Closing the Achievement Gap

The achievement gap in education is a matter of race, socioeconomic status, gender, and intellectual ability. Across the United States, a gap in academic achievement persists between the different populations. This is one of the most pressing education-policy challenges that states are currently facing. There are three main measures that are used to determine the achievement gap which are the standardized tests, dropout rates, and graduation rates of the schools. The NCLB policies have been put in place to help bridge the achievement gap by 2014, but there are so many areas that need improvement across the country. The problems aren’t just in the schools but in the community and home as well so it is hard to address all the factors that lead to the achievement gaps in schools.
Even though closing the achievement gap is a necessary step in getting the United States p to par with other countries in an educational standpoint, there are many negatives of this initiative that could leave many students struggling. NCLB has put a spotlight on the achievement gap and requires that states set the same performance targets for all their students. That includes students from economically disadvantages families, students with disabilities, limited English proficiency, and from all ethnic and racial groups. Students who do not have the same advantages as others should not be held up to the same standard and teaching those students at the same level as upper to middle class students could hurt their education. For example students with disabilities cannot be up to the standard of the other students in the school and should be taught to their mental ability not to the standard of children without disabilities. Schools are only considered successful if they close the achievement gap so schools could lose funding due to the gap they have in their school because they have students who cannot reach the level of the standard that has been placed on the school.
While the standard does affect the subgroups that do fail to meet the performance goals, the district has to provide public school choice and supplemental services to those students. This would help the students to get help to reach the standard of the school as long as the district keeps on top of regulating the services. Early intervention for the students with disabilities would help the students to reach the achievement goals of the district sooner as long as the services are started early and kept consistent. The job of closing the achievement gap falls into the districts hand and while it would be a nationwide achievement for all the states to close the gap, I feel that we are still very far off. There are too many areas that won’t get the help they need to be able to close these gaps and taking away funding would only hurt the districts. Closing the achievement gap is something that should happen in the United States but I think that the districts need more help to be able to address the needs of every student.