All humans are endowed with inherent talents and individual capabilities which could be modeled and modulated with the right guidance at the appropriate time. Academics in the United States, with a strong social conscience, show deep concern for the academic plight of minority students and the widening gap between blacks and their white peers. “No Child Left Behind (NCLB) program aims at educational reforms through identifying areas of educational backwardness, particularly gap between language learning skills of black and white, and overhauling the teaching system for “choice schools” by imparting special training methods aimed at professional development of teachers. ‘”Under NCLP, children in the Title I-funded schools have the choice to transfer to a better school in their district if their school fails to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) in the same subject area for two consecutive years.” (Robbins, 2007).
Many institutions in the United States are working to “ameliorate the academic problems of African American and other minority students” encountering “achievement gap,” through a “multi-faceted effort aimed both at raising consciousness and at offering solutions to the disparity in academic achievement between minority students and their white peers.” (Brobeck, 2006). There exist other gaps, namely: expectation gap; opportunity gap; funding gap; culture gap; health gap; and psychology gap, including issues of attitude and self-identity compounded with less experience and lower-on-the job attendance among school teachers in black-dominated schools add to the bigger issue of ‘achievement gap’. Experts opine that measurable correlates of achievement identified by Paul Barton in “Parsing the Information Gap” such as the “rigor of curriculum, the quality of teacher preparation, the level of teacher experience and their attendance on the job, class size, and the availability of technology-assisted instruction” hold good for involving the majority of academic disciplines to address the achievement gap. (Brobeck, 2006). Hence, the main focus is needed to face the issue with a strong will to identify students who are gifted rather than academically disadvantaged through a collaborative, cross-disciplinary, and comprehensive program like “Vanderbilt University Achievement Gap Project” created by Donna Y. Ford and Gilman Whiting (Brobeck, 2006). Though they confronted many hurdles from the parents of black students, the preconceived notions of “acting white,” the uphill task could be achieved through simple acts of morale boosting.
On the positive side, NCLB stresses the evolution of struggling students at the same time teachers find it difficult to cope with the increasing burden of the national curriculum, incorporating more writing technique development, with less teaching time. General observation made by teachers on time constraints is a clash among students to achieve the ultimate goal of one hundred percent proficiency with the need to cover all the very particular standards included in assessment tests. In the words of Singer-Gabella, faculty at Peabody that “NCLP is posing challenges to all education schools when it comes to the testing issue specifically,” clearly echoes the apprehensions of teaching faculty and their “professional accountability to student learning.” (Robbins, 2007). By creating a program with less “subject content” and more about “developing success-oriented attitudes and behavior” most advantageous achievement opportunities such as self-efficacy; resilience building; academic self-confidence; racial identity and pride; and self-awareness of one’s strengths and weaknesses could be provided to talented young black men and the widening achievement gap bridged over some time.
References
- Brobeck, Kurt. (2006). Spanning the Achievement Gap. No Child Left Behind Vanderbilt Peabody College. College of Education and Human Development.
- Robbins, Lisa. (2007). Making it works. Peabody Reflector.