Note to High Performing High Schools: Mind the Gap

On the front page of the Washington Post today, there’s an article about racial achievement gaps in SAT scores at local “high performing” high schools. The gist of the article is that high overall SAT scores at some high schools hide the fact that average scores for African American students at these schools are much lower. This is precisely why NCLB requires data to be disaggregated by subgroup—so that even the “good” schools have to make sure that every student is at least reaching proficiency in reading and math.

The article focuses on the role of families—that parents need to make sure their children aren’t falling through the cracks, that they’re taking advantage of honors and AP courses, and that they receive extra help when needed. But what the article doesn’t mention is that parents don’t have to wait until their child is a junior in high school to find out whether achievement gaps are a problem. State assessment scores can provide a warning sign before students sit down for the SAT.

Last year, I wrote about big achievement gaps on the state assessment at the much-vaulted Walt Whitman High School in Montgomery County, Maryland—in Algebra 2, the gap between white students and African American students is over 50 percentage points, and in English it’s over 40 percentage points. These are the two primary subject areas on the SAT, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that at Whitman white students score on average 315 points higher than African American students on the SAT.

Some might say that the number of African American students in these schools is just too small to make these kinds of comparisons, but there’s a difference between statistical significance—having enough students to make a statistical judgment on the difference between two groups—and practical significance, which asks whether the difference between two groups is large enough to be meaningful. And an achievement gap of 50 percentage points on the state assessment is absolutely meaningful.

Perhaps articles like this one will spur some "high performing" high schools to pay more attention to these gaps and ensure that students in every group--however small that group may be--receive the academic support they need to perform well on the state assessment and SAT.