CITTATION: Sherman, Whitney H. and Margaret Grogan, "Superintendents' Responses to the Achievement Gap: An Ethical Critique," International Journal of Leadership in Education 6, 3 (July-September 2003): 223-237.
What Did the Researchers Do?
The U.S. Department of Education reports that the achievement gap between African-American and White students widened from 1990 to 1999. African-American students score lower than Whites on vocabulary, reading and mathematics, scholastic aptitude, and intelligence tests. The average African-American 17-year-old reads only as well as the average 13-year-old White student. The gap is already evident when students enter kindergarten and continues to increase the longer students remain in school. White students are more often in honors and accelerated classes while African-Americans are found more frequently in special education classrooms and are more likely to be suspended from school.
This study involved superintendents in the state of Virginia from 1999-2001 and examined their perspectives on the African-American/White test score gap. Superintendents were questioned in an interview about whether there was a African-American/White achievement gap in their district based on the results of Virginia's Standards of Learning statewide test in grades 3, 5, and 8. The superintendents also responded regarding whether actions were being taken in their district to close and ultimately eliminate this gap. Eight women superintendents and seven men superintendents represented rural, urban, and suburban school districts in the survey. Of the 15 school districts represented in the study, seven included 50 percent or more African-American students, three had at least 40 percent, and the remaining five districts had at least 30 percent.
At the time of this study, many of the interviewed superintendents had not disaggregated test score data in their districts according to race. The achievement gap between African-American and White students had not received the same attention in Virginia as it had in some other states in the nation.What Did the Researchers Find?The findings of this study are reported from an ethical perspective, one that confronts the moral issues involved when schools benefit some groups in society but fail others. The ethics of this particular issue involve a matter of justice or fairness, caring about the achievement and well-being of all students, and the needs of the students in each subgroup-both as a whole and as individual students in terms of self-esteem, personal confidence, and ego anxieties.The study found the majority of the superintendents had minimal knowledge of the test score gap in their districts and that very little was being done about it.
Five findings are highlighted from the interview data:
Teachers, and often the superintendents, had low expectations for African-American students; they did not expect African-American students to accomplish as much as White students.
At that time, a state accountability plan was in its initial stages and the emphasis was on a school district reaching a 70 percent passing rate on the state tests for accreditation. There was no pressure to make the achievement of poor and minority students a priority. The measures at that time focused on the performance of the student body as a whole, which can result in masking the performance gaps among subgroups of children.
Once the superintendents recognized the test score gap between African-American and White students, the question of what to do with this information became paramount. In some districts, school boards did not allow these results to be communicated to the community due to anxiety about lawsuits, wanting to downplay racial differences and the feeling that the large numbers of minority students were depressing the scores of the district.
Despite such constraints, several superintendents had taken the initiative to disaggregate their scores. Even without board directives, superintendents had to deal with a wider community. Most of the superintendents, keenly aware of potential political ramifications even for their own jobs, encouraged internal discussion of racial or socioeconomic discrepancies in test scores among teachers and administrators, but not public discussion. However, three of the superintendents were dedicated to raising their communities' awareness of the discrepancies and taking action to reduce it.
Two of the districts developed similar strategies to eliminate the achievement gap. In both districts the superintendents publicly acknowledged the African-American/White test score gap and school boards and communities openly discussed the gap. These superintendents spoke of efforts to reduce the gap, thus displaying more ethical actions toward eliminating such unjust schooling practices.
What Are Possible Implications for School Improvement?
An ethical school environment requires the identification of inequities along with the practices and assumptions that have created them. Hidden racism must be challenged in order to free teachers to raise the expectations for these subgroups of students. A lack of acknowledgement and discussion results in a continuing cycle of inaction.
To begin to address the problem, a superintendent, the school board, and the community must be willing to acknowledge the existence of the gap and believe that schools can work effectively to reduce it.Teachers must be educated in ways to serve the multicultural population of students.
The common practice of teaching to the middle, which results in the needs of many students not being addressed, must be eliminated. The specific groups of students who are struggling must be identified and strategies developed and implemented just for those groups.The 70 percent benchmark passing rate for schools as a whole allows principals and teachers to promote teaching to the middle. This practice is justified by the assumption that the gifted students will succeed anyway and the remedial students will perform poorly regardless of instruction.With the initiation of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, all school districts must now begin to look at their subgroups' achievement by building, if there are sufficient numbers in a subgroup, and/or by district. Furthermore, the law requires that specific strategies be developed to improve the ability of these students to score better on state-mandated tests in reading and mathematics in grades 3 through 8, beginning in the school year 2005-06. Since the law
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