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The "Achievement Gap"

For today's reading on the achievement gap and education debt, we will discuss the video below, as well as an article from the Everyday Feminism blog. The reading addresses that white women have benefited the most from affirmative action. Research confirms the argument that gender was a "blindspot" in the original design of affirmative action policies.


Ch. 33, “From the Achievement Gap to the Education Debt: Understanding Achievement in U.S. Schools,” Gloria Ladson-Billings
Ladson-Billings addresses the “achievement gap,” a catchphrase to describe the difference in academic performance between White, minority, and lower socio-economic status students. This gap has been found to be most significantly affected by race and ethnicity, with a brief review of some of the potential causes. Ladson-Billings suggests avoiding too much focus on the gap, because most of the solutions are short-term in nature, and instead to look at the longer standing “educational debt” akin to the financial national debt. This debt is seen as the underlying cause of much of our national problems with regard to achievement, and that addressing it is necessary to truly have desegregated schools, as well as to come closer to fully realizing equality in the United States. 



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