Achievement gaps in the United States are observed, persistent disparities in measures of educational performance among subgroups of U.S. students, especially groups defined by socioeconomic status (SES), race/ethnicity and gender. The achievement gap can be observed through a variety of measures, including standardized test scores, grade point average, dropout rates, college enrollment, and college completion rates. The gap in achievement between lower income students and higher income students exists in all nationsCarnoy & Rothstein, "International Tests Show Achievement Gaps in All Countries", Economic Policy Institute, January 15, 2013 and it has been studied extensively in the U.S. and other countries, including the U.K.Joseph Rowntree Bawlls vs Lunch "Education and Poverty" , "How Does Poverty Affect Children's Education?" Various other gaps between groups exist around the globe as well.
Research into the causes of the disparity in academic achievement between students from different socioeconomic and racial backgrounds has been ongoing since the 1966 publication of the Coleman Report (officially titled "Equality of Educational Opportunity"), commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education. The report found that a combination of home, community, and in-school factors affect academic performance and contribute to the achievement gap. According to American educational psychologist David Berliner, home and community environments have a stronger impact on school achievement than in-school factors, in part because students spend more time outside of school than in school. In addition, the out-of-school factors influencing academic performance differ significantly between children living in poverty and children from middle-income households.Berliner, D., "Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success", Education Public Interest Center, 2009Berliner, D., "Our Impoverished View of Educational Reform", Teachers College Record, 2006
The achievement gap, as reported in trend data collected by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), has become a focal point of education reform efforts by a number of nonprofit organizations and advocacy groups. Attempts to minimize the achievement gap by improving equality of access to educational opportunities have been numerous but fragmented. These efforts include establishing affirmative action, emphasizing multicultural education, and increasing interventions to improve school testing, teacher quality and accountability.
Racial achievement gap
The education of African Americans and some other minorities lags behind those of other U.S. ethnic groups, such as White Americans and Asian Americans, as reflected by test scores, grades, urban high school graduation rates, rates of disciplinary action, and rates of conferral of undergraduate degrees. Indeed, high school graduation rates and college enrollment rates are comparable to those of white Americans 25 or 30 years ago. It should also be noted that the category of African immigrant population (excluding Haitians and other foreign-born black people born outside of Africa) has the highest educational attainment of any group in the United States, but they represent a small group within the larger African American population.U.S. Census http://www.asian-nation.org/immigrant-stats.shtml
Asian Americans of Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean descent score the highest on average, with the difference primarily on mathematics subtests, in all scholastic standardized tests such as the SAT, GRE, MCAT, USMLE exams and IQ tests followed by White Americans who score in the intermediate range. Hispanic American and African American scores tend to follow White scores. U.S. students as a whole have in general attained average scores on the International PISA test while other wealthy industrialized developed East Asian countries, such as China, Japan, Singapore and South Korea, achieve the highest top scores. However, compared with children in some less developed countries like Benin where some children, especially girls, end their education after the elementary level, education in the United States is compulsory to age 16 regardless of race or class. It is anticipated that over half of public education students will be required to pass standards-based assessments which expect that all students to be at least exposed to algebra by high school and exit prepared for college.
Researchers have not reached consensus about the causes of the academic achievement gap; instead, there exists a wide range of studies that cite an array of factors, both cultural and structural, that influence student performance in school. Sociologist Annette Lareau suggested that students who lack middle-class cultural capital and have limited parental involvement are likely to have lower academic achievement than their better resourced peers.Social Class Differences in Family-School Relationships: The Impact of Cultural Capital Annette Lareau, 1987 Other researchers suggest that academic achievement is more closely tied to race and socioeconomic status and have tried to pinpoint why.Tracking: From Theory to Practice Maureen Hallinan 1994
Gender achievement gap
For the past fifty years, there has been a gap in the educational achievement of males and females in the United States, but which gender has been disadvantaged has fluctuated over the years. In the 1970s and 1980s, data showed girls trailing behind boys in a variety of academic performance measures, specifically in test scores in math and science.
Data in the last twenty years shows the general trend of girls outperforming boys in academic achievement in terms of class grades across all subjects and college graduation rates, but boys scoring higher on standardized tests and being better represented in the higher-paying and more prestigious job fields such as STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math).Kafir, Krista (April 2007). "Taking the Boy Crisis in Education Seriously: How School Choice can Boost Achievement Among Boys and Girls." Independent Women's Forum. Male students consistently achieved worse school marks than female students from 1913 to 2011 in all countries for which there is data.
Literacy
Traditionally, girls have outperformed boys in reading and writing. Although this gap may be minimal in kindergarten, it grows as students continue their education. According to the 2004 National Reading Assessment measured by the US Department of Education, the gap between boys and girls, only slightly noticeable in 4th grade, left boys 14 points behind girls during their 12th grade year.Perie, M. (2005). NAEP 2004 Trends in Academic Progress. Washington, DC: US Department of Education. On the 2008 test, female students continued to have higher average reading scores than male students at all three ages. The gap between male and female 4th graders was 7 points in 2008. By 12th grade, there was an 11-point gap between males and females.
On the 2002 National Writing Assessment, boys scored on average 17 points lower than girls in 4th grade. The average gap increased to 21 points by 8th grade and widened to 24 points by senior year in high school.Persky, H. (2003). The Nation's Report Card: Writing 2002. US Department of Education. In the more recent 2007 National Assessment of Writing Skills, female students continued to score higher than male students, though margins closed slightly from previous assessments. The average score for female eighth-graders was 20 points higher than males, down 1 point from the 2002 score. For twelfth-graders, females outscored males by 18 points as opposed to 21 points in 2002.Salahu-Din, Debra (2008). The Nation's Report Card: Writing 2007. US Department of Education.
All of these assessments were conducted on a 100-point scale.
Math and science
Which gender is disadvantaged by the gap in math and science achievement largely depends on how academic achievement is being measured. Female students generally have better grades in their math classes, and this gap starts off very minimal but increases with age. However, males score higher on standardized math tests, and these score gaps also increase with age. Male students also score higher on measures of college readiness, such as the AP Calculus exams and the math section of the SAT.
The differences in National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) math scores between boys and girls nearly double from the 9-year-olds to the 17-year-olds. This inconsistency in which gender shows more achievement could be due to the fact that class grades, especially in middle and high school, usually depend on a student's completion of homework assignments, and studies have shown that girls report spending more time on homework than boys. The gender gap in mathematics is particularly large among the highest-achieving students; for example, there is a 2.1 to 1 male-female ratio among students who score an 800 on the math portion of the SAT.
At least one study has challenged the existence of the gender gap in mathematics. In 2008 Janet Hyde and others published a study showing that male and female students did equally well on No Child Left Behind standardized tests that were administered in second through eleventh grades in ten states. However, Hyde and her team did find gaps that favored males at the upper end of the achievement distribution and tried to examine gaps on more difficult test questions (previous research has shown that males outperform females on more challenging items), but the tests they examined lacked adequately challenging items. This raised questions about whether there is still a gender gap in math achievement. However, a different study published after Hyde's using NAEP data from all 50 states found a small mean sex difference in favor of males in grades 4, 8, and 12 that had remained stable through the 1990s and 2000s, as well as a 2:1 male to female ratio at the highest scores.
There is also a large discrepancy between the number of men and women working in STEM fields. Women have been, and continue to be, underrepresented in these fields. This underrepresentation is evident in the distribution of college majors among men and women; from 1997 to 2007, women earned only 18% of engineering bachelor's degrees.
Degree attainment
(Issued August 2003) Educational attainment by race and gender: 2000 Census 2000 Brief Percent of Adults 25 and over in group Men . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80.1 52.5 26.1 10.0 Women. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80.7 51.1 22.8 7.8 HS = high school completed SC = some college BA = bachelor's degree AD = advanced degree
According to 2007 data, 55 percent of college students were females and 45 percent were males. From 1995 until 2005, the number of males enrolled in college increased by 18 percent, while the number of female students rose by 27 percent.Digest of Education Statistics 2007 Males are enrolling in college in greater numbers than ever before, yet fewer than two-thirds of them are graduating with a bachelor's degree. The numbers of both men and women receiving a bachelor's degree have increased significantly, but the increasing rate of female college graduates exceeds the increasing rate for males.Mead, Sara. (2006). The Evidence Suggests Otherwise: The Truth About Boys and Girls. Washington: Education Sector.
In 2014, the percentage of women with bachelor's degrees was higher than the percentage of men with bachelor's degrees for the first time in America."Women Now at the Head of the Class, Lead Men in College Attainment" Wed Oct 07 2015. Written By: Kurt Bauman and Camille Ryan. https://census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2015/10/women-now-at-the-head-of-the-class-lead-men-in-college-attainment.html. Women also earn more master's degrees and doctorates than men.
Lifetime earnings