Achievement Gap In Education Essay

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Written into the founding principles of our country is the idea of equality for all, regardless of background. Two hundred forty-one years later we still face this issue in almost every aspect of life, but one of the most apparent examples of the inequality that still plagues our nation today is the achievement gap in education. In a perfect world, every child in school has the same opportunity to either succeed or fail, but in todays world those who succeed are overwhelmingly those who have privilege and those who fall behind are overwhelmingly those who don’t.

It has always been that the schools with more funding produce students that perform better. But even after an attempt to implement a standardized curriculum, the No Child Left Behind Policy and the Common Core Standards, there is still an obvious achievement gap between the schools with money and those without. In addition to the gap that still remains, there are new problems that arise as a result of planning a standard curriculum. One of the biggest complaints to be had is the issue of ‘teaching to the test’. Meaning that students aren’t learning what will be most useful to them in the long term, but rather what will prevent the school from losing government funding as a result of not meeting the test score requirement. If the idea is to educate for the future, then teaching to the test is not a viable nor a sustainable strategy, but, in the same sense, if educating for the future is the ultimate goal we can’t allow some schools to teach a curriculum that is so significantly lacking behind