After reading Daniel der Vise’s “Area Schools’ Success Obscures Lingering Racial SAT Gap” (Washington Post 9/10/07), I can’t help but wonder if as President Bush famously suggested, minority students are suffering due to “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” Late in the piece, Christopher Jencks, a professor of social policy at Harvard University who co-wrote “The Black-White Test Score Gap”, a book about the achievement gap, suggests that “Black teens in well-heeled suburbs tend to socialize with children less affluent than themselves, to the detriment of their academic goals.”
In a rush to secure higher test scores, schools may focus efforts on the highest-performing students and inadvertently leave lower-performing students behind. Is this culture of lowered expectations to blame for the academic achievement gap or is there a more deeply set systemic bias that supports the education of the wealthy and overlooks the less fortunate? Why should daining to consort with the less affluent result in lowered educational performance? Certainly, our nation was founded on the believe that everyone could achieve, regardless of their economic status. Interestingly enough, U.S. Census statistics in the DC area suggest economic disparities don’t entirely explain the achievement gap. HSG would posit that opportunity is at play, and our educational system could better provide for all students through innovative programs such as access to quality Pre-K programs, improving teacher salaries, modernizing K-12 curricula, and on-going educational support.
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