Dr. Ken Smitherman
President of ACSI (retired 2009)
The achievement gap in education between white students and African American and Hispanic students is one of the most significant topics being considered today in North America. In his article “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Urban Education”, Dr. Vernard Gant paints a bleak picture. The achievement gap he describes ought to be of the gravest concern to us as Christian school educators, particularly in light of what we consider to be essential to an effective Christian school—that every student develop to his or her full potential in Christ.
Too often it would appear that we try to achieve this outcome by merely doing more of what we have done in the past. It is my contention that if we are going to achieve such an objective, we will have to begin doing some things very differently— not merely for the sake of difference but because we have identified issues that hinder students from achieving their full potential in Christ. We need to be developing strategies to take our students forward to their full potential in Him.
We need to be developing strategies
to take our students forward to their
full potential in Him.
I am convinced that such a pursuit would have a phenomenal impact on closing the achievement gap that is so prevalent today. In the Harvard Education Letter, writer Michael Sadowski reports some interesting findings (“Closing the Gap One School at a Time,” May/June 2001,). He quotes Thomas Fowler-Finn, school superintendent of the Fort Wayne (Indiana) Community Schools, a district determined to focus on closing the gap: “When you’re really serious about closing the achievement gap, you have to be very deliberate in identifying what your problems are. You have to know what specific steps to take, and when you take them, you have to know if they make a difference.”
Using student surveys, the district discovered that there were key differences in the way black students and white students experience school. The surveys showed that black students felt less connected to school and believed they had more negative relationships with their teachers than their white peers had. Regarding discipline, the black students perceived that they received worse punishment than white students when caught doing the same thing. The district did not merely read these survey results, but they took action. They began tracking discipline reports and consequences for behavioral infractions to determine consistency. In addition, they hired a conflict mediator for each middle and high school. They are continuing to study the issues and to develop new interventions, and they are noting that some encouraging academic results have emerged. They have narrowed score gaps on the state-mandated Indiana Statewide Test of Educational Proficiency (ISTEP). (Details about these gains are available in the referenced article.)
An important point to consider is that when individuals are determined to make a difference and when they begin probing—essentially becoming researchers—problems can be identified and strategies developed to create solutions.
If we are committed to students’ developing their full potential in Christ, I believe we are on the road to closing the achievement gap. We must prayerfully and assertively identify problems and their causes, and then develop appropriate strategies toward resolution.
The Meantime Volume 3 Number 2