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Both schools and larger social inequities play role in achievement gap (Q&A with Sean Reardon)

September 23, 2015
EdSource
"I don’t think the people reporting the results understand how to interpret test results,” says Sean Reardon about recent media reports that the achievement gap has grown with the new Smarter Balanced assessments. "They are comparing things that are not comparable to each other. "
By 
Louis Freedberg

The results on the Smarter Balanced assessments – the centerpiece of the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress, or CAASPP – released on Sept. 10 showed the vast achievement gaps that decades of education reforms have failed to close. This interview with Sean Reardon, who is a professor of poverty and inequality in education in the Stanford Graduate School of Education, is the second in a series of interviews conducted by EdSource executive director Louis Freedberg with leading educators and scholars about the continuing gap. Among Reardon’s many publications, a landmark paper on the “income achievement gap” showed that the gap between students from affluent families and those from low-income backgrounds has widened in recent years, and is 40 percent larger than the black-white achievement gap.

What does the achievement gap in the Smarter Balanced test results say about the effectiveness or otherwise of the basic approach to education reform in recent decades?

There is no real evidence that the whole school system has been able to effect a reduction in achievement gaps over last decade or two. I don’t think there is any evidence that accountability systems have been effective in reducing achievement gaps. We did a paper looking at whether No Child Left Behind had reduced the achievement gap and found very little evidence that it had. Achievement gaps are a little bit smaller than they were nationally 15 to 20 years ago, but that is not due to NCLB because that happened well before NCLB came into place, and when you look at the black-white achievement gap, when kids come to school at kindergarten entry that has been declining over time.

That seems to explain why the achievement gap in elementary and middle school has been narrowing very slowly, because kids are getting to school a little less unequally prepared. Whatever narrowing there is seems to be a result of what happens to kids before they get to school. So it suggests we have not done a very good job.

Also worth acknowledging is that a big piece of the achievement gap is due to inequality of kids’ lives out of school. It may be unrealistic to expect schools to undo all the other inequalities in kids’ lives. They could certainly do a better job at reducing some of it, but I doubt schools alone will ever entirely reduce the achievement gaps, without some equally concerted efforts to reduce racial and ethnic inequality in income and neighborhood conditions and things like that outside school.

Read the entire interview on the EdSource website.

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