For decades, the persistent achievement gap between Black and White students has vexed educators, policymakers and researchers. Equally troubling is the fact that there had been progress—significant improvement throughout the 1970s and ‘80s—that came to an abrupt halt.
A 39-point gap in National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading test scores between Black and White 13-year-olds in 1971, for instance, fell to 18 points by 1988. The gap widened in the 1990s before falling to a 21-point difference in 2008. The average math score of Whites in this same age group was 46 points higher than that of Black students in 1971. The gap narrowed to a 24-point difference in 1986.
Researchers at Educational Testing Service’s (ETS) Policy Information Center set out to explain the factors that contributed to those gains and the reasons progress halted, drawing on existing and new data to examine the role declining neighborhoods, race-neutral policies, concentrated poverty and single-parent family structures, among other things, play on children’s achievement.
Researchers Paul E. Barton and Richard J. Coley found no clear culprit behind the persistent achievement gap but in the report, “The Black-White Achievement Gap: When the Progress Stopped,” point to “a wide and sticky web of conditions that are holding back progress.” The report offers no recommendations, noting that solutions to these formidable challenges will have to come from Black communities.
“Our modest objective is to help an interested and thoughtful reader to come to some judgments of their own; the research community does not have a monopoly on insight, and the policy machinery will continue to run,” the report says.
Diverse talks with Coley about why African-American student achievement took a turn for the worse.
Diverse: What prompted this study?
