Achievement Gap In The United States
Achievement gap refers to the observed and persistent disparity on a number of educational measures between the performance of groups of students, especially groups defined by gender, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. The achievement gap can be observed on a variety of measures, including standardized test scores, grade point average, dropout rates, and college-enrollment and -completion rates. While this article focuses on the achievement gap in the United States, various gaps exist between groups in other nations as well. Research into the causes of gaps in student achievement between low-income minority students and middle-income white students have been ongoing since the publication of the report, "Equality of Educational Opportunity" (more widely known as the Coleman Report), commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education in 1966. That research suggests that both in-school factors and home/community factors impact the academic achievement of students and contribute to the gap.
The achievement gap, as noted in the trend data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, has become a focal point of education reform efforts. Groups like The Education Trust, Democrats for Education Reform and The Education Equality Project have made it their mission to close the achievement gap. Efforts to combat the gap have been numerous but fragmented, and have ranged from affirmative action and multicultural education to finance equalization, improving teacher quality, and school testing and accountability programs to create equal educational opportunities.
Read more about Achievement Gap In The United States: Origins and Causes of The Achievement Gap, Economic Implications, Narrowing The Achievement Gap, High-performing High-poverty and High-minority Schools, Racial Achievement Gap, Gender Achievement Gap in The United States, Implications of The Gap, Attempts To Reduce The Gap
Famous quotes containing the words united states, achievement, gap, united and/or states:
“It was evident that, both on account of the feudal system and the aristocratic government, a private man was not worth so much in Canada as in the United States; and, if your wealth in any measure consists in manliness, in originality and independence, you had better stay here. How could a peaceable, freethinking man live neighbor to the Forty-ninth Regiment? A New-Englander would naturally be a bad citizen, probably a rebel, there,—certainly if he were already a rebel at home.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained the vaster the appetite for more.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929)
“For women the wage gap sets up an infuriating Catch-22 situation. They do the housework because they earn less, and they earn less because they do the housework.”
—Sylvia Ann Hewitt (20th century)
“Hearing, seeing and understanding each other, humanity from one end of the earth to the other now lives simultaneously, omnipresent like a god thanks to its own creative ability. And, thanks to its victory over space and time, it would now be splendidly united for all time, if it were not confused again and again by that fatal delusion which causes humankind to keep on destroying this grandiose unity and to destroy itself with the same resources which gave it power over the elements.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divides States and churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)