Closing the Achievement Gap: Resources for School Administrators Looking to Make a Change

There is a wide disparity when it comes to students’ success in school. It’s known as the achievement gap, and the negative impact of this gulf can be felt across a wide range of demographics. While the passage of legislation and a focused effort to narrow this gap has yielded positive results among specific racial demographics, the schism’s persistent presence and its negative ramifications confirm that there is still much progress to be made.

This guide aims to look at the educational issues driven by the achievement gap, what strategies can be deployed to help narrow the discrepancy, and how educators and school administrators can affect a positive change on a local and communal level.

The Achievement Gap at a Glance

The achievement gap is defined as the difference between the academic performance of one societal group and another. In the U.S., the definitions of these groups have changed over the years. In the early twentieth century, for instance, this gap was noticed between wealthy American children of Western European descent and poor children of Italian and Eastern European immigrants. Yet even as landmark government decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education helped bring racial minority educational discrepancies into focus, the achievement gap and how to close it didn’t garner its modern level of scrutiny until the 1970s, when the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) began to measure the educational progress of students over time.

Today, these reports have helped education organizations such as the National Education Association (NEA) define a broader range of groups affected by the achievement gap.

The NEA identifies the following groups as having substantial gulfs in educational achievement when measured against other groups:

The NEA defines the achievement discrepancy felt by these groups through the following indicators:

It should be noted that LGBTQ students also meet the NEA’s criteria to meet the achievement gap, even though the group is not included in their identification metrics. According to survey results published by the National Education Association:

While gaps exist, data culled from NAEP points to a narrowing of the achievement gap for African American and Hispanic students. For example:

You can get greater details on the achievement gap by exploring the interactive graphs created by the Educational Opportunity Monitoring Project from Stanford CEPA. You can also visit the NAEP website to see results from their most recent assessment through a host of different categories.

Current and Proposed Strategies to Close the Achievement Gap

While the achievement gap has been truncated in certain groups, such as African Americans and Hispanics, it is still enough of an issue to warrant serious attention. This need has led to the development of several strategies aimed toward bringing a sense of educational equity to various demographics.

Arguably the most visible of these strategies is the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015, This act, which largely served as a replacement for the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2002, features several provisions that aim to drive success for schools and their students. Some of these provisions include:

While ESSA carries uniform academic standards, it also provides flexibility for states that issue specific NCLB-related requirements. This flexibility comes with the expectation that these states create targeted plans designed to narrow the achievement gap.

Another group that has looked to close the achievement gap on a more localized scale is the Minority Student Achievement Network (MSAN). Formed in 1999, this coalition of twenty-four urban and suburban multiracial school districts throughout the country aims to improve academic performance among students of color. According to their website, they achieve this through the following processes:

These types of programs are showing signs of serving their intended purposes. The National Center for Youth Law reports:

African American elementary school students in New York State have reduced the achievement gap in math by twelve points.

Hispanic elementary school students in New York State have narrowed the math achievement gap by thirteen points.

Assessment scores for Delaware minorities have improved by more than twenty points.

Unfortunately, there is still substantial work to be done before the goal of eliminating the achievement gap can be achieved. A study conducted by the North Central Regional Educational Lab indicates that the reading and math skills of twelfth-grade African American and Hispanic students across the nation are the approximate equivalent of eighth-grade white students.

You can read the full results of the North Central Regional Educational Lab study by clicking this link.

What Can School Administrators Do?

School administrators such as principals and superintendents are in a unique position to work on closing the achievement gap at the local level. The following strategies can help these education professionals make a positive difference in the groups that struggle to find achievement equality in their districts.

For more tips on how school administrators can close the achievement gap among African American and Hispanic students, click this link to Education Post. This web page from the NEA Foundation also provides links to several documents that can provide further information on how teachers and communities can get involved with closing the gap.