The Racial Achievement Gap Refuses to Close

Last time, I focused on the education gap that exists between our U.S. students and the international community. Our education system continues to flounder in comparison to the rest of the world.

Even worse, within the United States, we continue to have a racial achievement gap that resists despite all efforts to address it. With more than half of all students now being non-white, according to The Atlantic, the racial achievement gap becomes an even greater factor.

We have worked tirelessly in government and education to narrow the achievement gap between the races since the 1970s. Some progress was made into the 1980s, but we have ample information that little has changed since then. At SoundEnglish, we believe a student’s reading capacity will be the major factor in school success. Consequently, we will focus on the reading statistics.

What Is the Racial Achievement Gap?

The sources of the data are the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the College Board. NAEP tests our fourth and eighth graders every two years in reading and math. In addition, our college-bound juniors and seniors take the SAT each year.

Students are categorized by race, gender, and, to a lesser degree, income level. This allows the test administrators to generate data that compares one category of students to another. The racial achievement gap compares the scores of students based on their race or ethnicity.

How Serious Is the Gap?

Once the conversation turns to statistics, it often becomes more difficult to understand. Suffice to say that the highest score possible on the NAEP reading test is 500. The graphic to the left shows average scores for the various race/ethnicity groups for the 2017 test. Similarly, the graphic to the right shows average scores for the SAT based on identified race/ethnicity groups.

According to the Brookings Institution, the gap is greatest between whites and blacks, and it hovers between .8 and .9 standard deviations. In plain English, this is a difference in about two years of schooling.

When Will We Narrow the Gap?

The NAEP has compared fourth-graders since 1992. In all that time, the average reading score has increased by five points, going from 217 to 222. Since our methods have failed to raise the average score, which includes all the groups, it is not likely that our current methods will do anything to narrow the racial achievement gap.

Next time, we will examine the low-income gap in reading and draw some conclusions about what might be done.