Where Achievement Gap Mania Came From
by Frederick M. Hess • Sep 29, 2011 at 7:54 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
 Print |  Send |  RSS |
ShareLast week's National Affairs essay "Our Achievement Gap Mania" has raised a little ire. One thing that might be useful is to situate the debate a bit, both in terms of how we got here and why I have the temerity to suggest that the moral philosophy behind gap-closing is less compelling than proponents seem to imagine.
In the 1960s, in the famed Coleman Report, sociologist James Coleman examined the first large-scale collection of data on school characteristics and student achievement to conclude that schooling had little effect on students' life outcomes and that parents' involvement in their children's lives affected achievement and eventual success much more powerfully than did schooling. An extensive reanalysis by sociologist Christopher Jencks and a team at Harvard similarly concluded that the outcomes of schooling depended almost entirely on "the characteristics of the entering children. Everything else--the school budget, its policies, the characteristics
