NCREL Policy Issues
Issue 13, December 2002
About This Issue
By Judy Stewart, Ph.D.
This edition of Policy Issues looks at the topic of closing the achievement gap from two perspectives: suburban school districts and urban school districts. Harvard University researcher Ronald F. Ferguson, Ph.D., shares findings from a recent survey of more than 34,000 students in Grades 7-11 in 15 school districts across the nation. These districts make up the Minority Student Achievement Network (MSAN), a group of middle- and upper-income districts committed to addressing the achievement gap in their respective school communities. (Information on MSAN is available online at www.msanetwork.org.) Despite higher overall achievement patterns in these districts, Ferguson finds persistent racial and ethnic gaps in performance.
The survey asked students about their home resources, why they work hard in school, what motivates them to achieve, what courses they take, and more. In analyzing the data, Ferguson found many similarities across student groups but also important differences.
Significantly, he found no racial or ethnic differences in effort or motivation to succeed among students in the same grade and taking the same classes. However, Ferguson found that black and Hispanic students have fewer family background advantages—such as access to books, computers, and extracurricular opportunities—than whites and Asians. In addition, black and Hispanic students complete less homework than their white and Asian peers (though they report spending as much time doing their homework as whites), and report understanding less of their teachers' lessons than do whites and Asians. Finally, Ferguson found that black and Hispanic students reported teacher encouragement to be a particularly strong motivating factor for their success.
Ferguson says that closing the achievement gap among students may require attending jointly to teachers' content knowledge, pedagogical skill, and relational skills. To reach this goal, policymakers should support professional development programs that equally emphasize content, pedagogy, and relationships. Schools should seek to provide black and Hispanic students with more educational resources outside the home after school, should identify and respond to skill or knowledge deficits that underlie comprehension problems, and should encourage teachers to routinely incorporate effective forms of encouragement into their classroom practices.
The second report, authored by Reginald Clark, Ph.D., president of Clark and Associates, shares findings from a body of research on closing achievement gaps in urban school communities. Schools in four districts participated in a series of survey and observational studies aimed at understanding the in-school and out-of-school conditions that support students' academic achievement. Clark looked at standardized reading test scores and factors that differentiate student performance.
Clark documents the importance of five influential factors for improved student achievement, especially among disadvantaged urban students: (1) teachers' actions in the classroom; (2) students' weekly participation in high-yield, in-school and out-of-school activities; (3) quality of students' participation in out-of-school activities; (4) parental beliefs and expectations; and (5) parent-teacher communication.
Clark found that the types and amounts of constructive in-school and out-of-school learning activities contribute to a success-oriented lifestyle. Specifically, he found that high-achieving students spend at least three hours a day with teachers doing structured learning activities; spend between 8 and 15 hours a week in high-yield, out-of-school learning activities; show a high level of enthusiasm, focus, and leadership in their activities; limit their unstructured leisure or nonlearning activities (such as watching television or doing chores); receive consistent messages from their parents valuing academic achievement; and benefit from parent-teacher partnerships that are vested in their academic success.
Significantly, Clark did not find a positive relationship between student ethnicity, family income, and student achievement. In fact, he found the opposite. Clark found that "when instructional-process factors are taken into account, student ethnicity and parent socioeconomic status are nearly eliminated as impacts on student achievement."
Of significant note, the two papers use different indicators to measure socioeconomic status. (Ferguson uses number of books in the home, parent level of education, and other factors; Clark uses family and student participation in a federally funded free or reduced-price lunch program.) Ferguson finds that socioeconomic status is quite important as a predictor of achievement, while Clark finds that it is not. This difference may or may not be due to the differences in measures used.
The full reports of Ferguson and Clark will be available on NCREL's Closing the Achievement Gap Web site (www.ncrel.org/gap/). In this edition of Policy Issues, each author presents an overview of his findings with special attention to those in-school and out-of-school factors that hold promise for closing achievement gaps among groups of students.
Judy Stewart, Ph.D., is a former program director of policy with NCREL's Education Decision Support Systems, where she had leadership for directing NCREL's achievement gap initiative. She now resides in Virginia and is an independent consultant.
