Equity Diversity and Accountability

¶ … Racial and Ethnic Achievement Gap Trends: Reversing the Progress toward Equity? By Jaekyung Lee. This article discusses setbacks in the achievement of racial and ethnic minorities, and identifies some of the key factors affecting these setbacks. The author believes variations in the data are not fully discussed, and there are strong implications toward future setbacks.

Reflective Review

The United States has always been a melting pot, and this blending of cultures and ethnicities continues throughout the new millennium. The fight for Civil Rights in the 1950s and 60s brought new opportunities to minorities in our country, but many studies and data indicate these opportunities may in fact be decreasing. Minorities tend to achieve less in mathematics and reading testing, and while these gaps narrowed in the 70s and 80s, they appear to be widening again (Lee 3). The author notes there are a wide variety of social and economic trends that can affect these gaps, including poverty, peer pressure, family conditions and cultural and student behaviors - such as alcohol or drug use, and even changes in how the school presents classes and information.

The author concludes that while these indicators have been used often in the past to measure the educational and achievement between whites and minorities, none of them "fully accounts for the bifurcated racial and ethnic achievement gap trends that I have described" (Lee 10). Therefore, there must be other indicators that studies have not yet discovered, and these indicators must be studied in order to get the true and factual results of achievement, and the true measure of the gaps and setbacks will not be known until all the indicators are discovered and studied. This article is quite informative and indicates why all studies should not be taken as "gospel truth," because it is clear often the studies are flawed, or at least do not represent the entire picture of the problem. Continued study will certainly show why these gaps in achievement continue to widen, and what we must do to bring the results back in line with our hopes and desires for all minorities in this country.