The Core Knowledge Blog

New research confirms what seems obvious to many teachers in inner city schools: the students who are at the greatest disadvantage in U.S. public schools are the brightest African-American children.

“As black students move through elementary and middle school, these studies show, the test-score gaps that separate them from their better-performing white counterparts grow fastest among the most able students and the most slowly for those who start out with below-average academic skills,” Education Week reports.

The reasons why achievement gaps are wider at the upper end of the achievement scale are still unclear, says Ed Week. But it was crystal clear to me in my South Bronx elementary school: every live, twitching nerve ending was aimed at getting kids who scored below grade level over the hump. The kids who were already there were viewed as finished goods. Such potentially high-achieving children, I was pointedly told by my AP once, were “not your problem.”

The “not your problem” kids walk in smart and walk out smart, largely by accident of birth. While they’re in school, they are nearly completely neglected, and as a result achieve not nearly as much as they would have (while still testing at or above grade level on dumbed-down state tests) had they not been starved for oxygen in an underperforming school, where they were constantly praised for being bright, but had few demands placed upon them, and where opportunities for enrichment, in or out of school, were non-existent.

“Some experts believe the patterns have something to do with the fact that African-American children tend to be taught in predominantly black schools, where test scores are lower on average, teachers are less experienced, and high-achieving peers are harder to find,” says Ed Week.

Sure, that too. But mostly, its not-so-benign neglect.

In one of the studies, Stanford University professor Sean F. Reardon, looked at the test data for nearly 7,000 elementary students and found that the achievement gaps grew twice as fast among the students who started out performing above the mean than they did among lower-performing children. “The long-term implication of this is that, if these gaps continue to grow throughout their schooling career, even kids who enter kindergarten with high levels of readiness are going to end up falling below where they started,” said Mr. Reardon tells Ed Week.