Article: America's Next Achievement Test; Closing the Black-White Test Score Gap

"Your Turn" Essay

Article: America's Next Achievement Test; Closing the Black-White Test Score Gap

By Christopher Jencks and Meredith Philips

Undoubtedly, higher education almost always guaranties higher income in the future. In determining whether or not labor discrimination exist between races, an experiment by using two different race with similar education is used to see whether discrimination exist. However, let say if discrimination on this particular experiment really exist, are all black have a similar education level on average compared to white? Evidence has proven that until now where discrimination are believe to be minimal, Black-White test score gap are still significant although it have shrank throughout the year. Thus, mentioning all the above, I think this is a very important issue on today's economics poverty and income distributions. Thus, I found that Race and poverty unit for this course to be inadequate.

In this essay, I'll be using "America's Next Achievement Test; Closing the Black-White Test Score Gap" by Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips article as reading that might offer important additional perspectives for the unit race and poverty.

This reading is an opinion and think piece article. There are some review of research on this reading in given evidence and to convincing the authors ideas brought out in their writing. The main idea in this reading is to convince that solution in closing the black-white test score gap have a lot to do in promoting racial and distribution equality in the US. They conclude that although it may take several more generation to close this gap, the goal to close the gap is possible.

Although, the score test gap has narrowed since 1970, the median black still score below 75 percent of white on most standardize tests. Also, even as the gap shrank when black and white attend the same school, the reduction in gap are only little. As there is no evidence in genetic that black have less innate intellectual ability than white, the author believe that closing the gap possible. They argue that the gap is still an issues as it rest in mainly three facts; IQ and achievement scores are sensitive to environmental change, Black-white differences in academic achievement have also narrowed throughout the twentieth century and when black or mixed-race children are raised in white rather than black homes, their pre-adolescent test score rise dramatically. In justifying their major points, they start with why test score matter. The authors believe that reducing the black-white test score gap would reduce racial disparities in educational attainment as well as earning and so will reach the race equality goal in US. They also provide evidence from AFQT data and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) that test score performance relate to earning are far more important nowadays than it did in the 1960s.

Then, the author argues that traditional solution on reducing this gap have fails and they also provide evidence to it. The traditional solution for closing the gap are to raise the children's family income, desegregated their school and equalize spending on school that remain racially segregated. As the traditional solution take us nowhere, this failure led some people to dismiss the gap as unimportant and argue that the test as culturally biased and do not measure skill in the real world. Thus, the authors put schooling and culture into argument. They argue that certain crucial resources, like teachers with high-test score, are still quite unequally distributed between predominantly black schools and predominantly white schools. Also, they blame the different culture. They use caste-like status as one of the example that blacks developed an "oppositional" culture that equated academic success with "acting white".

Furthermore in their article, they blame the U.S Department of Education which should be funding experiments from which every state and school district would benefit, has shown almost no interest in this approach to advancing knowledge. This for me really make sense as theory in fighting the test gap would be in useless if this important data from research is not available. It is like making theories without conduction experiment and achieving any conclusion. So, as there are no data available, the author explain three ways which successful new theories about the cause of the test gap will differ from the traditional theories. As the authors have put this basic fact forth, they then suggest several solutions that plausible in closing the black-white test score gap. However, the author also addresses that their argument rest on two problematic premises which, are on know how to reduce the gap and that the policies required to reduce the gap could command broad political support. As improving the nation's school could reduce the black-white test score gap, schools alone cannot eliminate the entire gap. Education resource and system of school finance also play main role but ensuring the equality is hard. That's why they believe that this is a long process and might take several generation or worth if there are no emphases on this issue.

Overall, I find that the argument and conclusions by this article make sense. The basic fact that education gap and skill has give a result for different earning consistent with almost all the reading in the race and poverty unit. As the author quote, "The available research raises as many question as it answers. This is partly because