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are here: Who's Responsible for Closing the Achievement Gap?
The Role of School Leaders in Acknowledging and Accepting the Challenge
This summer I had the opportunity to work with a wide range of teacher leaders, principals, and district administrators from across the state of Washington who were in residence at a five-day institute on the elimination of the achievement gap. Curious about the motivation of this self-selected group of educators who had given up a week of their summer vacation to learn more about how to overcome the achievement gap, I talked with many of them about their reasons for attending the institute.
One participant, a school principal, commented that she was tired of the falling back on the usual explanations for why some kids underachieved and wanted to deepen her understanding of the issue so that she could begin to generate new and broader strategies to address the problem. Another participant, a veteran classroom teacher, remarked that while he considered himself to be a tireless advocate for struggling students and a leader in his building, he did not think most of the teachers in his school believed that all students could meet high academic expectations and he wanted to equip himself with some strategies for challenging his colleagues' perceptions. And a third participant, a district-level administrator from a small but high-performing system, explained that while she felt a deep sense of urgency about the issue of the achievement gap, most of the teachers, principals, and other central office administrators with whom she worked exhibited a complacency towards the issue which she wanted to learn how to "shake up" at the institute.
All of the folks with whom I talked serve as leaders in their departments, schools, and districts. Through the series of conversations I had with them, I heard each of them in their own way grappling with the question of how to lead their colleagues in acknowledging the existence of the achievement gap as an urgent problem and to accept individual and collective responsibility for addressing the problem of eliminating, or at least greatly narrowing, the gap. Determined to avoid falling prey to framing the issue around a question of blame, the educators at this institute were clearly working, instead, to frame the issue around the axis of responsibility. Exhibiting a common and shared understanding that we as educators are, in fact, responsible for working to close the achievement gap, the commitment of these participants caused me to reflect upon what it means as an educational leader to accept responsibility for eradicating the gap.
I offer these reflections based on my study of the issue and through my personal observations and interactions with school leaders who are successfully transforming schools to better serve the learning of underachieving students. In this essay, I will argue that there are three essential steps for school leaders in acknowledging and accepting responsibility for addressing long-standing educational inequities. It is my hope that the suggestions laid out in these remaining paragraphs can serve as fodder for educators' evolving conceptions of leadership in the age of the achievement gap.
To accept responsibility for the existence of the achievement gap, school leaders must first commit themselves to engaging in deep inquiry about the nature of the problem and its root causes. In a 2002 OSPI-sponsored report entitled Addressing the Achievement Gap: A Challenge for Washington State Educators, policy-makers Shannon and Bylsma assert that "All stakeholders will need to reflect and learn more about the root causes of the achievement gap and potential solutions" (p. 3).
Research into the causes of gaps in student achievement between low-income, minority students and middle-income, white students began almost a decade ago, and during that time we have learned that there are both school-related and home/community-related factors which impact the academic achievement of students (Goodlad & Keating, 1994; Darling-Hammond, 1995; Williams, 1996; Jencks & Phillips, 1998; Lee, 1998; Noguera & Akom, 2000, Haycock, 2001; Shannon & Bylsma, 2002). Hence, school leaders have an important choice to make: On which factors will they lead their colleagues in focusing? Will they direct attention to highlighting the noteworthy home and community related factors which contribute to the academic achievement gap, such as parental education level, income, or the primary language spoken at home? Or will they focus attention around an inquiry into the school-related factors which impact disparate student achievement, such as inequitable access to high-powered learning opportunities?
In a recent article in the Principal, Kati Haycock, executive director of Education Trust, a national non-profit organization dedicated to disseminating research on the elimination of the achievement gap, urges school leaders to "accept the challenge and join the ranks of more than 4,500 high-poverty and high-minority schools that are performing in the top third of their states in at least one subject/grade combination," rather than "dragging our heels and blaming the underachievement problem on the kids or their families, as some of our colleagues do" (2002, p. 20).
Mano Singham, associate director of the University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education at Case Western University, reminds us that while the research has shown that there is a high pattern of correlation between a child's socioeconomic status and their school performance, recent research has also demonstrated that the "academic resources and curriculum" of a student are an even more important predictor of school achievement than is SES (2003).
In truth, researchers have not reached consensus about the a priori causes of the academic achievement gap; instead, there exists a wide range of studies that cite an array of factors that influence student performance in school. Given the complexity of the research landscape, I concur with Haycock and Singam that school leaders, in particular, must take responsibility for the gap through guiding a community inquiry into how the distribution of learning opportunities and instruction directly affect the achievement gap problem at their sites.
After engaging in deep inquiry, school leaders must next accept responsibility for closing the achievement gap by crafting a set of deliberate action-strategies that focus on the dismantling of inequitable schooling practices and the sustained and school- or systems-wide improvement of instruction. Researcher Belinda Williams, who published one of the first texts on the achievement gap problem in the mid nineteen- nineties, counsels school leaders to remember the difference between "improving achievement and closing the gap." She maintains that when educators have concentrated primarily on improving student achievement outcomes we have often acted by instituting new programs or specific strategies, such as parental involvement seminars, class-size reduction measures, or site-based management. The cumulative effect of these "fragmented" interventions, she argues, is minimal over the long-term, even when student achievement is boosted a little in the short term. Rather than instituting single program quick fixes in response to the problem of the achievement gap, she advises school leaders to concentrate, instead, on implementing a coherent and broad range of strategies that are designed to improve "teaching and learning" over time (2001, p. 21).
It appears that only by creating a school environment where good teaching is fostered and made available to all students that the achievement gap can begin to narrow and close. Hence, school leaders have a pivotal role to play in setting a school or district-wide instructional improvement agenda and in providing the resources necessary for teachers to achieve this goal.
As a third step, along with engaging in deep inquiry and deliberate action, school leaders must additionally accept responsibility for closing the achievement gap through modeling a consistent sense of urgency and agency towards the problem. Kati Haycock insists that every school leader has a natural "bully pulpit." She laments that many "do not make as effective use of it as they could, especially in helping their schools confront difficult equity issues. . . how principals talk about the issue will determine, in large part, how school employees and community members respond" to the issue (2002, p. 22). As an integral part of their job school leaders communicate on a regular basis with parents, community members, policy-makers and, of course, teachers and students. With each communication, Haycock suggests that school leaders have a privileged opportunity to craft a steadfast message of urgency and agency regarding the challenge of closing the achievement gap.
I have been lucky to work with a few educational leaders who cheerfully and gracefully embraced their responsibility for students who were underachieving by accepting no excuses among the educators for their students' failure. In contrast, I have also worked in school environments where the leaders and the teachers tacitly divided their students into two camps: those worthy of effort and patience and those whom they perceived did not really belong at the school. If there is any hope of narrowing or eliminating the achievement gap, it is clear that we as educators cannot continue to write a percentage of our students off. Instead, we must all be encouraged to shift our attitudes and beliefs so that we become willing to accept responsibility for educating every child on our roster and in our schools. I was stirred to witness the deepening of the will of the educators with whom I spoke this summer to do their own part in closing the achievement gap as well as to return home and cajole others to join them in the work of school transformation.
In this essay, I have ruminated upon how educational leaders might inspire the members of their school communities to take up the cause of eliminating the achievement gap, such as was the work awaiting the institute participants upon their return to their districts. While it true that educators cannot change the condition of children's lives outside of school, it is also true that we can and must work to greatly improve the learning conditions for poor and minority children within the domain of our schools. It is an adherence to this belief system, engendered by the inquiry, strategic-action, and modeling of school leaders, that I deem the best hope for our underachieving students lies.
References
Darling-Hammond, Linda. (1995). Inequality and access to knowledge. In James Banks and Cherry Banks (Eds.) Handbook of Research on Multicultural Handbook. New York: MacMillan.
Goodlad, John, & Keating, Pamela, eds. (1994). Access to Knowledge: the continuing agenda for our nation's schools. New York: College Board. Haycock, Kati. (2002). Closing the achievement gap. Principal, 82(2), 20-23.
Haycock, Kati. (2001). Closing the achievement gap. Educational Leadership (March), 6-11.
Jencks, Christopher, and Phillips, Meredith, eds. (1998). The Black-White Test Score Gap. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institute.
Lee, Jaekyung. (1998). State policy correlates of the achievement gap among racial and social groups. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 24(2), 137-152.
Nogura, Pedro, & Akom, Antwi. (2000). Causes of the racial achievement gap all derive from unequal treatment: disparities demystified. The Nation (June 5).
Shannon, Sue, & Bylsma, Pete. (2002). Addressing the Achievement Gap: A Challenge for Washington State Educators. Olympia, WA: Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction.
Singam, Mano. (2003). The achievement gap: Myths and reality. Phi Delta Kappan (April). 586-591.
Williams, Belinda. (2001). An interview: How to close the achievement gap. NEA Newsletter (March). 21.
Williams, Belinda, ed. (1996). Closing the Achievement Gap: A Vision for Changing Beliefs and Practices. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Jean Snell is a Project Director for the Center for Educational Leadership at the University of Washington. A former secondary-level language arts teacher, she has taught in the administrator and teacher preparation programs at the University of Washington and done research on at-risk students, teacher leadership, and the achievement gap. She can be reached at jsnell@umd.edu.
© August 2003 New Horizons for Learning
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