Achievement gap between black and white students in the United States
Two previous articles on this site presented data on disparities in school attendance by ethnicity, language or religion from 17 nationally representative household surveys. Net attendance rates among the least disadvantaged groups are up to 1.7 times higher than net attendance rates among the most disadvantaged groups at the primary level of education and up to 6 times higher at the secondary level of education . Similar gaps in access to education and in student achievement exist in the United States. The National Center for Education Statistics has published the most recent findings of its National Assessment of Educational Progress, a long term study of student achievement, in the report NAEP 2008 Trends in Academic Progress . The results of the periodic assessments by the NCES demonstrate a persistent achievement gap between black and white students. Figure 1 summarizes the results of 12 reading assessments over the period 1971 to 2008. For each assessment, the average reading ...