50 Years Later:
Can current education policy finish the work started with Brown?

By Karin Chenoweth

Black Issues In Higher Education first started publishing a year after the 1983 "A Nation at Risk" report shocked many into taking seriously the sorry nature of elementary and secondary education in this country. The report's dire warnings of a "rising tide of mediocrity," bolstered by data on the rarity of academic rigor in American schools, have been debated ever since by those who see in the report an overblown criticism of public schools. After all, the report's critics have argued, the American economy is a powerhouse, and the ingenuity of its people a marvel for all the world to wish for. Why would you want to criticize the schools that have created such conditions? If you look at the top kids in public schools, the report's critics say, they match and beat any kids around the world. True, some kids don't meet those standards, but it's important to focus on the half of the glass that's full, not the half that's empty.
For 20 years debates along those lines have been swirling around, but in the past few years they have crystallized in ways that are of enormous importance to poor kids and kids of color. Because it turns out that those "top kids" are, for the most part, drawn from a very narrow section of students, mostly White and mostly middle and upper-middle class.
Huge swaths of students are not only not doing as well as the "top kids," but are doing horribly. We know that because in the last decade or so, there has been a push to "disaggregate" data to get a clearer picture of what is going on in schools, and what we can see has been deeply disturbing.
One thing we see, for example, is that, on average, Black and Latino 17-year-olds read and do math about as well as White 13-year-olds when measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Every assessment has its critics, and NAEP is no exception. But other measures, including SAT scores and state test scores, show roughly the same thing, so —  although it is possible to quibble around the edges — there is no argument that there is what has come to be called an "achievement gap."