Closing the gap: the Education Trust's recipe for meeting new federal standards on student achievement

School Administrator, August, 2002 by Craig Jerald, Kati Haycock

In a field where the rules are always changing, last winter's passage of the federal No Child Left Behind Act might appear to be just another blip on the screen. But don't be fooled. The new law fundamentally redefines what it takes to be a successful school system, and district leaders would be wise to begin taking steps now to meet the new demands.

The law requires states to separately report school- and district-level test scores for different groups of students, including low-income and minority children. These reports will lift the veil on achievement gaps in many communities that never had to confront them before. States also must begin to hold schools and districts accountable for getting all groups of students on track to reach proficiency on state standards in a dozen years.

The message is clear: You no longer will be judged a successful school system unless you successfully teach all kinds of students.

While such measures will come as no shock in states that already have instituted similar accountability systems, elsewhere the new law will have big consequences for educational leaders in all but the most homogenous and affluent communities. Some suburban schools with "good" average test scores will be shocked to find themselves judged as needing to improve, and leaders in poor urban and rural districts will be under even greater pressure to produce big learning gains.

For many, these new goals will at first feel unfair. But they are achievable. Despite what many administrators learned in graduate school, newer, more sophisticated research shows that it is not just poverty or family background that determines student achievement. What schools do does matter. And across the country, schools with concentrations of poor, African American and Latino students consistently achieve in the top third of their states. (See related story, page 18.)

Moving Forward

Here we suggest some productive steps that school district leaders can take to move ahead of the curve in reporting on and closing gaps in achievement between groups.

Before we begin, however, let us be clear about two things.

First, while we are focusing here on steps that district and school leaders can take, that does not mean we believe that it wouldn't also help if communities and states tackled head-on the many other problems--including inadequate health care, nutrition and housing--that make many young people's lives so very difficult. These things are important, too.

Second, state policymakers must stop ducking the pervasive inequities in school finance. Our research at the Education Trust shows that in 42 states, districts with the highest child poverty rates receive fewer state and local dollars per student than districts with the lowest poverty rates. The federal government is helping out this year by increasing its contribution and concentrating it more heavily in high-poverty districts. But that doesn't absolve states of the responsibility to fix their own funding systems.

In the meantime, however, district administrators can get a leg up by taking The Education Trust's recipe for meeting new federal standards on student achievement action on several fronts.

* The Bully Pulpit: Take responsibility for raising achievement and closing achievement gaps--in word and deed.

Every superintendent owns a bully pulpit, but many don't make as effective use of it as they could, especially in helping their systems confront difficult equity issues. That must change. In fact, we can't think of a time when educational leaders have stood to gain or lose so much ground simply based on how they choose to talk about an issue.

In a study of school districts that successfully responded to disaggregated test scores and accountability in Texas during the 1990s, researchers from the Dana Center at University of Texas at Austin found that how superintendents talked about achievement data was a key catalyst in getting district personnel and community members to respond to the challenge in productive ways.

Rather than trying to explain away low performance and achievement gaps by pointing to poverty, family circumstances or lack of support from social service agencies, superintendents in successful districts began by talking about the school system's responsibility for student achievement and followed up with concrete actions.

But the bully pulpit can be a lonely place, so superintendents should seek the involvement of other community leaders who have their own megaphones in talking about and responding to achievement gap data. A chorus of voices taking responsibility for the gaps and committing to closing them can help avoid finger pointing, frustration and futility. And those voices also can lend valuable support down the road when it comes time to press for difficult changes.

When Ohio recently released its first round of school-level test scores for poor and minority youngsters, the mayor of Columbus and the superintendents of 16 school districts in surrounding Franklin County responded together. They convened a countywide "achievement gap summit" to meet with parents and community organizations about what actions could raise student performance and close the gaps.