The Term ‘Achievement Gap’ Fosters A Negative View Of Black Students
Despite long-standing efforts to close the racial “achievement gap” in education, the term does more to trigger racist stereotypes and causes a lower sense of urgency than when the issue is presented as the need to “end inequality in educational outcomes.”
Those are the key findings of a new study in which we examined the effect that the two different terms had on teachers and others.
To reach this conclusion, we conducted two different survey experiments – one with teachers and one with nonteachers.
In the experiments, we randomly asked respondents to answer one of two versions of a question on a survey. Some were asked how important it was to “close the achievement gap” between Black and white students. Others were asked how important it was to “end inequality in educational outcomes ...