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Academic Achievement Gap

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Academic Achievement Gap
Academic Achievement Gap
The education system has improved in many ways, however we still face many problems as a nation. Among many current education system problems is the academic achievement gap between different races. The academic achievement gap has existed for many years but has really been brought to the attention of United Stated citizens in the last decade. Statistics show that on average African American students score lower than white students on examinations, performance and overall grades in school (Camera, 2016). Many theorist have stated what they believe the problem behind the academic achievement gap is, however we have yet to close the gap. There have also been administrative acts set in place in the hopes of closing the …show more content…
One administrative act is the No Child Left Behind Act, passed by President Bush in 2001 (Korte, 2015). One goal behind the act was to help eliminate the academic achievement gap. No Child Left Behind required all states to develop content and standardized test in order to make sure that all students were meeting the required education achievement (Korte, 2015). This however was replaced in 2009 by President Obama who created Race to the Top. The goal of his educational reform was to turn low preforming schools around. He created a building system that measured student success (Korte, 2015). He created a competitive grant in hopes of motivating school professional to focus on helping poorly preforming student to achieve higher academics (Korte, 2015). Neither of these acts helped to close the academic achievement gap from what it was in previous …show more content…
Many scholars and researchers believe that we can’t focus on school reform alone but also socioeconomic reform. There has been a great number of researcher that suggest that community status has a great influence on the success of students in school. Corey Bower suggest that in addition to making changes in school, we should spend a great deal of effort in reforming the social aspect of these students life (Bower, 2011). Bower states that be believes about three quarters of the academic achievement gap comes from sources outside of the school, whereas only one quarter of the gap is experienced in school (Bower, 2011). After researching the academic achievement gap, Bower believed that schools alone can’t fix the academic achievement gap but that we need to address a social policy as well in order to close the gap successfully (Bower,
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