On the outskirts of the city, Roxbury is a hub of African American community in the Boston area. While the neighborhood is predominantly low income with many unemployed residents, and the high density population has led to a high crime rate, many vibrant, optimistic youth reside in Roxbury. Despite maturing in this difficult neighborhood, many teens from Roxbury have impressive goals for their futures and work with Roxbury Youth Program to find success. By offering a safe place for high school students to thrive, RYP addresses social injustice issues of achievement gaps. For students at RYP, the achievement gap, referring to the disparity of educational performance of students by race and income stems from overlapping societal injustices …show more content…
Run by many experienced social workers, RYP offers a safe environment for Roxbury teens to challenge themselves academically while preparing for college readiness and learning important life skills through enrichment. By focusing on improving self-image, RYP assists teens to recognize the power of advocacy and self-sufficiency in a particularly harsh neighborhood. RYP does not only provide a safe place to study and grow, but it also provides dinner for all students and rides home at night as a way to ensure the health and safety of Roxbury teens. As a tutor, I will help students reach their educational goals at RYP in addition to guiding them through the college process. More importantly, I get to provide the teens with undivided and individualized adult attention and guidance and support, in the hopes of helping them experience great personal success and achieve their dreams. Providing teens with the tools to succeed academically and personally, RYP allows the youth of Roxbury to narrow the achievement gap and accomplish success in high school, college, and
These claims have been well documented. However, the connection to the graduation gap may be clearer with an answer of how other factors such as financial and other family problems brought about by poverty affect them. The rest of the book provides possible solutions to questions of invisibility such as respecting and valuing black students. Another solution is removing remedial programs for challenging curricula and supports that are appropriate.
The data is compared to those students come from affluent socioeconomic status and backgrounds. The data is sourced from several diverse locations in order to give the broadest view of the disparities that exist. Howard (2010) compares data in reading, mathematics, SAT results and disciplinary rates. This data is a formidable beginning to the content of the book because it provides context for the reader to better understand the achievement gap.
Less than 4% of the total student population enrolled in America’s colleges and universities (one of the smallest subgroups based on race/ethnicity and gender.) According to the Schott Foundation, the graduation rate of Black males in CT is between 51%, whereas White males in CT have an 83% graduation rate—a 32% gap. Moreover, the achievement gap between Black women and Black men is the lowest male-to female ratio among all racial/ethnic subgroups. (Strayhorn 1). The disproportionate and devastating failure of Black males in the educational system has further ramifications in our social system as black males are over-represented in the criminal justice system: “African-American males represent approximately 8.6 percent of the nation’s K-12 public school enrollment but make up about 60 percent of all incarcerated youth” (Smith 2005). In order to gain a comprehensive understanding of the academic crisis of adolescent black males, one must examine the research findings surrounding the Black-White achievement gap, black male standardized test scores, black male literacy achievement, and the socio-cultural achievement barriers that obscure black males’ self-perception of themselves as readers. “According to many standardized assessments, educators in the U.S.
The “achievement gap” in education refers to the disparity in academic performance between groups of students. The achievement gap is shown in grades, standardized-test scores, course selection, dropout rates, among other success measures. It’s most often used to describe the troubling performance gaps between African-American and latino students, towards the lower end of the performance scale, compared to their white peers, and the similar academic differences between students from low-income families and those who are privileged. In the past decade, scholars and policy makers began focusing their attention on other achievement gaps, such as those based on sex, English language and learning disabilities.
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.
The Achievement Gap is a term that represents the difference of academic success in certain groups of students such as race, gender, and
Education and economic justice were two forms of systemic inequalities that make inequality difficult to talk about. Education is a requirement if someone wishes to have a better life, but not everyone has access to quality education. In the U.S there has always been a battle, people of color have fought to be able to access quality education, (Philips, 2016: 130) they are constantly attending inferior and ineffective school where there are many distractions for students to be fully successful in the classrooms. Often these schools where children of color attend lack quality facilities, educational resources, and qualified teachers. Someone can’t help to notice that in general such unqualified schools are mostly in color people’s neighborhoods.
the term receivement gap is useful because it focuses attention on educational inputs-what the students receive on their educational journey, instead of outputs-their performance on a standardized test. This refocusing also moves attention away from the students as the source of these disparities, and toward the larger structure and forces that play a role in their education and development (p. 417). Venzant-Chambers (2009) asserted the issue of the Black and White achievement gap must be viewed through other lenses opposed to the single view of Black students cannot perform as well as White students. Venzant-Chambers (2009) offered other avenues by which to examine the achievement gap such as school tracking, examining the
A school setting provides opportunities where issues of social justice, oppression, and discrimination can be addressed. According to Bemak and Chung (2009), students of color and economically disadvantaged students are likely to have low academic achievement, in comparison to their White middle class counterparts. These disparities in academic
The “gap” as referred to in the title, is the distribution of the scores on achievement tests that differ between black and white students in the United States. The purpose of this study was to record the degree of the gap in achievement scores, decide how much of the racial gap is due to social-class, how the gap differed in the 30-year period, and how that which is credited to the social-class has changed over the years.
Ever since the establishment of equal education in the United States, there has been a disparity in academic success between children of different races. The education of African American children has become a prime example of this. As discussed in the historical text, A Letter to My Nephew, which was written during the time of the civil rights movement in the 1950’s and 1960’s, African Americans were not given equal opportunities to succeed educationally and could do little to change their futures for the better. They had to work much harder than whites to receive even a portion of the recognition and success that whites achieved (Baldwin 1). Although many today believe America has overcome this problem, it still remains a pressing issue in many aspects of society, arguably the most important being education. The racial achievement gap, an important term to familiarize with when discussing this topic, refers to the disparity in educational performance between students of different races (National Education Association 1). As of now, although the education achievement gap has been narrowing, there still remains a large disparity between African Americans and their racial counterparts. According to a study by Roland G. Freyer and Steven D. Levitt, professors at Harvard University and W.E.B Du Bois Institute, respectively, African American students enter kindergarten already significantly behind children of other races, and their test scores continue to drop
The pressures of racism on today’s society are being perpetuated by socioeconomic shaming against less fortunate black schoolchildren to look to the future of becoming less successful than the more financially stable white schoolchild sitting in the next classroom. The most unfortunate part about the white-black achievement gap is that there is no easy solution to solving it. One large proponent of the achievement gap between all schoolchildren is the factor of wealth and affluence in their homes. The racial achievement gap compared to the wealth achievement gap is quite staggering. Diane Ravitch states that “in contrast to the racial achievement gap, which has narrowed, the income achievement gap is growing…[and is] nearly twice as large
As I read about the achievement gap (Taylor), I felt a sense of despair. Families of color are positioned between a rock and a hard place. When children enter kindergarten, the racial gap is half of its ultimate size because many children of color do not participate in high-quality programs. How can people of color "catch up" to their counterparts when they are behind at the age of 5? There are also institutional factors that continue this achievement gap and perpetuate racism by consequence. After Brown v Board of Education (1954), white families enrolled their children in private and suburban schools. Since school busing has been discontinued, school assignments based on residential neighborhoods have created racially segregated schools.
“The socioeconomic achievement gap in education refers to the inequality in academic achievement between groups of students. The achievement gap shows up in grades, standardized test scores, course selection, dropout rates, and college-completion rates, among other success measures” (Ansell, 2017). Typically, when discussing the achievement gap, educators are comparing the academic progress of African-American students or Hispanic students to the progress of white students. More-often-than-not the white students will have more educational achievements than their non-white colleagues (Ansell, 2017). The most widely accepted theory as to why students with higher socioeconomic status (SES) do better academically is high parental involvement, access to economic resources and access to highly qualified teachers (Huang, 2015. Pg.6). Students of low socioeconomic status often live in poverty. This means that the student may not have sufficient school supplies or even someone at home to help him with his homework. There are numerous children in the United States’ school systems that are failing due to the achievement gap. These students are at a disadvantage because the school systems and teachers do not notice or even care about their home life and how it comes into play in their education. It is important for our nation to not only understand the achievement gap but take steps toward correcting it.
As minority students increased in urban public schools, they have now become the majority of the school population and have brought difficult topics to the surface; race and ethnicity. In Another Inconvenient Truth: Race and Ethnicity Matter, Hawley and Nieto published their beliefs on how cultural differences are not to be tucked away and hidden in an educational setting, but embraced and celebrated to promote education by the teacher in an academic journal: Educational Leadership. Their appeals and claims provide various instruction to guide professional educators to overcome the achievement gap.