Close Achievement Gap by Discussing Race, Expert Says
In a country where white students vastly outperform black and Hispanic students on national standardized tests, one education innovator says the performance gap can be eliminated on a school-by-school basis by having honest discussions with teachers about race.
"We like to create proxies for conversations around race," says Glenn Singleton, president and CEO of Pacific Educational Group, a consulting firm based in San Francisco that's dedicated to addressing racial education disparities. "We talk about poverty, not recognizing that poor white kids outperform poor black and brown kids."
Singleton argues that many teachers don't know how to relate to students who are of a different race. "Along with conversations about English-language acquisition [for Hispanics] and poverty's impact on students' readiness to learn, we have to have a continuous