Overwhelming Achievement Gap Before School Begins

In my last post I wrote about the gap in vocabulary among  incoming students at the Kindergarten level.   I argued that it is a mistake to believe that any teacher can wave a magic wand and make up this difference with good teaching alone.   Learning takes time, I argued.  Learning is hard work.  Students who are educationally disadvantaged aren't going to make up the gap, unless they compensate for their disadvantage with extra time learning, and lots of it.  A ton of research has been accumulating on the cumulative learning disadvantage arising from shortfalls in vocabulary among disadvantaged students.

How big is this gap and what are the significance for public schools.  Many studies of incoming kindergartners seem to show that gap between advantaged and disadvantaged populations is approximately one standard deviation.  Some of you remember the standard deviation from college statistics.   Here's a picture of the familiar bell-shaped curve

The idea is that in a so-called "normal distribution," just about one third of the population is within one standard deviation above the median and another third, within one standard deviation below. Put differently, more than two thirds of the normally distributed population is less than one standard deviation of the median.  So, what does it mean if we say that the mean score of disadvantaged students is a full standard deviation below the median of advantaged?   Consider two populations, advantaged and disadvantaged.  The advantage might be economic, linguistic, racial or some other factor that results in a standard deviation difference between the advantaged group and the disadvantaged group.

First, randomly selecting one disadvantaged child and one advantaged child and comparing their scores will show the advantaged child exceeding the disadvantaged child 76 percent of the time and the disadvantaged child exceeding the advantaged  child only 24 percent of the time. Second, 84 percent of advantaged children will perform better than the average disadvantaged child, while 16 percent of disadvantaged children will perform better than the average advantaged child. Third, if a class that is evenly divided among advantaged and disadvantaged is divided into two equal-sized groups based on ability, then disadvantaged students will compose roughly 70 percent, and advantaged 30 percent, of the students in the lower performing group. Fourth, if a school district chooses only the top-scoring 5 percent of students for “gifted” courses, such classes will have thirteen times more from the advantaged group than the disadvantaged group.  Finally,  assume that a reading textbook is written so that the average advantaged student will read it at a 75 percent comprehension rate. The implied comprehension rate for the average disadvantaged student will be 53 percent, virtually guaranteeing that such a reader will not engage with the text. Rock and  Stenner, Assessment Issues in the Testing, of Children at School Entry (2005).

A full standard deviation between advantaged and disadvantaged groups is a huge gap with grave consequences for the disadvantaged group.  It doesn't mean that members of the disadvantaged group can't succeed, because some will.    But it means that the disadvantaged group faces overwhelming disadvantages right from the start of school, and that these disadvantages compound themselves, year after year, unless the disadvantages are attacked at the very beginning.  And, I am arguing that the attack on the disadvantage requires compensatory time -- more time learning during school and after school.  

The achievement gap is not a product of public schools, it is a product of the disadvantages that arise in families where the parents are themselves educationally disadvantaged.   Mastering the achievement gap requires improving public schools so that they can overcome overwhelming disadvantages.  They need to be massively better, not because they are terrible schools, but because we have set them a mission that is overwhelmingly difficult and challenging.   They need to move a group of children who come to school, on the average, a standard deviation behind, and whose disadvantages continue throughout their schooling.   

Suppose for example, half of the students who came to school practiced dribbling and shooting a basketball one hour a night throughout elementary school, while another group never touched a basketball at home.   How would those two groups perform on tests of dribbling and shooting?   I'll have more to say about this in the next post.....

"Making stuff up" about the achievement gap.....

The achievement gap has become a recurrent justification -- or should I say rationalization -- for radical alteration in public school funding. Several legislative leaders with responsibility for school funding at the legislature have repeatedly contended that public education in general has failed, and they have contended that this failure is proven by the persistence of the achievement gap. Indeed, several have suggested that we could attack the achievement gap more effectively, if only we would pull funding away from public schools and transfer that money to a voucher program. Throughout these discussions at the legislature, the claim that the public education system is causing the achievement gap runs largely accepted and unchallenged. Hand wringing editorials; documentaries; speeches from the Secretary of Education (who ought to know better), all accept this claim uncritically.

What really is the achievement gap, what causes it, and who has the solutions? Unless we understand the meaning of the achievement gap, it is impossible to craft sound policy:

We say that there is an achievement gap, because average white reading and math proficiency scores and non-white reading and math proficiency scores both have risen substantially, but that the gap between these scores remains.

Let me say this a different way. The achievement gap is not a measure of whether American students are doing better than they did a generation ago. Actually, the achievement gap is a manifestation of the fact that all students are doing better on the average, and that non-white students (on the average) are not gaining enough ground to close the gap. Highly respected education policy researcher Richard Rothstein provides persuasive statistics to support this important point in a recent article in the Washington Post, "How Bill Gates Misinterprets Education Facts." In his article, Rothstein points out that the most reliable longitudinal measure of student achievement is the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). NAEP provides trends for 4th, 8th, and 12th graders, disaggregated by race, ethnicity, and poverty, since about 1980 in basic skills in math and reading (called the “Long Term Trend NAEP”) and since about 1990 for 4th and 8th graders in slightly more sophisticated math and reading skills (called the “Main NAEP”).

He continues:

On these exams, American students have improved substantially, in some cases phenomenally. In general, the improvements have been greatest for African-American students, and among these, for the most disadvantaged. The improvements have been greatest for both black and white 4th and 8th graders in math. Improvements have been less great but still substantial for black 4th and 8th graders in reading and for black 12th graders in both math and reading. Improvements have been modest for whites in 12th grade math and at all three grade levels in reading.

Here are two charts he offers to prove his point. Take some time. Read them carefully, because they are probably the most important statistics in education as it pertains to the achievement gap. The challenge the repeated claim that minorities (on the average) are failing to make educational progress.

In the last four decades, Rothstein continues the percentage of colleges graduates in the United States has nearly doubled. In 1970, 16% of young adults (ages 25 to 29) were college graduates. Today, it is 31%. The improvement has been across the board: the share of African-American young adults who are college graduates has gone from 10% to 19%; for whites it has gone from 17% to 37%.

We face a great education challenge in America. We need more children to read proficiently. We need more students to read and write beyond proficiency standards. We need more students to master math and science. There are schools, and in some case entire school systems that can be rated as abject failures by any standard. We need to fix those schools and those school systems. But the people who claim that the story of American public education is one of abject failure, are "making stuff up." Some of them are making stuff up because they want to make things better, and by making things look uniformly bad, they think they will spur us to change. Some of them are making stuff up because they want to dismantle what they call "government schools," and shift money to privates. Some of them are making stuff up because, well everyone else is making stuff up too.

We have a crisis in American education. There are too many young people who are not realizing their potential. Too many of them are poor, are minorities, are first generation families, or are immigrants from third world countries. All of this requires fundamental change in American Education. But let us not develop those changes on bogus information.

Because folks at the legislature are using the achievement gap as an excuse for their favorite solutions, I'm going to spend the next few posts taking a look at the causes of the achievement gap and potential solutions. There are some very promising reforms underway across the country. Some of them require major fundamental change in how we deliver instruction, how we use the labor force, and how we train teachers and administrators. None of those solutions involve pulling funds out of K-12 education, or dismantling our system of public education.