What Are the Achievement Gaps?
The term achievement gap is used to denote differences in the academic achievement of particular groups of students. Actually, it is more accurate to say that there are achievement gaps rather than merely one achievement gap. The issue is not as simple as a difference between blacks and whites or rich and poor. There are many gaps, and the gaps themselves have changed over time. During the 1970s and part of the 1980s, some achievement gaps between poor minority students and their affluent white peers lessened. But since the late 1980s and early 1990s, some achievement gaps have stagnated, and many have widened. Specifically, average reading achievement for 17-year-old African-American and Latino/a students rose through the 1970s and 1980s, but achievement gaps between these students and their white counterparts increased in the 1990s. Similarly, the gap between whites and African Americans in mathematics was the narrowest in 1990, and the gap between Latino/a and white students was the
