- Proficiency of black students is found to be far lower than expected, By Trip Gabriel, November 9, 2010, New York Times: “An achievement gap separating black from white students has long been documented – a social divide extremely vexing to policy makers and the target of one blast of school reform after another. But a new report focusing on black males suggests that the picture is even bleaker than generally known. Only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys. Poverty alone does not seem to explain the differences: poor white boys do just as well as African-American boys who do not live in poverty, measured by whether they qualify for subsidized school lunches…”
- Report calls attention to achievement gap between black and white male students, By Nick Anderson, November 9, 2010, Washington Post: “Black male students trail their white counterparts in school by alarming margins and for reasons that often are not well understood, according to a report released Tuesday. The report from the Council of the Great City Schools, an advocacy organization for urban education, suggests that poverty is not the only factor behind the black-white achievement gap. Federal test data show that white male students nationwide who come from families poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunches outperform black males from large cities whose families are better off economically, according to the report. The report analyzed fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math results from the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty