Creating Schools where Race Does Not Predict Achievement: The Role and Significance of Race in the Racial Achievement Gap.

This article explores the ways in which race is implicated in efforts to address the achievement gap in U.S. schools. Through an analysis of the theoretical and historical issues that have framed the relationship between race and intellectual ability, the author explains why the effort to close the achievement gap is politically and socially significant. The efforts of two suburban school districts to address the achievement gap is presented to illustrate why some schools are making progress in closing the achievement gap while others are not. These cases are used to make a call for a new discourse about the role of race in student achievement and to clarify how and why race continues to be so controversial and confounding to educators who are working to ensure that all children, regardless of their backgrounds, receive a quality education and have the opportunity to experience academic success. The effort to find ways to close or at least reduce the achievement gap-the disparities in test scores and academic outcomes that tend to follow well-established race and class patterns-has become a national priority. Since the enactment of No Child Left Behind (NCLB, 2002) and its requirement that schools and students be held accountable for achievement through annual standardized tests, a sense of urgency has developed over the need to improve the educational outcomes of under-performing students. In many communities, this has placed greater focus and attention on the need for strategies to improve academic achievement among children who have traditionally not done well in school, namely, poor and disadvantaged children, students with learning disabilities, recent immigrants and English language learners, and in many communities African Americans, Latinos and other students of color, generally (Miller, 1995). Those familiar with American history and the history of American education, in particular, will undoubtedly be struck by the irony and significance of the current national preoccupation with closing the racial achievement gap. Racial gaps in achievement, attainment and measures of intellectual ability are by no means new. In fact, throughout most of American history, racial disparities in educational achievement and performance were attributed to innate genetic differences between population groups, and as such, were regarded as acceptable and understandable "natural" phenomena (Fredrickson, 1981). Intelligence was regarded as an innate human property rooted in the particular genetic endowments of individuals and groups (Duster, 2003), and therefore altering patterns of academic achievement was not regarded as feasible or even desirable. Given this history, the fact that federal educational policy has made the goal of closing the racial achievement gap a national priority is truly remarkable Although policymakers have not called attention to the fact that the effort to eliminate racial disparities in student achievement represents a repudiation of America's past views on race, educators at the center of this effort can not help but engage attitudes and beliefs that are associated with the vestiges of racial attitudes from the not so distant past. The notion that children of color are not as intelligent and capable as White children continues to find adherents among educators and the general public. Furthermore, seven years after the adoption of NCLB, it is clear that eliminating racial disparities in academic outcomes will require more than an official renouncement of traditional views about the nature of race. Race continues to be implicated in patterns of student achievement in predictable and disturbing ways, and the persistence and pervasiveness of these patterns compels us to ask why? It also forces us to reconsider what it might take to alter the long-standing relationship between race and achievement since so many efforts to alter racial patterns have been unsuccessful. This article explores these issues through an examination of the historical and theoretical factors that influence the role of race in educational performance. …