RALEIGH — In recent years, policies seeking to narrow the entrenched achievement gap between black and white students have proliferated. Such efforts to rectify a widespread educational injustice are unequivocally important. But are they working?
Yes and no. Newly released data from the National Center for Education Statistics indicate we have made some notable strides toward racial parity, nationally and in selected states. However, we have miles still to go, especially in North Carolina.
First, the good news: Nationwide in 2007, math scores for black and white fourth- and eighth-graders on the National Assessment of Educational Progress were higher than at any other point during the 1990s; fourth-grade reading scores also reached their peak. The black-white achievement gap shrunk in math in both fourth and eighth grades, and in fourth-grade reading.
Despite these successes, black students across the country still lag a minimum of 26 points (on NAEP’s 500-point scale) behind white students in both reading and math. In North Carolina, this gap is generally larger. According to the 2007 NAEP data, our state’s only discernible progress has been in fourth-grade math: the achievement gap has narrowed by three points since 1992. In eighth-grade math, the gap has diminished by just one point since the early 1990s.
In reading, North Carolina has made virtually no progress. The fourth-grade achievement gap is just as it was in 1992. In eighth-grade reading, racial disparities have worsened: the achievement gap has widened by four points, and is the largest it has been since 1998.
But these data do not tell the whole story. In 82 schools in 19 states, the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), an unusually effective national network of public charter schools, is blasting away at the achievement gap. These schools, serving mostly poor minority students, live out the KIPP credo, “demography does not define destiny.”
KIPP successes are hard-won: students usually attend school weekdays from 7:30 a.m. until 5:00 p.m., every other Saturday, and three weeks in the summertime. Teachers offer after-hours homework help via cell phone. Parents, students, and teachers sign a “learning pledge,” promising to do whatever is needed to help kids learn.
North Carolina is home to three KIPP charter schools; two in Northampton County — Gaston College Preparatory (grades 5-8) and KIPP Pride High — share the same charter. A second KIPP middle school opened in Charlotte in 2007.
Results at Gaston College Preparatory (GCP), now in its ninth year, defy conventional wisdom. The student body is 84 percent black and 64 percent low-income. In 2008 sixth-graders who entered GCP as fifth-graders raised their national percentile rankings on the Stanford Achievement Test by 39 points in math and 22 points in reading. This is no flash in the pan. Last spring KIPP Pride High graduated its first class of seniors; all 48 of them are headed to college this fall.
Principal Christine Barford attributes GCP’s success to one key ingredient: “the people.” “Parents commit a lot by sending their children here,” she says. “A lot of faith and hard work has gone into the past eight years.”
Students, says Barford, are taught by “incredibly passionate teachers” who “believe that all children can learn.” This conviction that any child can succeed in the classroom is so fundamental that KIPP leaders screen prospective teachers for it “above all else.” Notes Barford, “Without that, we won’t get very far.”
But with it, oh, what they can do. KIPP’s teachers and leaders aren’t just narrowing the achievement gap. They’re obliterating it. It’s time the rest of us paid attention.
Kristen Blair is a North Carolina Education Alliance Fellow.