ETS Report: Progress Has Stalled in Closing the Black-White Achievement Gap
No progress for last 20 years
Reaching equality could take decades
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- Jason Baran
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- Jason Baran
After a long period of progress in narrowing the Black-White educational attainment and achievement gaps, that progress has stalled, according to a new report from Educational Testing Service titled, "The Black-White Achievement Gap: When Progress Stopped." Moreover, some research indicates that reaching equality could take 50 to 100 years if current patterns continue.
It has been 45 years since Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote his landmark and controversial report on the deterioration of low-income Black families, "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action," and evidence gathered over the past several decades supports the assertion that deteriorating family structure, neighborhoods, and schools threaten to undermine the development of disadvantaged children.
This report, written by Paul E. Barton and Richard J. Coley of ETS's Policy Information Center, examines the periods of progress and stagnation over the past several decades in closing the achievement gap; looking for the factors that contributed to the progress and the reasons for why it stopped.
Coley, Director of the ETS Policy Information Center explains, "National Assessment of Educational Progress data starting from the 1970s reveal a steady narrowing of the gap until the late 1980s. The last 20 years have essentially yielded a period of stability in spite of a lot of national attention to the gap, and measures taken that were expected to narrow it. We want to know, 'why?'"
The report focuses on three time periods beginning with the 1970s and 80s during which a substantial narrowing of the gap was seen in the subjects of reading and mathematics. Next, the research shows that the decades since the late 1980s have produced a sustained period of no change in the gap. Finally, the authors go back to the beginning of the 20th Century when the gap in educational attainment levels first started to narrow with progress halting, ironically, for those born in the mid-1960s when landmark legislation such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act and th