Building Road Maps to Close the Achievement Gap

October 16, 2012 - If big-city school systems had a clear picture of the risks that put their students in danger of falling behind academically, and of the protective factors that are helping some of those students overcome such dangers and succeed, educators and policy makers could build locally targeted solutions for the achievement gap.
 
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education (Penn GSE) have found a way to create just such a road map by mining the kinds of data that schools and social service agencies already collect routinely. With such a map in hand, schools and other agencies can work together to mitigate the risks and bolster the protective factors. Their findings have been reported in the October issue of the Journal of School Psychology.
 
“The model, design and findings of this research provide actionable intelligence to put us on a path to close the black-white achievement gap,” says Penn GSE Professor John Fantuzzo, lead author of an article published in the October issue of the Journal of School Psychology. Fantuzzo’s research focuses on African-American boys because the achievement gap is much wider for boys than for girls.
 
 In the study they describe in “Academic Achievement of African-American Boys: A City-wide, Community-based Investigation of Risk and Resilience,” Fantuzzo and his co-authors used an integrated data system, they helped develop, to match thousands of third-grade boys from across Philadelphia, both black and white, with records stored by the schools and other agencies that had previously not shared data systematically, if at all.
 
Third-grade boys were chosen because third grade is the first time that children take state-mandated achievement tests, giving the researchers a consistent measure of academic performance. The data, which had been collected over the boys’ lifetimes and even extended back before their births, to the time of their mothers’ pregnancies, allowed the researchers to use sophisticated analytic techniques to find the correlation between academic performance and various risks and protective factors over time.
 
The researchers found that the black-white achievement gap was accompanied by a “risk gap” of the same magnitude. African-American boys in Philadelphia were considerably more likely than their white counterparts to experience risks such as poverty, maltreatment, homelessness or lead exposure; to have a low birth weight; to have a mother with a low level of education; or to have a mother who received inadequate prenatal care. All of these risks were correlated with poor academic performance, and Fantuzzo calls them “what’s behind being behind.”
 
But other factors can help to mitigate these risks. The researchers also studied the link between academic performance and the boys’ school attendance and behavioral records. After accounting for early childhood risk factors, they found that African-American boys who showed higher levels of engagement, through strong attendance records and frequent participation in classroom tasks, did better academically than their peers who were less engaged.
 
The findings suggest that to close the achievement gap, schools and social service agencies must work together to reduce the risks to which African-American boys in their communities are exposed. But educators must also work with boys and their families, building home-school collaborations to help African-American boys stay engaged with learning. And this must happen early in the children’s academic careers, the researchers say; many African-American boys show increasing signs of disengagement beginning in the youngest grades.
 
“By working collaboratively,” Fantuzzo says, “we can generate and test effective prevention and intervention programs for these school communities to better support the educational well-being of African-American boys.”
 
Fantuzzo’s co-authors are Whitney LeBoeuf of Penn GSE, Heather Rouse of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and Chin-Chih Chen of the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Education.

Media Contact: Kat Stein, Exec. Director of Communications, katstein@gse.upenn.edu, (215) 898-9642