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The Facts About The Achievement Gap Summary

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How should society handle the perceived differences between races when it comes to education? The goal of both researchers is to narrow the academic gap between white and black students. Both authors attribute the gap between the academic scores of black and white students from opposite sides of racial identity. As Dr. Beverly Daniels Tatum, President of Spelman College and clinical psychologist has written an article entitled “Why are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” Her approach is from the perspective of the student and how they perceive their role and upper limits while maintaining their place in their peer group's expectations of their race. Dr. Diane Ravitch, a research professor of education at New York University, has written an article entitled "The Facts about the Achievement Gap.” Her approach is from the perspective of how schools and society implicitly or explicitly cast students into achievement tracks based on their race. Both approach the same idea about racial identity, but they have different solutions, such as peer groups, the school board, and who is right about the solution. First, Tatum suggests …show more content…

She also used the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) for closing the achievement gap. Paul Barton and Richard Coley of the Educational Testing Service wrote an overview of the black-white achievement gap over the course if the twentieth century and concluded that the period in which that gap narrowed most was the 1970s and 1980s (Ravitch 365). Over the past generation, there was a remarkable decline from the blacks and Hispanic students who score the lowest on National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) testing. When the NAEP did not help with the gap between the blacks and the Hispanic students, teachers turned to a different

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