Brian Jones: Dr. King and the Achievement Gap: The approach of a national holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King provides an opportunity to reflect on one of the hot topics in education reform today: the racial achievement gap. Everyone wants to close the gap. Or so it would seem.
Despite the hope many invested in President George W. Bush's 'No Child Left Behind' (NCLB) initiative, which highlighted the persistence of the gap, and set the goal of closing it by 2014, progress toward that end has been incremental at best.
In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg claimed to have reduced the gap 'by half' in some places. But in the summer of 2010, when city's tests were re-scaled, the scores were revealed to be only half as good as previously believed. Only 40 percent of Black students were found to have met the state's math standards, compared with 75 percent of white students. The new scoring revealed that only 33 percent of black students met the English standard, while 64 percent of whites and Asians did.
