Mind the Gap

A theory about academic achievement gaps Kathleen L. Holmes, MA 2022 Readers who have some connection, even a weak one, to the arena that is education are probably familiar with the idea of the ‘academic achievement gap’. Andy Porter, the founding director of C-SAIL (Center for Standards, Alignment, Instruction, and Learning) wrote “In the last 40 years, more has been written about the achievement gap than just about any other topic in education.” (Porter, 2022 ) Following the legendary scientific method, my question centered on why has the gap lasted so long. Literature reviews in several disciplines suggested that the academic achievement gaps today are the result of 2500 years of intentionally denying specific groups of people access to literacy. The religious beliefs of each ancient age: Antiquity (3000s BCE-400 CE), Late Antiquity (300s CE-700s CE; AKA the Early Middle Ages), High Middle Ages (1000 CE-1300 CE), Late Middle Ages, the Reformation, and the Renaissance have kept females not worthy of gaining literacy. Along with other groups targeted for oppression throughout history, even in the United States, not only were these groups ignored in the history books but they were also ignored by their contemporaries. Robert Garland of Cornell University lists the groups othered throughout time in the first lecture of his series, ‘The Other Side of History’ as “... the sick, the infirmed, the enslaved, the elderly, the poor, the disabled, the refugees; these are the people who truly inhabit the other side of history. And the women, too.” (Garland, 2012) A review of the construction of the academic achievement gap, who populated/s each side of the gap, and how the current Gap is addressed suggests that the Gap is, necessarily, an outcome of such conditions and that any reduction to or elimination of the Gap will require significant cultural changes. The use of ‘gap’ in this paper is that provided by the Merriam-Webster dictionary; of the ten given definitions for ‘gap’ as a noun, entry 4b introduces deficiency, and entry 7 introduces disparity. (Merriam- Webster Dictionary) The other eight (8) focus on the ‘gap’ as a space, not as a ‘lack’ of anything. Supporting Merriam-Webster, or vice versa is the following definition offered by The Institute of Education Science’s (IES) National Center for Education Statistics study. Sponsored by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), their definition states; “Achievement gaps occur when one group of students (e.g., students grouped by race/ethnicity, gender) outperforms another group and the difference in average scores for the two groups is statistically significant (i.e., larger than the margin of error).” (IES-NCES, 2022) Therefore, an academic achievement gap (AAG) is constructed using test scores, graduation, and retention rates to compare one category of students to another on multiple levels using a plethora of variables, specifically to find gaps. It is important to remember that the standards are constructed by non-group members. According to NAEP, “The frameworks are developed for each subject area through a collaborative development process among teachers, curriculum specialists, subject-matter specialists, school administrators, parents, and members of the public.” (IES-NCES, 2022) Evidence of the Gap’s construction is in NAEP’s definition ‘...developed through a collaborative effort...’. Populated by administrators, not educators; subject-matter experts are nice but can get caught up in the subject and overload the curriculum. Perhaps if the group included more parents and their student-children the Gap would narrow. Another outcome of any collaboration is agreement on ‘othering’ those identified by Garland. Additionally, it is quite rare to find any of Garland’s group serving in administrative roles. But why the such concern with narrowing or eliminating the Gap? The term implicitly suggests superiority and inferiority, leading to various conclusions about its cause. The causes end up being addressed by policy and procedure in an attempt to remove the gap. “Because NAEP has used the same tests since the 1970s, we can use it to compare the reading and math skills of children today with those of their parents’ generation.” (Stanford University) {Emphasis mine.} Presented as a benefit, the statement reflects how stagnant change is; how can we use 50-year-old data to make any statements about today? The technology that has entered the classrooms and homes makes that comparison foolish. In addition to technology, cultural differences have been somewhat addressed; analogies are found less and less frequently in standardized tests. Results from the 70s are bound to be skewed as are recent tests; there is no way around that. Apples and oranges. Although not tested by original research, the review of the literature supports each piece of my hypothesis that today’s academic achievement gap is a result of religious oppression beginning 2500 years ago. In today’s era of ‘equity for all’, Gaps are not welcome. Gaps indicate failure of prior initiatives, etc. Gaps make failure public. Whether the public, or the collaborative group, blames the individual, the family, the environment, or the system, the goal is to remove the Gap or at least narrow it. Equality and equity are marketed but it’s a bait and switch; upon purchase, the buyer quickly learns that equal opportunity, equal access, and equity mean different things. Sure, the school administrative unit is going to give the students laptops; will the units also supply internet services, or perhaps even electricity to the home? The cultural construction of the Gap has the added bonus collective public consciousness that all people are the same. Many believe we all process information the same, we all have the same outlooks, and we all possess equal ability, access, and motivation for whatever we need. We all live the same lives, have the same dreams, and have the same worries. However, it is not surprising that the public believes that one size fits all in education/learning. Social and broadcast media replay images of ideals all night and day; ideals of beauty of the body, home, yards, animals, landscaping...the list goes on. Fame and infamy are gained in a moment. Stories are published as real/true, meaningful, predictive, national/state, and/or local crises, labeling one group as suffering deficiencies (in abilities) and disparities (in resources) when compared to the other group in the district, and school boards, teachers, administration, parents, etc. clamor for a fix. Those who design and decide policy and procedure are frequently parents of achieving or over-achieving students; eliminating or reducing the Gap lowers their children’s ‘star power’. Without standards, no one is #1; if there are no standards, there is nothing to meet. The persistence of the Gap indicates that these initiatives, etc. to reduce or remove have failed. Today’s Gap suggests that females and non-whites are still being left behind. Educators seem to agree that former President G. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act (2001) left every child behind. By attempting to remove Gaps, NCLB attached federal funding to standardized test scores. Systems with historically low scores were punished with reductions in budgets that in turn lessened the effectiveness of the system. This creates an other-perpetuated spiral into under-achieving, over-supervised school units. These are the types of policies that perpetuate the Gap. The Gap is historical, surviving for 2500 years despite work done to reduce or remove it. Of course, the last 50 years of work is only 2% of the Gap’s life. It will remain alive until the connections between antiquity and modernity are acknowledged; until they are, true change will be a long time coming. Education professionals in the United States and elsewhere are busy comparing student outcomes across academic disciplines. The last decade (2010-2020) shows that the Gaps are decreasing in the aggregate and between non-whites and whites across disciplines and between females and males in STEM courses. Statistics from NAEP show that the Gap is decreasing in the aggregate between blacks and whites because blacks score higher on the tests. Conversely, NAEP stats show that the standard deviations are quite different when disaggregated by state. Hispanic students perform poorly when compared to their white counterparts in California. In Minnesota, the wide Gap is the result of high-scoring white students. “Achievement gaps are strongly correlated with racial gaps in income, poverty rates, unemployment rates, and educational attainment. ... even in states where the racial socioeconomic disparities are near zero (typically states with small black or Hispanic populations), achievement gaps are still present.” (Stanford University) The statement suggests that these areas have also had little success in reducing the Gap. The persistence of the Gap is also blamed on a shortage of programs in the areas of academic, recreational, self-care, art, and music at the elementary and secondary levels. Traditional fixes involve creating new programs, or revamping or reconstructing existing ones. As noted earlier, these initiatives fail outright or deliver less than promised. Many initiatives are unsustainable; a lot of money is spent up front, getting all the pieces in place, and marketing it leaving little money to continue funding the initiative. Several reasons are posited for the gap’s existence, including blaming the individual, the family, the system, and/or the environment, making a ‘one solution fits all’ impossible even though the public demands immediacy. The idea that there is one solution is problematic for many reasons, the least of which is ignorance of the history of what we call education. A cursory glance at all educational venues finds global bureaucratic commonalities; there is a head of the school, staff, and teachers. In western, predominantly Judeo-Christian countries that offer public schools, the underlying structure of the educational systems is the same. The self-sustaining structure is not exclusive to Christianity, however. In Goffman’s dramaturgical terms, the play has the same plot and characters but the costumes, scripts, and front- and backstage behaviors differ. In these societies, the Gap’s existence is intentional and perpetual, and because it has survived for over two millennia is entrenched not only in the academic structure but also in its policies and procedures. There are thousands of articles on the ‘academic achievement gap” [AAG] and hundreds of books. With such an all-encompassing definition, there are innumerable experts on the causes of the AAGs. In a quick, non-scientific perusal of databases like ERIC and EBSCO sorted by date, the first article to reference specifically an academic achievement gap is from 1962 and focuses on de facto and de jure segregation to desegregate schools. It is not until the end of his speech that the ‘gap’ is referenced. From it, we learn “... that is the problem of the awful gap in the achievement level between children from slum areas and children from outside these areas. In 1955, a study by the Public Education Commission showed that there was almost a two-year differential in reading levels between children in the eighth grade attending de facto segregated schools and children attending a mixed school.” (Maslow, 1962) [bold mine] Since one of the major decisions in ‘leveling’ education (Brown vs. BoE, Kansas-1954) did not take place until just a year before the PEC study of 1955, a gap should have been expected. One might think today however that the Gap would be narrowing with six decades of opportunities to do so. This early example of the failure to realize how the restrictions of the past influence today’s performances are what keeps the Gap alive and well. Looking at AAGs as a tree, we can see how many limbs there are, including the little twig branches. The assumptions and practices Anne Dyson writes of must be pruned so that they do not block the growth of other limbs. The most common style of classroom setup in the world is that the teacher stands and talks, and the students sit and listen. The teacher is the tree; the students the limbs. Some little branches are pruned, making room for bigger and stronger limbs. What happens to the pruned limbs? Special education and alternative schools? I aim to present a rational argument that the AAG tree has roots that are 2500 years old, have been pruned for just as long, and what remains supports some of today’s day-to-day long-standing practices. If we look at the groups that experts label as deficient, we find that they are the pruned limbs. Not surprisingly, these are the same groups denied access to literacy for over a millennium. Fixes, if desired and possible, require cutting not only some of the tree’s twigs but also some of the bigger limbs. Possibly, remove the tree. The most obvious reason for the gap is the belief that an objective standard exists and that it reflects a baseline, expected, accepted measure and definition of intelligence. Sure, there are mental abilities that change as we age, giving us the ability to process information differently. At six, algebra is probably beyond our mental capacity; at 13 though, the brain might not like it but it can process math. However, there can be no objective standard for academic achievement; learning differences can accelerate or decelerate learning. If the criteria are consistently fluid, stability will be impossible to attain and maintain yet if they remain stagnant, the result will be the same. However, the most damaging to achievement is the refusal to look from whence we come. Should the fluidity result from new initiatives, future fixes will be difficult as the audience becomes fluid as well. “... we need to first understand the relationship between the achievement gap, standards, tests, and everyday instruction. During the last decade, large-scale investigations have focused on international comparisons of test performance, ...” (Junlei Li, 2006) A balance of academic achievements within the United States will be extremely difficult to meet within this 2500-year-old system let alone balance global academic achievements. The gap was created to establish an imbalance. Are superiority and inferiority reflected in the concepts of grade levels in addition to course grades? When a student is in the 9th grade or 6th Form, is there not an assumption that they know more than a 3rd grader or a 2nd Former? There is still a tightly bound bureaucracy made even tighter through oligarchy, nepotism, new social demands (ADA, etc.), and racism is woven into the fabric of educational systems. Is there quantitative evidence? Probably but the qualitative evidence is quite telling. The achievement gaps today between sexes are in life sciences and math with males scoring higher than females while in English and social studies, females hold the lead. In a newly released study, results suggest that this gap is not the result of sex but, “On the contrary, the scholars found that men with very low high-school GPAs in math and science and very low SAT math scores were choosing these math-intensive majors just as often as women with much higher math and science achievement.” (Cimpian, Kim, & McDermott, 2020) What this says is that institutions will perpetuate the gap by pushing forward the lower-scoring males while leaving the females to ‘use their smarts’. The males will see more success as they will have support; the females will lack the same support but may rather be regarded as out of place. Women have lots of ‘smarts’ to gain, yet ironically are considered intelligent enough to do so by themselves so are rarely offered support. Leaving females out of science and math is not new nor is the omission of lower SES students. This practice started in Mesopotamia, millennia ago. Some women had rights like property ownership and freedom of movement, but those rights disappeared as people migrated west. In Egypt, 500 years later, we find that women have been reduced to objects for men to use as they will. Yes, some women made quite a name for themselves in antiquity: the first female pharaoh, Sobekneferu, along with Nefertiti, Cleopatra, Hatshepsut, and a few others but compared to males, the numbers pale in comparison. As time passes and ‘civilization’ and populations grow, females are regarded as less and less human and are reduced to property status, bought, traded, or sold like farm animals. Females were most often kept within a family’s home in spaces separate from the men. The Greeks held this opinion of females and when Rome conquered them, they didn’t need to change their opinion; they already thought of women as less-than. When Rome grew its slave ranks, females were not used primarily as baby-makers; instead, females performed the homebound work. The Roman leaders would never have given the enslaved males an avenue to sex nor would any free man be allowed or encouraged to have sex with an enslaved female. Instead, Rome would eventually run out of slaves because the single-sex living conditions prohibited the reproduction of an enslaved class. Rome had been using prisoners of war to replenish the enslaved but the war chest soon ran dry. Slaves and women were of similar status; eventually, lepers and the mentally ill were added to the list. All of these people were property; they had no civil rights and could not become citizens as only citizens participated in public life. The absence of citizenship came with its restrictions but simply being female came with many more. The question of citizenship would not have entered the ancient mind. Lepers (males) could freely walk about; females could not. If the male had once been of a privileged class, before being afflicted with leprosy, he was probably somewhat literate; a female would not have that chance. Literacy is not simply the ability to read; it is “... the ability to use printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential.” (IES-NCES, 2022) [Bold original.] When access to literacy is forbidden, functioning well in society is difficult if not impossible. The illiterate have no concept of goals, no concept of knowing more, and believe how they live now is their lot in life. There is no ‘better’. The othered groups are so removed from active participation in society that one wonders if they have a concept of society. We know from historical accounts that the Church (or Ghetto (very few synagogues) or Mosque) played the most important role; the people were more likely to name the Church than a town. The only place a female could be guaranteed a chance to learn to read and maybe write was in a convent attached to an established monastery. Most were oblates, donated by their families to the church. Many did not have a dowry for that daughter so a convent was the best option. Prof. Carol Symes of the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, wrote “... many medieval women could also read, and write, in Latin—especially if they had been educated in a monastery.” (Symes, p. 15) She also tells us that “... in antiquity and during the Middle Ages, wealthy women were mostly taught to read at home—often by their own mothers.” And that, “At home, little girls and boys were taught to read in their own vernacular language or mother tongue rather than in Latin.” (Symes, p. 15) When universities were developed, the students were given the status of the cleric; since females could not be clerics, they could not be university students either. The only benefit that wealthier Roman females received was as a business owner; if a wife was a wool dyer and her husband was a brewer, and his business folded, her business could not be touched. (Daileader P. , 2001) To separate further females et al from participation in social life, the language of the elite literate classes was not that of street people. Egyptians did not ‘speak’ hieroglyphs, and elite Greeks and the gods did not speak the dialect of the people. As said by Dr. Garland, “Language is not just a series of words; it’s a way of thinking, a habit of mind.” (Garland, 2018) If one is not literate in the language of the educated classes, one cannot become educated. In the Discovery Channel documentary, “Wild Child: Feral Children”, Dr. Susan Davis says, “Language is more than words; it’s grammar.” Because language is constructed, like race and gender, its definition, and impact too, are malleable. Language as all-encompassing allows for an expansion of mind, etc. One can know hundreds of words but if the grammatical syntax is unknown, an understandable sentence cannot be created. “All women, regardless of their social status, faced certain legal disabilities, and some of the era’s larger trends, such as the revival of urban life, limited rather than broadened the political and educational opportunities available to women.” (Daileader P. , p. 33) These are the behaviors that lead to the hypothesis that keeping females et al out of positions of even the slightest power or prestige is a construction, is perpetual, and is desired. Females as invisible has a very long life. The educational systems throughout the globe follow the same model that they did 2500 years ago. Some Middle Eastern religions prohibit females from attending school at all, thereby denying literacy. Some allow religious training for females; the knowledge is belief-based, not necessarily academic. Moreover, as noted earlier, religious training often further separated females as the language of the Church was Latin but the language of the street was not; this difference between the language of the speaker and of the audience makes proselytizing difficult. The audience has no idea what is being spoken; this scenario plays out at every mass as well. The commoners attend and listen to what must seem like random noises. Only the clerics (monks, priests, bishops, etc.) understood the spoken and much of the written, although Latin was very tough to read even for the literate. There were no spaces between words, no capital letters to set off new ideas/paragraphs, just one long line of letters. One had to know Latin well to know where a word began and ended. Females and others were completely left illiterate; however, once they began to become literate, the Church panicked. Women could not become priests or bishops and regarding higher education, The clerical status of students had another important consequence: women were not admitted to medieval universities, because they could not be members of the secular clergy. Thus, women found themselves shut out of the institution that would gradually become the main, and often the sole path to prestigious jobs. (Daileader P. , p. 70) Some areas teach only that which is necessary to live yet the method is the same. Many of these areas have sex-based education; females learn domestic things and males learn hunting, etc. Females remain close to home while males can leave the area and meet other people. Limiting access to literacy necessarily limits achievement in most areas, most especially but not exclusively, in academics. The Gap is the concern but the most recent solution to narrowing or eliminating it has been to revamp the policies, procedures, and regulations aimed at improving the student, not the system. However, because the fracture is not with the individual, the initiatives fail time and time again. Anne Dyson “... suggest[s] that inclusive schools require, not fixing children to eliminate a gap, but fixing the taken-for-granted assumptions and practices of schools.” (Dyson, 2021) The gap was created explicitly to separate and label ‘others’, especially females, and for the last 2500 years has done a stellar job of remaining alive. Today, equality and/or equity are only marketed as desirable; however, policies, procedures, and regulations in education and academics keep both at bay. The ‘fix’ will be painful to the dominant as what exists now needs to be broken and reset to heal well. In order to reduce or eliminate any academic achievement gap, several changes could be made. These would be massive cultural changes but it has been done before. The system could remove current academic standards since they are arbitrary. The system could remove grades (levels) so that students could move freely according to ability. The system could remove grading---A, B, Cs etc. The system could split schools into interest zones into which students could come and go. The current ‘tech’ schools are a good idea; the specialized academics school should not be called an Honors anything and Academy sets a high tone too. Especially however, a thorough fix, one that returns all to the same starting point will rely on the Christian leaders, the Jewish Rabbis, and the Muslim Imam, regardless of denomination, to revisit their history and ‘change their evil ways’. Beliefs are OK until they are untruths. The untruths have cost women a fair shot to advancement globally. How can women be on par with men when they have started so far behind in the race?  REFERENCES American Experience. (2012). Henry Ford. Retrieved from American Experience: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/henryford-antisemitism/ Andrews, D. 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