NYTimes on the Achievement Gap: What To Think

Paul Tough went long--really long--on the achievement gap in yesterday's New York Times Sunday magazine. While I'll quibble with some his conclusions and interpretations, on the whole I think he got the story right.

First, the quibbles. Tough frames the story by discussing the latest NAEP data, which is fine since there's no better source of info about national trends. Reading scores are relatively flat, math scores are up. But in tying NAEP data back to a discussion of the NCLB goal of 100 percent student proficiency by 2014, he says:

The most promising indications in the national test could be found in the fourth-grade math results, in which the percentage of poor students at the proficient level jumped to 19 percent in 2005, from 8 percent in 2000; for black students, the number jumped to 13 percent, from 5 percent. This was a significant increase, but it was still far short of the proficiency figure for white students, which rose to 47 percent in 2005, and it was a long way from 100 percent.

The implication is that while we've made some progress in closing the gap in math, we're still far, far short of 100 percent proficient. But the 100 percent goal isn't based on the stringent NAEP proficiency standard, it's based on individual state standards, a fact that Tough doesn't mention until the very end of the article. The typical state puts 4th grade math proficiency at around 75 to 80 percent, a whole lot closer to 100. One can argue whether they've set the bar high enough (I think many have not), but it's an important distinction to understand in discussing whether NCLB is realistic, or working.

Tough also critiques 2001 research from my former employer, The Education Trust, that pointed out that there are thousands of high-poverty, high-minority schools that have above average test scores in some grades and subjects. As Tough notes, critics responded that many of these schools weren't high performing in all grades and subjects, or were high-performing in some years and not others. But Ed Trust has followed up since then with many reports and searchable databases, unfortunately not mentioned in the article, that addressed these criticisms, showing that there really are schools out there that succeed for many students in many subjects for many years. For a list of schools in New York that outscored most other schools statewide for three years running in math, despite having students who are mostly poor and mostly minority, click here.

Tough also oversimplifies the political dynamics at work, making it sound like belief in the ability of schools to close the achievement gap is primarily a conservative position promoted by the likes of the Heritage Foundation. It's not, and it's an odd mistake to make in an article that references work from obviously non-conservative groups like Ed Trust, as well as self-described "liberal" education reformers running schools for disadvantaged students, as often as it does.

But all in all the article does a pretty thorough job of summarizing the extant research on why low-income and minority students come to school behind academically and what can be done to help them. KIPP schools feature prominently, as is often the case in these debates. Tough's conclusion, which I think is the right one, is that while the achievement gap is caused by a lot of deep-seated inequities that occur outside of schools, really good schools can go a long way to mitigating those problems--but only if they're really good schools.

It's not enough to stop giving disadvantaged students less money, worse teachers, and fewer educational resources, which is what we're doing now. We have to give them more of all of those things than we give other students, which is difficult and expensive--but not nearly as hard as managing the consequences of the inequitable school system we have today.

UPDATE: More from Matt Yglesias here, AFT here.