include basic facts, algorithm fluency, calculation proficiency, basic problem solving, measurement, estimation, and so on. This category also includes long-term retention of information, as well as information retrieval when it is called for. Of course, performance on standardized tests and grade point averages also generally fall within this category. These outcomes are well justified, and although their relative importance has been disputed over the years, their successful attainment has generally served U.S. schooling well.

To achieve success in the 21st century, however, students must also achieve higher-order learning outcomes. In closing achievement gaps while raising achievement for all students, we must increasingly use these outcomes as essential academic barometers. These outcomes include knowledge-transfer skills—that is, being able to use knowledge to understand or solve similar problems, or to extrapolate from present understandings to a novel body of information or concepts. This category also requires students to do more than consume knowledge. They must become adept at generating knowledge and applying their knowledge and skills to solve real-world problems. Students should become adept at reflecting on what they have learned, to understand it more deeply and to process its implications and nuances. Rather than just accept what they have learned at face value, or assume that what is on the printed page or comes from the teacher's mouth is immune to challenge, students must judge what they have learned and be constructively critical of it—and of their own knowledge as well. Certainly, in this Information Age, when information itself is becoming a commodity, skills at knowledge communication will serve students well.

In all, there are three "achievement gaps" that must be confronted simultaneously: the one between White studen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I. Understanding the Achievement Gap
• Chapter 1. What Are the Dimensions of the Gap?
• Chapter 2. What's Race Got to Do with It?
• Part II. Analyzing the Research
• Chapter 3. Engagement
• Chapter 4. Guiding Functions
• Chapter 5. Asset-Focused Factors: Interpersonal Relationships
• Chapter 6. Asset-Focused Factors: Intersubjectivity
• Chapter 7. Asset-Focused Factors: Information-Processing Quality
• Part III. Applying What We Know
• Chapter 8. Why Are Some Schools Making More Progress Than Others?
• Chapter 9. What Can We Do to Close the Gap?
• References
• About the Authors
• Related ASCD Resources
• Study Guide
• Copyright