In September of 2020, Jospeh Workmen and Anke Heyder published a study that used data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 to explore, and try to explain, the gender achievement gap in education. They found that the gender achievement gap is mainly caused by the societal structure that surrounds high school years: “Males were 1.75 times as likely to report that they would be unpopular for trying hard in school and 1.50 times as likely to report they would be made fun of for trying hard in school” (Gender achievement gaps; the role of social costs of trying hard in high school). Starting in 1981, women started to surpass men in receiving bachelor’s degrees, and, to this day, are continuing to widen the gap. After reading about the newfound social costs to trying hard in high school, I reflected on my days spent in high school. I realized just how large of an impact the social costs of trying hard in school really were. Even though I had friends that all did well in school, we all seemed to hide the fact that when we weren’t playing sports or hanging out, we were all reading, writing, or studying. My friend group allowed everyone around us to think that we were the kids that never spent any time on their school work, and were just naturally smart (something that Workmen and Heyder mention is a constant that they found throughout their research). Now that I know we inadvertently added to the societal pressures on men of not showing effort towards education, I wish I could go back and let it be known that I strove to get the grades that I did in high school.
In 2008, the American Psychological Association (APA) began conducting research to see if the implementation of zero tolerance policies to see if the way these policies are being enacted are actually helping the schools. Beginning in the 1990s, schools began to borrow the philosophy of zero tolerance polices that was being used in the war on drugs (APA, 2008), and they did so to try and ensure the safety of the students in the schools. The APA found that, while there isn’t a ton of data available on the effects of zero tolerance policies, that “in general, data tended to contradict the presumptions made in applying a zero tolerance approach to maintaining school discipline and order” (APA, 2008). They found that zero tolerance policies actually tend to create a worse school climate, and that in implementing zero tolerance policies, schools tended to spend a disproportionate amount of time on disciplining students. This leads to something known as the school-to-prison pipeline, that is identified later in the timeline.
In a book published by Howard Adelman and Linda Taylor titled, Addressing Barriers to Learning: In the Classroom and Schoolwide, published in May of 2017, they address one of the main issues with our schooling system right off the bat; with no surprise, it relates to poverty. After looking at studies done on the make-up of low-income areas and the student’s achievement in those areas, they’ve addressed the fact that many poverty children and new immigrants in those areas have often “developed a range of other cultural, subcultural, and and language abilities that many schools are unprepared to accommodate, let alone capitalize on” (Adelman and Taylor, 2017). I think that the influence of new immigrant students needs to be paid much more attention to since they do come in with different cultural and subcultural needs that our public education system is not equipped to take into account. If our schools can’t teach new immigrants because of their cultural backgrounds, then how can we ever expect for the achievement gap to close?
The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 has also been a contributor to the educational achievement gap as we know it. It’s well known that impoverished areas score lower on their standardized tests, and have a lesser likelihood of graduating from high school, and it’s for that reason that the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 has perpetuated the achievement gap. In an article written by Kevin J. Payne and Bruce J. Biddle titled Poor School Funding, Child Poverty, and Mathematics Achievement, published in 1999, they write: “Urban Institute recently estimated that, as a result of ‘welfare reform,’ 1.1 million more children will shortly be added to the poverty rolls in the United States” (Payne and Biddle, 1999). By putting 1.1 million more children into the poverty rolls in the U.S., we were actively widening the achievement gap as we know it.
Hillsborough County, Tampa, Florida, 1971: This was a time when white flight was hitting the area hard in relation to the desegregation of the local schooling system. A lot of white families moved out to the suburbs to avoid sending their children to a fully segregated school in the city; however, the court system mandated a busing system to make sure that black and whites could go to school together. White parents were furious, and actively tried to fight back against this decision. While they were unsuccessful in keeping black children out of “all-white” schools in their areas, they did successfully put even more burden on the city-dwelling black community. The white fought for “one-way” busing that made it so blacks could bus into their schooling system, but by no means would they let their children go to the black schools in the city. This put a lot of pressure and effort on the black community, who experienced a lot of pressure in the first place, and lead to a lower likelihood of equitable outcomes of schooling until the state fully achieved desegregation (which didn’t happen for years after 1971). (Kimmel, Elinor. 1992 – Hillsborough County School Desegregation Busing and Black High Schools in Tampa, Florida April 1971- September 1971).
In 1996, J.S. Coleman et al. released a report that studied the effects that induced the achievement gap in the educational system in response to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Payne and Biddle, 1999). This report changed the way that the public viewed the crisis of the achievement gap. The report “was lengthy, its procedures and statistics were complex, and its text was murky—and, as a result, almost nobody actually read it” (Payne and Biddle, 1999); however, since it was produced and released by well-known scholars, it became one of the main texts to cite when it came to the belief that schools had little impact on achievement. Conservative thinkers used it to justify their poor attitude toward public schooling, and lawyers began to cite it in high-cost lawsuits that “argued against demands for greater educational equitability” (Payne and Biddle, 1999). While Coleman later went back and redid some of the experiments to try and fix what was wrong with the original, the damage had already been done: “Its findings were vigorously promoted—by the authors of the report, by conservative forces hostile to public schools, and by those motivated to preserve funding inequities—and its suspect results concerning the supposedly minuscule effects of school characteristics passed quickly into the public domain as a ‘confirmed fact’ (Payne and Biddle. 1999).
“The No Child Left Behind Act Raises Growing Concerns” is a piece written by Kate McReynolds, and it highlights some of the major concerns in our educational system since the installment of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001. Kate writes about how the implementation of the NCLB has led schools to cut their curriculum drastically, specifically cutting history, science, and the arts to put more of a focus on math and reading. By doing this, schools are severely inhibiting their student’s ability to be ready for real-world scenarios, as well as reducing critical thinking skills. Not only are schools cutting their curricula, but they’re also moving to multiple-choice only, high stake testing. This puts massive pressure on students. McReynolds writes that ” [a] Seattle school nurse described third graders coming to her office in tears for fear of failing the WASL and her own son began sleepwalking before his fourth grade test” (McReynolds, 2006). These policies of cutting down curricula, and basing tests on test-prep for multiple choice, is leading our children to rely mainly on a process-of-elimination style thinking, which does not really leave room for free-thinkers. This is a big problem, and if we don’t get away from this standard of high-stakes testing focusing on multiple choice questions, then a whole generation of children will not have the skills they need to be apart of, or change, the systems of the world as we know it.
In 2020, Jennifer L. Martin and Jeniffer N. Brooks co-oped an article titled Turning White: Co-Opting a Profession through the Myth of Progress, An Intersectional Historical Perspective of Brown v. Board of Education. In this article, they explore some of the negative effects that immediately came out of the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1955. While the decision to rule segregated schools as unconstitutional was seen as a win at the time, there were many changes that actually hindered the ability of black students to learn effectively in the schools they found themselves in. They write, “Prior to the Brown decision, Black schools in Topeka, for example, were well-funded and highly respected. Black teachers were esteemed, and the teaching profession in general was prestigious” (Martin and Brooks, 2020). They go on to mention how W.E.B. Du Bois argued that black teachers were more equipped to teach black students because of their knowledge of the culture differences between blacks and whites. However, “as schools became integrated, Black teachers were pushed out of the profession, the prestige of the profession decreased, and Black students became trapped in underfunded schools with inexperienced white teachers with little to no understanding about how to teach SoC” (Martin and Brooks, 2020). They go on later in the article to mention how this could be a contributing factor to the fact that our teaching force in the U.S. is now about 80% white. Without proper knowledge of a different culture, white teachers that teach students of color may actually be hindering their ability to learn, and feel as though they’re supposed to be in school, by effectively stripping them of their own culture to better fit in with a white society.
When I was in high school, I saw something that was often overlooked and ignored when it came to my school’s extracurricular activities. I learned this year in my ED253 class that after-school extracurriculars can lead to a better performance in academics, and I was then able to make the connection as to why what I experienced in high school was so important. When I got to my junior year, there came an uproar of anger from female students about the school’s track team. Our track team was one team, a male team. There was no women’s track and field team. This effectively took away opportunities for many girl’s in my school to participate in an extracurricular that they actually enjoyed. Without the ability to find an extracurricular that interested them, they were left out of the overall school community; however, by the time I was a senior, my school had implemented a women’s track and field team. This was seen as a huge win, and the girl’s in my high school rejoiced in their newfound ability to participate in an extracurricular that they enjoyed.
While taking a psychology during my collegiate time, I learned about a phenomenon called the “self-fulfilling prophecy.” The self-fulfilling prophecy functions on the premise that, say, you’re surrounded by people that all have college degrees (like a suburban neighborhood), you’re much more likely to attend a college in order to receive a college degree. This is something that I’ve seen in my life that feels as though it helps perpetuate the achievement gap in education. I’ve lived in any places, I’ve stayed connected to a lot of my friends that I lived around, and I’ve been able to see differences in the ways in which we live based on who we’re around. I was expected, and expected myself to get a college degree because the people around me had college degrees and pushed me to get a college degree; however, I have friends that lived in super rural areas for their whole lives, and as a result, never intended to go to college, instead opting to go into the trades (like construction or union work). Unfortunately, this also happens to many children in low-income areas or areas stricken with poverty. A lot of these children don’t have people around them (to the same degree as suburban, well-off children) that have college degrees to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Instead, they see the people around them working multiple jobs just to try to get by. So, these children grow up with the thought that they’ll also have to do the same thing. This can lead to lower effort in school with more of a focus on working and more instantaneous rewards for hard work (like a weekly paycheck instead of years in school to be able to get a larger weekly paycheck, or even a salary). If we want to tackle the educational achievement gap, we have to put more of a focus on giving children the role models, thought processes, and community needed to increase their chances of getting into higher education.
Another way that the educational system is run that may lead to the achievement gap is by way of “tracking.” Tracking in schools is “the practice of grouping students by achievement levels into differentiated curricula” (Chmielewski, 2014). This tracking system starts, often times, at a young age and continues through to upper-secondary schooling. There are two type of tracking, educational/vocational streaming, and course-by-course tracking. The U.S. predominantly uses course-by-course tracking, which is the “offering courses at varying levels of difficulty in one or more subjects within a school” (Chmielewski, 2014). This can lead to an achievement gap because certain students are recognized and placed in higher level classes at a younger age than their peers, giving them an advantage when it comes to standardized testing. This also effects the chances of a student getting into higher-secondary schools. Chmielewski writes that, “[using a] less explicit course-by- course tracking, they [schools] may give more low-track students the expectation of college without giving them greater preparation to succeed in college” (Chmielewski, 2014). This is because students placed on a low-track still may have expectations of going to college, but the school’s placement of the student into a low-track puts the student way behind their peers in terms of knowledge through education.
The “school-choice” put in place by Betsy DeVos is the latest installment of neoliberalization into our school systems, and it’s yet another government intervention into education that could lead to the widening of the already prevalent achievement gap. School choice refers to the marketization of education, and giving people the ability to reallocate their funding for local public schools to private schooling or homeschooling. The problem with school choice is that there is always a winner or a loser (Jason Blakely, 2017). “Market choice does, however, favor those who already have the education, wealth, and wherewithal to plan, coordinate, and execute moving their children to the optimal educational setting” (Blakely, 2017). As we can see, school choice very often favors the rich; so much so, that in Detroit, a place where DeVos spent a lot of time putting her plan into affect, what is called a “educational dessert” has sprung up. “…Two decades of this marketization has led to extreme defunding and closing of public schools; the funneling of taxpayer money toward for-profit charter ventures; economically disadvantaged parents with worse options than when the neoliberal social experiment began; and finally, no significant increase in student performance” (Blakely, 2017). School-choice favors the rich, and by favoring the rich, we’re doing nothing but helping the achievement gap between different SES levels become more apparent.
“The banking concept of education, which serves the interest of oppression, is also necrophilic. Based on a mechanistic, static, naturalistic, spatialized view of consciousness, it transforms students into receiving objects. It attempts to control thinking and action, leads women and men to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power” (Freire, 2013/1972). Paulo Freire was writing there about the inhibitory power of the banking system of education, which is widely used throughout the United States. The banking concept of education, as we can see from this one quote from a long reading produced by Freire, is one way in which the rich and powerful are able to create a stark divide between achievement in school, and in life. They are able to control a public education in which students are not taught to think for themselves, and are often lead to work robotic nine-to-five jobs without thinking they can change their path in life, much less the world around them. In perpetuating the banking system of education, the people in control of our country are able to keep the common-person down ‘below’ the leaders. By doing this, they are successfully keeping common-people away from the political landscape, and in turn leading to a giant cycle of familial matters and connections creating educational opportunities for the children of people that are ‘in-the-know.’ If we, as a nation, want to really start tackling the problem of educational achievement gaps, we must first uproot the way in which our educational system is squashing our abilities to think for ourselves and enact change in the world.
The impact of historical redlining on educational achievement in massive in the United States. “In the 1930s, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) ranked property values based on residents’ race, class, and immigration status” (White, Li, Ashby, Ferri, Wang, Bern, Cosier, 2019). They did this in order to stop the “infiltration of ‘lower-class occupancy and inharmonious racial groups’ ((Federal Housing Administration, 1936, Part II, Section 2, para. 229) White et. al., 2019). It’s a well known fact that local taxes affect the overall quality of the school system in the area, meaning that higher taxes will lead to more school funding. Because of redlining, white flight to suburban areas, and out of urban areas, led to higher taxes in suburbia and lower taxes in urban areas. This means that primarily white suburban area students will attend schools with more funding, generally leading to more academic success, while urban students are forced to attend schools with low funding. Historical redlining has led to the entrapment of urban youth in schools with low funding due to low taxes, furthering the achievement gap in education to this day.
Since the implementation of Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act in 1990, there has been growing concern with the representation of minorities placed in special education. Todd Elder, David Figlio, Scott Imberman, and Claudia Persico authored a study that looked at these special education gaps. They start with the notion that “about 70% of all Black students attend schools where more than half of students are non-white. By contrast, just 13% of white students attend predominantly non-white schools” (Elder et. al, 2021). They found that when in mainly-white schools, minorities are often over-represented in special education, but underrepresented in special education when in mainly minority schools while whites are overrepresented. Their findings show that it may be a case of ‘you’re different so you stand out more,’ more than anything else; however, when you see the figure of that only 13% of white students attend predominantly non-white schools, this begins to raise concerns. While the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act aimed to create equal educational opportunities for students with disabilities, it actually led to overrepresentation of minority students in predominantly white schools, and underrepresentation of minority students in predominantly non-white schools. This back-and-forth of overrepresentation and underrepresentation leads to the inability to actually see if gaps in our special education are widening or closing in, but “a formula that fails to account for health and other baseline differences among students may unintentionally encourage schools and districts to reduce access to special education services for the minority students who need them” (Elder et. al., 2021). We can’t allow purely the standing-out based on skin tone to be the leading factor in who gets the special education they need.
In 2019, H. Wenwen Ni, Brianna M. Goodale, and Yuen K. Huo published a study that looked at the affects of affluent social cues on college-level students from different SES categories test scores. Their results found that students from high-SES areas scored significantly higher than their low-SES peers when affluent social cues were around, but the gap between the two groups shrunk when there were no affluent social cues present. Affluent social cues mean things like wrought-iron gates, high walls, perfectly green lawns, and many more examples of things common to 4-year universities. It was one of the first studies looking at this, but by their preliminary research it’s easy to see that placing every student around affluent social cues once they enter college is creating a large educational achievement gap between high-SES students and low-SES students.
“In the early years of the Texas accountability system, one of the first high-pressure testing systems in the country, some teachers reported that they reduced–sometimes very substantially–the amount of time devoted to teaching science, which was not tested, in order to make additional time for prepping kids in math and reading” (Koretz, 2017). In Chapter 7 of The Testing Charade; pretending to make schools better, Koretz writes about the rise of test prep and the implications that it has on children in our school system. This creates a system where students miss out on social studies and history, in turn making them less aware as people in our democratic republic (which is very, very bad). It also “can create a misleading positive impression of the impact of test-based accountability” (Koretz, 2017). Schools that implement these high-stakes testing are actively making it harder for their students to become informed citizens in their country, and right now, we need as many informed citizens as we can have. The worst part is, bad test prep disproportionately effects already disadvantaged students. This means that students that need the most help to hone in their critical thinking skills, as well as their critical consciousness, are being taught to conform to the ways the world works around them, not to have the ability to change it.
In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling in the historic court case Brown v. Board of Education. They ruled that school segregation was no longer allowed throughout the United States; however, the pushback to their ruling was astounding. Instead of creating desegregated schools, the Supreme Courts ruling led to what is known as “freedom of choice.” Freedom of choice was a ruling that said white students, as well as students of color, could choose which schools they wanted to attend. As you could expect, white students almost never chose to attend a mainly black school, while students of color tried to enroll in primarily white schools, but were consistently pushed out due to social pressures. The implementation of the original Brown v. Board of Education led to the allowance of schools to deem themselves desegregated, while still holding on to predominantly white students and disallowing students of color equal opportunities. (Ravitch, D. 2010)
In 1992 the Supreme Court released a ruling on the case of Freeman v. Pitts that “redefined the standards set in Greene v. County Board o Education that specified when a district could claim to have achieved ‘unitary status’ and thus have its desegregation order lifted and be returned to normal control” (Rosiek and Kinslow, 2016). This decision, and the subsequent thought process of how racial balance should only be pursued if there is a direct causal relationship between an imbalance and constitutional violation, basically took the muscle out of the Greene decision. If a school could deem that the racial pattern in their schools could be attributed to racial patterns in housing that’s not directly created by the district, then they could apply to have their desegregation mandate lifted. This had led to the resegregation of many of our schools nationwide. This decision actively rolled back the progress made by the Greene decision, and was seen as a victory for advocates for segregation. As I wrote earlier, redlining play a huge part in where racial groups live, and they weren’t put in place by districts themselves, so almost every school in historically redlined areas had the ability to go back to segregated schools by saying that it’s just the natural order of their district, which is very, very bad.
Another government implemented plan that has led to achievement gaps in education between students in the U.S. is the Indian Removal Act of 1831, and the boarding schools that came out of it (Spring, Joel, 2013). the U.S. government, while expanding westward towards land that they’d deemed Native American’s, implemented boarding schools for Native American Children in order to take them away from their families and erase their culture and history. This has negative effects on the Native American population to this day. It created a large gap between Native American students and American students, and created a general feeling that Native Americans were less human than the sons and daughters of colonizers. Interviews with Native American students show that, to this day, they’re suffering the impacts of the hate that the U.S. government brought on them during the 19th and 20th centuries.
Christopher A. Mallet published a study in 2015 about the school-to-prison pipeline, and found that these zero tolerance policies are negatively impacting student achievement, disproportionately affecting vulnerable children, adolescents, and their families (Mallet, 2015). This shows that, in areas that have a lower-income, usually urban schools, the academic success of students becomes lower than those of students who reside in higher-income areas. This, in turn, widens the achievement gap between areas with lower-income and areas with higher-income.
Works cited:
Workman, J.; Heyder, A. Gender achievement gaps: The role of social costs to trying hard in high school. Soc. Psychol. Educ. 2020.
“Are Zero Tolerance Policies Effective in the Schools?: An Evidentiary Review and Recommendations.” American Psychologist, vol. 63, no. 9, 2008, pp. 852–862., doi:10.1037/0003-066x.63.9.852.
Adelman, Howard S., and Linda Taylor. The Implementation Guide to Student Learning Supports in the Classroom and Schoolwide: New Directions for Addressing Barriers to Learning. Corwin Press, 2006.
Payne, Kevin J., and Bruce J. Biddle. “Poor School Funding, Child Poverty, and Mathematics Achievement.” Educational Researcher, vol. 28, no. 6, 1999, pp. 4–13., doi:10.3102/0013189×028006004.
Kimmel, Elinor (1992) “Hillsborough County School Desegregation Busing and Black High Schools in Tampa, Florida April 1971- September 1971,” Sunland Tribune: Vol. 18 , Article 7.
Available at: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/sunlandtribune/vol18/iss1/7
K. McReynolds. Summer 2006. The No Child Left Behind Act Raises Growing Concerns. Encounter. Vol 19 (Issue 2). 33-36.
Martin, Jennifer L., and Jennifer N. Brooks. “Turning White: Co-Opting a Profession through the Myth of Progress, An Intersectional Historical Perspective of Brown v. Board of Education.” Educational Considerations, vol. 45, no. 2, 2020, doi:10.4148/0146-9282.2190.
Chiu, Ming & Chow, Bonnie & Joh, Sung. (2017). Streaming, Tracking and Reading Achievement: A Multilevel Analysis of Students in 40 Countries.. Journal of Educational Psychology. 109. 10.1037/edu0000188.
Blakely, J. 2017, 17 April. How School Choice Turns Education into a Commodity. The Atlantic.
Freire, P. (2013/1972). The banking concept of education. In A. S. Canestrari & B. A. Marlowe (Eds.), Education foundations: An anthology of critical readings (3rd ed., pp. 103-115). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
White, Julia M., et al. “Same As It Ever Was: The Nexus of Race, Ability, and Place in One Urban School District.” Educational Studies, vol. 55, no. 4, 2019, pp. 453–472., doi:10.1080/00131946.2019.1630130.
Elder, Todd E. and Figlio, David N. and Imberman, Scott Andrew and Persico, Claudia, School Segregation and Racial Gaps in Special Education Identification (May 2019). NBER Working Paper No. w25829, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3387185
Ni, H. Wenwen, et al. “How the Rich Get Richer: Affluence Cues at Universities Increase the Social Class Achievement Gap.” Social Psychology of Education, vol. 23, no. 1, 2019, pp. 125–141., doi:10.1007/s11218-019-09528-z.
Koretz, D. (2017). The testing charade: pretending to make schools better. Chapter 7, Test Prep. pp. 93-118. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press.
Ravitch, Diane. The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. Basic Books, 2016.
Rosiek, J. and Kathy Kinslow, K. (2016). Resegregation as curriculum: the meaning of the new segregation in U.S. public schools. Chapter 1 Resegregation in Riverton and the Nation. pp. 1-18. New York: Routledge.
Spring, Joel 2013. Deculturalization and the Struggle for Equality. Chapter 2: Native Americans: Deculturalization. Schooling, and Globalization. New York: McGraw Hill.pp. 21-40.
Mallett, C. (2016). The School-to-Prison Pipeline: A Critical Review of the Punitive Paradigm Shift. Child & Adolescent Social Work Journal, 33(1), 15–24.
Mac's Interest in Literature and Education 