Rough Draft

This essay will explore the achievement gap in America, and what has been done to close the gap and improve the American education system. I chose to do my essay on this topic because of a class I took during my first semester at Roosevelt University: ACP250, Issues in Metropolitan Education. That class brought the issue to my attention, and since then I’ve been wanting to learn more about it. The issue is quite complex, and history has shown that it is not something that will be fixed overnight. Since the 1980’s, * the U.S. government has tried many different solutions to close the gap and increase the nation’s standardized test scores. We have spent trillions of dollars on school reform and millions more on scientific studies in an attempt to find a solution - all of which has resulted in minimal progress. The achievement gap is as much of a problem today as it was then, and the international standardized test scores have actually decreased over the last year.

The achievement gap has been an issue since Brown vs Board of Education in 1954. In this case, the Supreme Court ruled that the segregation of blacks in different schools was unconstitutional. When schools began desegregating, unsurprisingly, there was a large achievement gap between African Americans and Caucasians. After all, slavery had ended just 89 years before that, and the education that African Americans received since was subpar to say the least. In 1964, the U.S. Congress authorized a study to measure educational opportunities. The resulting report, widely known as the Coleman report, found that educational opportunities were not equal.

Unfortunately, unequal educational opportunities are still an issue today – 50 years later. Thomas J. Kane, a professor at Harvard University, conducted a study in Los Angeles School and concluded that: “The worst teachers – in the bottom 5%-taught 3.2% of white students and 5.4% of Latino students. A similar pattern held when Kane looked at...