Progressive cities have larger (educational) achievement gaps

By Joanne Jacobs.

"Huge achievement gaps for black and Latino students are The Secret Shame of progressive cities, reports the brightbeam network. Progressive cities, such as San Francisco, have much larger gaps than conservative cities, such as Fort Worth.

Cities that claim to value “equity” are “citadels of racial, economic and educational injustice,” charges Chris Stewart, CEO of brightbeam, a newly created network of education activists affiliated with Education Post.

Researchers identified the 12 most progressive and most conservative cities using criteria developed by two political scientists, explains Erika Sanzi.

They controlled for other factors that could potentially explain the different educational outcomes, including per-pupil spending, poverty rates, population size and rates of private school attendance but none of these other variables made a difference. The variable that mattered most when it came to predicting the size of the achievement gap was whether a city was progressive or conservative.

In San Francisco, for example, 70 percent of white students and 12 percent of blacks are proficient in math, a 58-point gap. In Washington, D.C., the black-white reading gap is 60 points.

“By contrast, city and school leaders have effectively closed or even erased the achievement gap in either math, reading or graduation in three of the most conservative cities the researchers looked at — Virginia Beach, Anaheim and Fort Worth,” Sanzi writes.

Educators should be flocking to Virginia Beach, Virginia to figure out what it’s doing right: “The black-white gap in math proficiency is only 3 percentage points and the gap in reading proficiency is a miniscule 1 percentage point,” the report notes. “The Latino-white proficiency rate gaps in Virginia Beach actually favor Latino students by 2 percentage points in both math and reading.”

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Comments

1. LTEC says

   January 24, 2020 at 8:49 am
   I don’t think we should care about GAPS, but rather about how well people do. For example in some of the conservative cities, the black-white gap is smaller not because black people do better, but mainly because white people do worse.
   
   Reply
2. Joanne says

   January 24, 2020 at 10:33 am
   That’s true in Detroit: The gap is small because the very small number of white students in district schools are performing just as badly as the non-white students. Most parents now send their kids to charters, schools in nearby suburbs or to private schools. But Detroit is an outlier, according to the report. Elsewhere, small gaps are not the result of low achievement by whites."