New Report: The Black-White Achievement Gap: When Progress Stopped

Posted by on August 27, 2010

A far-reaching view toward stasis

A new report from Education Testing Services takes a long look at the achievement gap between black and white students, starting with its first narrowing at the turn of the last century and continuing to the first decade of the present century. The authors take special note of the era in the 1970s and ’80s that inaugurated the NAEP and provided the first data on national trends, which they say is important because it witnessed a “substantial narrowing of the gap in the subjects of reading and mathematics.” But in the decades since the late ’80s, the authors found “no clear trend in the gap, or sustained period of change in the gap in one way or another” — in other words, stagnation. During this time, there was little analysis of the gap while attention was directed to the vicissitudes of small gains and declines. “Anyone looking for a smoking gun as to why progress halted, establishing dead certainty, will not find it in this report,” the authors write. “Having posed the question of why progress halted, we hope to urge the research and policy communities to put this question high on the list of priorities, and encourage funders to make the resources available.”

See the report: http://www.ets.org/research/policy_research_reports/pic-bwgap