Perhaps no education issue is more complex than the highly publicized achievement gap. Why do children from minority families consistently score below their peers in most measures of academic achievement? How do we move beyond the rhetoric and develop meaningful strategies to reduce and eventually erase the achievement gap?

First we must understand that the achievement gap in Minnesota has more to do with the high performance of Caucasian students than the low performance of minority students.

For example, Minnesota's black students scored at about the national average on the 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress tests in math, while math test scores of white students are well above the national average. Thus, the large math achievement gap in Minnesota is due to the relatively high scores of white students, not the low scores of black students.

Why have Minnesota's minority students been unable to share in the success of its white students? One major reason is poverty and the hurdles it presents to successful learning. In Minnesota, poverty is worse among the blacks, Asians, and American Indians in Minnesota than in the rest nation, according to Parents United for Public Education , which cites 2000 census data:

• The poverty rate among Minnesota blacks is 8.8 percent higher than among blacks nationally and median family income is 6 percent lower
• The poverty rate among Minnesota Asians is 50.5 percent higher than among Asians nationally and median family income is 16.4 percent lower.
• The poverty rate among Minnesota American Indians is 11.4 percent higher than among American Indians nationally and median family income is 6.4 percent lower.

The higher rate of poverty among Minnesota's minority students correlates with lower student achievement, because poverty itself creates gaps in opportunity, according to Richard Rothstein , a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute and visiting lecturer at Teachers College, Columbia University. “In order to really erase achievement gaps, we must close opportunity gaps – gaps that exist before children enter school,” Rothstein writes in his book, “Class and Schools.”

Rothstein cites these examples:

Vocabulary and literacy
Kansas researchers found that by the time children are about to enter kindergarten, the typical 4-year-old from a middle-class family would have accumulated experience with 45 million words compared with only 13 million words for a typical 4-year-old from a low socioeconomic background.

Computers and technology
By kindergarten, almost all upper-class children, about half of middle-class children and fewer than one in five low-income children have experience using computers.

Vision problems
Fifty percent or more of minority and low-income students have vision problems that interfere with their school work. Some students need glasses, but more need eye-exercise therapy to correct focusing, converging and tracking problems.

Lead exposure
Low-income children have blood lead levels at five times the rate of middle-class children. Although lead-based paint was banned from residential construction in 1978, low-income children tend to live in buildings older than that and in buildings that are repainted infrequently. Water pipes in older buildings, including schools where many low-income children often attend, also contribute to high lead levels. High lead blood levels can harm cognitive functioning, affect behavior and cause hearing loss.

Mobility
A 10-year-old government study found that 30 percent of the poorest children (those with incomes less than $10,000 annually) attended at least three different schools by third grade while only 10 percent of students of middle-class families ($25,000 annual incomes) did so.

Resources

Class and Schools, Richard Rothstein, Teachers College Press, 2004
The Big Picture, Education is Everyone's Picture, Dennis Littky, Association for Curriculum and Development, 2004
Priority Schools, National Education Association
Redesigning Schools to Raise Student Achievement (RSRSA), American Federation of Teachers
Whatever It Takes: How Professional Learning Communities Respond When Kids Don't Learn, Richard Dufour, Rebecca Dufour, Robert Eaker, and Gayle Karhanek, National Education Service, 2004
The Right to Learn: A Blueprint for Creating Schools that Work, Linda Darling-Hammond, Jossey-Bass, 1997
Meaningful Differences, Betty Hart and Todd Risley, Paul Brookes Publishing Company, 2003
The Truth About Testing: An Educator's Call to Action, James Popham, Association for Curriculum and Development, 2001
What Works Clearinghouse