The Challenge: The achievement gap is the difference among the academic performance of different ethnic groups. Even though schools are now desegregated, public education has failed to deliver the promise of a quality education to African Americans.
The Solution: Attack the soft bigotry of low expectations and demand that schools close the achievement gap among minority and white students.
HOW NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND WILL RAISE RESULTS FOR ALL
No Child Left Behind is an unprecedented commitment and focuses not on money, but on results.
- For the first time in the history of the world, a society has said that we are going to educate every child. We will provide every American boy and girl with a quality education—regardless of ethnicity, income or background.
Educating every child is the greatest moral challenge of our time.
- On the 2000 National Assessment of Educational Progress reading assessment—a national test that gauges states academic progress—40 percent of white fourth graders scored at or above proficient, compared to only 12 percent of their African American counterparts.
- In math, African American achievement also lagged—34 percent of white fourth graders scored at or above proficient, and just five percent of African Americans scored as high achievers.
- The racial achievement gap is real, and it is not shrinking.
We must test all groups of students, so we can measure the achievement gap, define it and attack it with the full knowledge and support of our communities.
- The president is committed to eliminating the achievement gap, not hiding it within school or statewide averages. That's why he wants each school to examine achievement every year in the third through eighth grades by race, ethnicity, economic background and disabilities. That way we won't leave any group or child behind.
President Bush is rallying community leaders.
- The Department of Education is working with the National Conference of Negro Women to reach out to communities to close the achievement gap.
Download this fact sheet. (It is in PDF format.)
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Official U.S. Department of Education web site.