The Achievement Gap Initiative
at Harvard University
 
 

Text Box: the minority. Rigid social boundaries inhibit students’ ability to identify with multiple social groups at once. Finally, Pollock reported on ways that educators may unintentionally contribute to racial achievement gaps. Her forthcoming book, titled Everyday Anti-racism, provides educators with practical strategies for avoiding biased practices. Text Box: Carter explored the relationship between school practices and the rigidity of “social” and “symbolic” boundaries. Social boundaries separate groups--race, class, gender--from one another. Symbolic boundaries can be used to acquire status, monopolize resources, and/or distinguish groups from others. Carter found social boundaries to be more rigid in schools where students of color were Text Box: Elmore and Ladd both argued that accountability pressures under NCLB have made it more difficult for low-achieving schools to attract and retain good teachers. Johnson presented results from The Project on the Next Generation of Teachers, a multi-year study examining issues related to the future of the nation’s teaching force. She discussed ways schools can attract teachers more successfully. For example, the best Text Box: districts ensure access to top candidates by hiring in March and April. Kane cautioned that policies aimed at redistributing effective teachers should be based on high quality measures of effectiveness, beyond years of experience or certification status. He identified prior effectiveness at producing achievement gains as the best current measure of a teacher’s future effectiveness. Text Box: Instructional Quality Gaps Under NCLB Text Box: ties. She found highly racialized practices related to course enrollment and discipline, racialized resource allocations and race-based performance expectations. Similarly, Diamond’s presentation focused on how institutional arrangements in schools influence social identity. Specifically, he found that racial differences in advanced-course enrollments lead students of color to conflate racial categories with academic categories. Text Box: Interventions to Raise Achievement and Close Gaps Text Box: substantially improved with psychological interventions that include using concepts of malleable intelligence and role models for students. Linguistic Code-SwitchingRebecca Wheeler of Christopher Newport University presented her work on “Code-Switching,” a new method for teaching Standard English. She uses a compare and contrast Text Box: Methods to Counter Stereotype Threat New York University’s Joshua Aronson presented new research on stereotype threat and academic performance. His recent school intervention results in Texas demonstrate that performance can be Text Box: technique to teach students and teachers how to translate “informal” dialect English into “formal” standard English. The results so far indicate strong effects on test scores for black students. Engagement in Learning AGI Director, Ron Ferguson presented evidence on the power of five key classroom conditions as predictors of five Text Box: Page # Text Box: June 2007 Research Conference Highlights Text Box: University of Illinois at Chicago’s Amanda Lewis and Harvard’s John Diamond, Mica Pollock and Prudence Carter addressed patterns and meanings of racial differences in school settings. Lewis reported on her study of achievement gaps in an affluent suburban school that has plentiful resources and an expressed commitment to eliminate race-based dispariText Box: Harvard’s Richard Elmore, Susan Moore Johnson and Tom Kane joined Duke University’s Helen Ladd to explore factors affecting school improvement. For North Carolina, Ladd finds a connection in high poverty schools between low test scores and low principle leadership ratings. She also finds that low-income students have less experienced teachers. Some districts are responding with increased pay to attract experienced teachers. However, Text Box: Racially Identifiable Social Structures and Processes in Schools

"I just think that kids aren't used to seeing a successful .black male student. Whenever I do something that's . just like normal. They're like, "Whoa." . A lot of times racism is indirect. "

A high achieving black sophomore John Diamond's research
Text Box: types of student engagement in secondary school classrooms. Using data from a school intervention that he founded, the predictive conditions include relevance, enjoyment, teacher skill at clearing up confusion, teacher support, teacher demands, and peer supports. Effects differ across types of student engagement.

Copyright © 2008 The President and Fellows of Harvard College
Photos (top left and right) by Kevin G. Reeves for the Shaker Heights City School District