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Achievement Gaps: The Role Of Segregation In Education

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The history of the achievement gaps is complex, and many educators believe that there is no single primary cause for its existence and persistence. The period of segregation in the United States is most influential factor that has shaped the racial gap in education. Tracing back to the history, the term “segregation” notably appears in the education settings is through the Brown vs. Board of Education court case in 1954. Since the period of slavery, ethnic minorities, especially Blacks, have been placed in a disadvantaged setting in term of educational opportunity. However, in Brown vs. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruled that states cannot separate schools for blacks and white students, which required schools to desegregate and provide …show more content…

Bush passed the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), an reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) under Lyndon B. Johnson administration’s War of Poverty. The No Child Left Behind Act requires states to administer an annual assessment, and ensure that schools are making Adequate Yearly Progress, a set of measuring tool to determine if schools are successful. One of the primary goals of the No Child Left Behind Act is to close the students’ achievement gaps by 2014 through the four main pillars: stronger accountability for results, more flexibility for states, more choices for parents, and proven education methods. (U.S Department of Education, 2004) However, the NCLB is exacerbating the gaps with its strong emphasis on the use of standardized testing as a measurement. With NCLB’s strong emphasis on standardized testing to measure student learning, teacher quality, and the achievement gaps, it pressured the schools to narrow its curriculum, teach to the test (Jackson Sr., 2011), and more importantly, “limited the productivity of critical thinkers, and innovators of America.” (Proconor) Teachers are forced to teach to the test to meet the requirements, and focus their teaching on the materials that are on the test. At the same time, the NCLB gives the states and school districts the flexibility to develop their own assessments. David Hursh, an Associate Professor at the University of Rochester, claims that this freedom seriously impact the accuracy of the assessments since states can design tests with different standards. (Holmes, 2009) The flaws, and inaccuracies of standardized testing proved that NCLB failed to close the achievement

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Decades after the Brown vs. Board decision, achievement gaps and disparities in educational resources and opportunities persist in many communities, particularly those with high concentrations of minority

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This author agrees with President Obama saying that their are two many standardized test, which does not leave enough time for students to learn what they need to graduate. He goes one to Quote President Obama saying “Learning is about so much more than just filling in the right bubble,” the president said. “So we’re going to work with states, school districts, teachers, and parents to make sure that we’re not obsessing about testing … to make sure that our kids are enjoying learning, that our teachers are able to operate with creativity, to make sure we are preparing our kids for a lifetime of

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The segregation of schools based on a students skin color was in place until 1954. On May 17th of that year, during the Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education, it was declared that separate public schools for black and white students was unconstitutional. However, before this, the segregation of schools was a common practice throughout the country. In the 1950s there were many differences in the way that black public schools and white public schools were treated with very few similarities. The differences between the black and white schools encouraged racism which made the amount of discrimination against blacks even greater.

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The state of Texas has been in a constant struggle within itself over just how to evaluate education, and standardized testing in Texas has been a major influencer in terms of the state’s standards for over thirty years. Though these methods of testing have been utilized for decades, resentment to the tests have been continuously rising among educators, parents, and students, but not everyone agrees. Despite government officials trying to quell these protests with changes to administration, and the way the test itself is formatted and formulated, there seems to have been little to no improvement made and those opposing the tests have started calling for an end to all standardized testing. For one to truly understand this ongoing struggle, one must first look at standardized testing’s beginning, then how government today is trying to fix the broken system, and finally consider the opinions of notable figures in the testing world.

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In Diana Ravitch’s ‘(2010) article Why I Changed My Mind, she discussed how abiding by an educational system using accountability and choice has failed tremendously in America. In addition, Ravitch explained how the federally ordained policies are continuously contributing to the system’s decline as well. She believes the legislators are so focused on testing and teacher evaluation that they are ignoring the root of educational problems faced in the United States. With such strong emphasis on testing and test results, educators have changed their teaching strategies in an attempt to satisfy this broken structure. There is strong attention to preparing students to pass standardized tests while simultaneously denying teachers the time to focus

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Although many schools and communities where still segregated affecting all races and ethnicities. Overtime African Americans and other ethnicities made it clear that they have rights and have never surrendered or lost them. “Despite the fact that desegregation seemed to proceed without federal intervention in some northern and western states, in the southern states, where race relations showed little improvement, codified school segregation was persistent and was only overturned after an intense legal and social battle by civil rights activists and their allies. The Supreme Court case Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954) paved the way for dismantling school segregation.” (Barnes-Bowler, 2015) Oliver Brown and other parents were concern about their children having to attend segregated schools that were an inconvenience to their children and to them, when there were white’s schools districts closer to their home and more convenient for their children.

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Standardized tests have been an integral component of the American educational system since the mid-1800s. The use of standardized tests went through the roof with the creation of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2002, which made it mandatory for all 50 states to hold annual standardized tests. Standardized tests are defined by W. James Popham, former president of the American Educational Research Association, as “any test that’s administered, scored, and interpreted in a standard, predetermined manner. These tests often consist of multiple choice questions which are able to be quickly scored by an automated test scoring machine. I do not believe that standardized tests are improving education in America because they are detrimental

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Introduction In 2001, when the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was created, the goal of NCLB was to increase the accountability of schools for the educational outcomes of their students and to bridge the gap between poor and high-performing students and districts. To accomplish this, NCLB placed considerable importance on standardized testing, which I will be examining the effectiveness of relative to the goals that NCLB sought to accomplish by 2014, within this paper. NCLB brought attention to the achievement gap and spurred efforts to improve educational outcomes for all students, particularly disadvantaged populations, through its accountability measures and reporting requirements, but its reliance on standardized testing and punitive consequences

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