Closing the Achievement Gap Essay

Introduction

There is much to be said about the achievement gap. Indeed, there is an alarming chasm between top performers and many others that are further down the scoring and achievement spectrum. The most disturbing part of the problem is that the gaps are often along income, racial and other pronounced socioeconomic lines. As with any other problem, there are possible interventions that can be used to curtail and prevent this problem from getting larger and harder to manage. The interventions that were sought and found for this literature review were found in academic databases such as EBSCO. As one might expect, “achievement gap” and other similar search strings were the parameters used to find the results. Generally speaking, the use of targeted interventions that address the root of the problem at the cultural and economic levels are what it takes to stem the problems in question. While there are no easy or simple answers when it comes to the achievement gap, the hard questions and answers will have to come to truly solve the problem.

Targeted Interventions

As noted in the introduction, using a single broad approach is not going to work when it comes to the achievement gap. For example, what holds women back is going to tend to be different than what holds the poor or African-Americans back. Further, people that are in more than one afflicted class (e.g. poor African-Americans) may themselves need a blended approach. This is all also true when it comes to the arena that gains are sought in. For example, many of the victims of the achievement gap are noticeably absent from what is known as the STEM fields. STEM is short for science, technology, engineering and mathematics. One such program, known as C-STEM, is present in the state of California. It is put in motion by the University of California system of colleges. A litany of high schools bid for the pilot program for C-Stem and about two dozen were accepted. It was found that direct and guided interventions at the high school level set a much better tone for STEM-related (and other) success for those enrolled students as they grew into adults and started their careers. Further, an approach like this that is not race- or cultural-specific, but rather focuses on multiple afflicted classes, is a way to address more than one affected population at once. (Kuchey & Flick, 2017). This approach works in both urban and rural settings, if done properly (Assouline, Ihrig & Mahatmya, 2017).

Racial Gaps

Something else that…