Achievement Gap: Play to Their Strengths
Posted on November 28th, 2010 by ASEE
Educators who try to fix the achievement gap afflicting young black males by focusing on their shortcomings have it backwards, argues Yvette Jackson, chief executive officer of the National Urban Alliance. “We must embrace a new approach to African-American males that focuses less on what they aren’t doing and builds on what they can and want to do as the path to improving their academic performance.”
Filed under: K-12 Education News | Comments Off on Achievement Gap: Play to Their Strengths
Tags: African-American Students, Education Policy, Minority Group Students
The long-documented achievement gap between black and white students turns out to be wider than is generally known. According to a new study focusing on young African American males, 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys.
We can do better. That’s the bottom-line assessment of STEM education in the U.S. by John P. Holdren, the former Harvard physicist who now directs the Office of Science and Technology Policy, making him President Obama’s chief science advisor. “Too many of our children, particularly too many of our girls and minorities, are steering away from science and engineering, and we’re trying to address that.”
