Bridging the Achievement Gap: Smarter Solutions for Urban Schools

One of the most hotly contested issues in American policy debates today is the achievement gap between urban and public schools. The achievement gap refers to the persistent disparities in academic performance between different groups of students, such as white students and minorities. High-poverty urban schools, enrolling twenty-four percent of all public school students, thirty-five percent of poor students, and forty-three percent of minority students, continue to fall behind others. sixty-three percent of fourth grade students in nonurban schools in the U.S. meet the basic reading level–only forty-three percent of urban school students do the same. Typical advocates for inner city school systems claim that these schools are underfunded because reliance on local property taxes creates an unequal distribution of funding. This is a harmful misconception that ignores the chronic underlying problems such as systemic racism and structural inequality that prevent certain schools from properly serving their students. Given the vast historical injustices that have plagued urban communities, producing equal education outcomes will require far more than funding. Education policy must develop solutions to problems such as the inequitable distribution of qualified teachers, the disadvantages posed by standardized testing, and the criminalization of school discipline. 

Funding Statistics

Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis in 2022 found that spending levels between black and white students were almost identical, reporting that the average Black student went to a district that spent $14,385 per student, while the average white student went to one that paid $14,263 per student. However, the funding sources were somewhat different: for the average Black student, the district obtained an additional three percent of revenue from the federal government. Thus, school districts that have a majority black racial makeup may have less control over how their funding is spent since federal funding often comes as grants for fixed programs. This is consistent with research from 1995 conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics, which found that more money is spent in districts with the highest percentages of minority students and that public education expenditures per student are highest in low-poverty districts. If the school funding research is practically the same in 2022 as it was in 1995, there obviously needs to be a drastic change in urban education policy. 

Teacher turnover

One of the reasons that achieving high levels of student learning in high-poverty urban schools has proven difficult is because these schools struggle to attract and retain effective teachers. Studies from Florida and North Carolina find that teachers with stronger qualifications are more likely to transfer out of urban and high-poverty schools. Nationally, high-poverty schools in urban communities lose twenty-two percent of their teachers each year, which is almost twice the rate found in low-poverty schools. This is of particular concern as recent evidence suggests that perpetually high levels of turnover can undermine student achievement and disrupt efforts to maintain instructional cohesion and organizational culture, particularly in schools with higher proportions of students of color. Some policymakers and researchers have interpreted the constant turnover as an indication that teachers prefer not to work with minority and low-income students; thus, policies to address this issue use financial compensation as a method to attract and retain educators for high-poverty schools. However, research from Harvard found that most teachers chose and stayed at their schools because of their students. Still, when schools failed to provide institutional support and extra assistance for students, teachers expressed frustration and a desire to leave. 

The transfer patterns of teachers at these schools most often reflect teachers’ preferences for a better working environment rather than a preference for a different type of student. In the aforementioned study, teachers reported a desire to stay at their schools when certain factors were present: instructional support, social and psychological support for students, and disciplinary support. Thus, policymakers should refocus their attention from funding debates to policies that attract and retain effective teachers while also ensuring the appointment of effective principals who are committed to transforming school cultures. 

Standardized testing

Another area of urban education that must be reevaluated is standardized testing. When the No Child Left Behind Act was passed in 2002, its goal was to help low-achieving schools improve test scores in order to better serve low-income children. However, well-meaning policy intentions led to an increase in high-stakes testing and moved the U.S. education system farther away from accessibility and closer to a system that unfairly penalizes high-poverty schools. Although the NCLB has been replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015, urban schools are still trying to recover from the consequences of the older legislation today. At the local level, schools are graded and penalized for low performance. Punishments include reduced funding, sanctions, and altered teacher salaries. Annual achievement tests can determine the funds a school has access to, and while schools aren’t forced to administer annual achievement tests, they lose funding if they don’t. Even though the local school districts determine the content of standardized tests, the recent push towards meeting Common Core standards–a set of academic standards that each student is expected to learn–means that states’ tests are becoming more standardized than ever before. Some school districts even have performance-based pay for teachers, which ties standardized test scores and teacher evaluations to salaries. 

This originated with the goal of motivating teachers and boosting student performance. In reality, this encourages teachers to “teach to the test.” When teachers "teach to the test," they are teaching a narrowed curriculum in order to improve test scores. On the surface, this may sound harmless; however, studies have shown that schools–especially low-income ones–are severely reducing instruction in non-tested subjects such as social studies, science, and the arts in order to improve their test scores. This is a cheap tactic that robs students of a well-rounded education and pushes out low-achieving students. It is time to replace these high-stakes tests with other methods, such as "intelligent accountability," which rely on the self-evaluations of schools. 

School discipline

Disciplinary policies also affect the performance of high-poverty schools. Research has continually demonstrated that racial and ethnic disparities in discipline are not the consequence of varying amounts of misbehavior between students of color and white students but rather of racial and cultural biases. Most legislative responses to school deviance do not intensify penalties. Rather, legal reforms mandate that already illegal behaviors–drugs and weapons possession–are referred to the police when they occur on school grounds. Other policies specify that students are to be treated like actual or suspected criminals. They are subjected to in-school suspensions, armed police, dogs, and metal detectors. This is a result of zero-tolerance policies that spread rapidly in the early 1990s in the midst of rising rates of school victimization and juvenile violence overall. According to USA Today, 87 percent of schools now have a zero-tolerance policy that requires suspension or further legal action for all types of drug and alcohol violations. Often referred to as the "school-to-prison pipeline," zero-tolerance disciplinary policies are pushing students into incarceration through suspensions and expulsions for minor infractions that disproportionately impact youth of color. 

Additionally, since the 1990s, U.S. public schools have employed a rapidly growing number of police officers in schools known as school resource officers (SROs). In 1975, only 1 percent of schools were reported to have SROs on site–but as of 2018, 58 percent of schools were reported to have at least one SRO on-site during the school week. Despite the rapid growth and federal funding SROs attract, there is little to no federal policy defining their role and a severe lack of federal-level data collection on SROs. SROs are also more likely to reproduce broader social patterns of policy targeting of students of color while also being disproportionately placed in schools serving a majority of students of color. Alternatives for zero tolerance that still take a largely preventative approach to violence and misbehavior are targeted behavioral supports for at-risk students, social-emotional learning programs, and school-wide positive behavioral interventions and support. 

Conclusion

The misconception of urban schools being substantially underfunded compared to their suburban counterparts is holding back meaningful policy solutions that combat underlying issues affecting their academic performance. Generations of inequality have constrained opportunities for people in marginalized communities, and additional funding is not going to fix centuries of injustice. Policymakers must refocus their attention on practical solutions to problems such as the high rates of teacher turnover, disadvantages of standardized testing, and the steady criminalization of school discipline.