Bridging Disparities in U.S. Student Learning
Nine years after NCLB, although there have been improvements in test scores of U.S. minority students, serious gaps persist between the achievement of white students and their Black and Latino counterparts.
In Creating the Opportunity to Learn: Moving from Research to Practice to Close the Achievement Gap, authors A. Wade Boykin and Pedro Noguera, nationally recognized experts in the fields of education, psychology, and equity, critically examine what’s wrong with popular approaches to closing achievement gaps in U.S. schools and discuss more potent approaches. Drawing from decades of research, they detail strategies any teacher can take to promote strong student engagement, inner orientations to learning, and in-school assets for at-risk minority kids.
“Without a full understanding of the causes of the [achievement] gap, it is easy for schools to adopt strategies that either do not work or, in some cases, even exacerbate the problem,” explain the authors.
To bring clarity to the national dialogue, Boykin and Noguera get to the heart of the issue by calling for
