The Achievement Ideology
By Anonymous / Winter 2020
Knowledge is power. We often hear this statement said. Yet, we fail to realize that we live in a world where this statement is painfully true. Knowledge steers us towards success and a stable future. How can we guarantee one's future with the discrimination that continuously persists within the education system? We, as a society, need to acknowledge how flawed and broken our education system is. Achievement gaps are major problems buried within our education system that need to be recognized for change to occur. These problems will never be recognized until someone shines light onto these injustices.
Learning about achievement gaps made me think back to my past experiences. In high school, I was a peer tutor for a Spanish 2 class. I remember how the teacher would separate her students with those who needed special attention and the African Americans who were considered troublemakers onto the left side of the room. She put me in charge of helping the left side for warm-up questions. I remember her directing her attention to the middle and right side of the room, which primarily consisted of whites and Asian Americans. Rarely did she ever encourage them to participate or even try in group discussions. I never put much thought into it because I thought that these students on the left needed more help than the rest of the class. But looking back to it after learning about achievement gaps, it made a lot more sense.
As we recall back to the Advanced Placement (AP) courses we took in high school, notice how a majority of those classes consisted of whites and Asian Americans. We never think about the lack of diversity in AP courses, and we accept it as something normative. I never put much thought into this until the last quarter when I took this human development class. I thought back to my best friend, who had experienced this during our senior year of high school. When it came to class enrollment, my best friend, a Mexican American, wanted to enroll in AP Calculus with me so that we would have a class together. When she told her counselor, instead of receiving support, her counselor encouraged her to take an easier math class that would be more suited for her. Her counselor said that this AP class was going to be too difficult for her. When I told the same counselor that I wanted to take the calculus course, she helped me plan it without any questions or hesitation. So why is it that my best friend was not able to take the class while I was? The fact is, my friend and I both did equally as well in our previous math courses. When I think back to what happened to my best friend, we can see the clear implications of systemic discrimination within institutions of education still discreetly persisting today.
Achievement gaps are disparities in educational achievements and outcomes-based on a student's race. It utilizes tracking programs that prevent qualified students of color from accessing honors and advanced placement courses. Tracking systems have been used for as long as we can remember. In King’s Where Do We Go From Here, he mentions that “in elementary schools, negroes lag one to three years behind whites, and their segregated schools receive substantially less money per student than do the white schools? One-twentieth as many negroes as whites attend college, and half of these are in ill-equipped southern institutions” (King Jr., 186). King shows us an excellent example of how achievement gaps have persisted and have yet to have something done about it. Within the small percentage of minority students who are placed into these rigorous courses, many continue to lack the encouragement and funds needed to succeed. According to the Washington Post, "Disadvantaged students face complex challenges connected to their families, neighborhoods, and schools" and many of the underserved students had a readiness rate of 15% when it came to take the exams (Anderson). Mexican Americans and African Americans tend to receive lower testing scores compared to those of Asian Americans and whites, which is reflected in their college admissions. As many students went on to pursue higher education, white students were encouraged to attend four-year institutions while black students were discouraged from attending four-year institutions. Instead of receiving support, they were pushed towards attending community colleges.
Racial zoning and redlining enforce this achievement gap within our educational hierarchy. Let's take a look back into history. With the restriction of the Buchanan Law, lower-income African Americans were not allowed to occupy living spaces near middle-class whites. Middle-class African Americans remained barred from purchasing land in these middle-class white neighborhoods. This drove many African Americans into ghettoized neighborhoods referred to as slums. Banks utilized color-coded maps to determine the loans given within each neighborhood. "A neighborhood earned a red color if African Americans lived in it" (Rothstein, 64). How does it seem fair that an African American who resides in the neighborhood, results in an automatic red color code when it comes to racial mapping? Not only does redlining continue to enforce a class hierarchy, with these ghettoized neighborhoods receiving red codes, it affects the way the government portrayed African Americans, seeing them as "poor risks." These codes caused the FHA to deem neighborhoods as too risky for insurance and to "withhold approval if the presence of African Americans in nearby neighborhoods threatened integration" (Rothstein, 71). Schools with African Americans are greatly affected by this. With color codes affecting neighborhoods, this limits their community facilities and the funds going into their schools and neighborhoods. With limited funds, these students learn from outdated materials, attend oversized classrooms, and have less money allocated per student, increasing the achievement gap. Being placed in under-resourced schools, these students are taught by less experienced teachers who may lack teaching credentials within subject areas.
The achievement ideology suggests that success is earned through hard work. By assimilating to these ideologies, everyone should be able to succeed, right? However, this achievement ideology does not work for everyone. No one ever wants to fail; we all crave success, but we are given life circumstances that often lead minorities to a downhill spiral. "Data suggests that African Americans, while they value educational attainment and academic achievement, have learned to view education with less hope for success than do their white counterparts." This ideology causes many to drop out and underachieve their academic potentials, which later affects their success in the future. This confines them within their communities, "denying them opportunities to fulfill their talents and actualize their dreams" (Ford-Harris, 48). This ideology further promotes the class hierarchy within society, ensuring that African Americans will remain below that of Anglo-Europeans.
The practice of achievement gaps creates the belief that it is not within these minority’s ability to strive for education higher than what is offered at a community college. The fact is, students of color, primarily black and brown students, lack many opportunities that white students take for granted. According to the Alliance who wrote the article, Confronting the Education Debt, "students of color have less access to high-level math and science courses, have less access to guidance counselors, and can be removed from the classroom altogether and placed in some form of detention," (The Alliance). How does pulling a student away from their education as a form of punishment seem fair? In doing so, you construct a bigger achievement gap upon these students who are already behind in their classes.
Society has caused many to believe that specific races are inferior to others when it comes to education. Those superior in the educational hierarchy, have created a system to keep certain groups at the bottom. Mariscal tells us that “all we are trying to do for Mexican Americans, nobody has accepted the fact that the system has done a poor job” (Mariscal, 215-216). Mariscal tells us about the struggles that Mexican Americans have had to navigate within the public school system and their attempt to fight to push for a better education. Rather than placing the blame onto students of color, it should be placed onto those who are superior to the educational hierarchy. In class, we learned that history, once built, can always be rebuilt. Achievement gaps have reconstructed the educational hierarchy, putting whites and Asian Americans at the top while putting Mexican and African Americans at the bottom. The only difference is that a minority group, Asian Americans, are also placed on the top of this reconstructed hierarchy. But during lectures, we saw Asian Americans once portrayed as the model minority when it came to education, which may be a reason as to why they receive better opportunities within this achievement gap.
We can see clear implications that the achievement gap within our education system needs addressing. So why is it that we have yet to come up with a solution? A reason as to why this problem still exists within society is due to how tracking systems are determined. Test results rely on meritocracy as a way of determining one's intelligence. These standardizations created are used to praise meritocracy as a fair and just approach. Recently, I took a midterm for my organic chemistry class, where the average for that midterm was 34%. Studying a week for this exam, attending oasis tutoring sessions twice a week, and passing the practice midterm given during oasis, I walked into the exam feeling prepared. But instead, the exam blindsided a majority of the students. This exam was not an accurate representation of what we knew and our intelligence but rather a way to see how fast we could finish the exam within a limited time. The standards he expected from his students were near impossible, which reflected off of the class' average. Before taking the exam, the professor told his students that his averages have previously ranged around the 30th percentile. Doing so, he created the idea of low scoring exams as normative, causing students to accept the ideology that having a low-class average was fine. While his students, the inferior in this situation, accepted the idea that receiving a low score on the exam was fine, it conceals the contradictions that a majority of the class will not pass the course.
As Chen states in his TEDx Talk, Student Tracking Needs to End, “the United States is evolving, but the education system is the same” (Chen, 6:50). The ideology that standardized exams measure one's knowledge and compatibility create institutional policies that rely on meritocracy as a just way of determining admission for colleges. How can we take what Chen is telling us and make a change in this broken system? We can implement many ethical methods to try to abolish the concepts of achievement gaps within the education system. If we refer back to one of the demands of the Lumumba-Zapata College, it was to “have an enrollment of 35% blacks and a 35% Mexican Americans” and that the admissions at universities “must not use an instrument [of standardized exams] for excluding minority students from or limiting their numbers” (Lumumba-Zapata Coalition, 4) in this college. Lumumba-Zapata argues for “admission for the top 12% of all high school students and the rejection of entrance exams like the SAT” (Mariscal, 230). If we were to accept the demands of the Lumumba-Zapata College, it would begin to break the achievement gap, incorporating more minority groups, specifically African and Mexican Americans who have fallen into this gap, allowing them the opportunity to have access to higher education. Doing so would enforce an end to the minority bias of college admission requirements, ensuring that the top students would be accepted regardless of their school's ranking.
Another option for ending this achievement gap would be to abolish the traditional standardized tests, such as the SATs and ACTs, required to determine admissions. Many schools, such as the University of Chicago, have slowly stopped requiring applicants to submit their standardized test scores towards admissions. "Research has shown that standardized test scores have little correlation with a student's college performance" (Cardinali and Arnold). Students have shown that standardized tests are methods of separating students unfairly and have a tremendous impact on minority groups. By not using meritocracy as a way to determine admissions, "test-optional schools have been able to enroll more students from diverse backgrounds." This shows that by eliminating meritocracy, colleges are more accessible for under-served minority students. I know that abolishing standardized exams such as the SAT and ACT may seem near impossible, but for change to happen, it must start somewhere. According to James G. Nondorf, University of Chicago's vice president of enrollment, he says, "We want students to know that the application does not define you- you define the application" (Cardinali and Arnold).
Imagine a world where we define the application, and we are no longer categorized based on a GPA number. A bad grade should not define who we are and our capabilities. With the practice of applications no longer defining an individual, it allows schools to diversify, giving students of other races an opportunity at a higher quality of education. These changes are what students want to study within a university. According to the article, The World We Want, students desire to study in an environment where “students are not just struggling for a GPA but also deeper concerns” and an environment that “doesn’t just focus on academic achievement but making us thoughtful people” (Twohig). Many times, do we hear about how students have the greatest impact on the generations to come? We hear this said, but how often do we listen to what students want instead of ignoring them? When society chooses to ignore the demands and needs of students, that is when school begins to fail their students. “Schools that fail to serve these children are not accidental, nor are they the fault of students, educators, unions, communities or parents—all of whom seem too often to take the blame. They are the logical outcome of the systematic exclusion of Black and Brown communities from the halls of political power where priorities are set, and budgets determined” (The Alliance). The government owes it to these students of color to produce a change towards these injustices.
This problem affects us as a society as a whole. We should be concerned with the practice of achievement gaps because of the clear implications of systemic racism embedded within institutions of higher education. Change does not happen when we wait around, hoping for someone else to do something about it. This is a problem that cannot be resolved overnight. If our society comes together to evoke a change towards this achievement gap, discrimination within the social system will slowly decline. We are all one community. Imagine how solutions to this problem would benefit those who fall under this achievement gap. As King says, "... all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."
Works Cited
Anderson, Nick. “'We Didn't Know It Was This Bad': New ACT Scores Show Huge Achievement Gaps.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 7 Sept. 2017.
Cardinali, Emily, and Arnold, Alexis. “More Colleges Go Test-Optional; Google Launches College Search Tool.” NPR, NPR, 16 June 2018.
Confronting the Education Debt. The Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools, Sept. 2018.
Ford, Donna Y., and J. John Harris. “The American Achievement Ideology and Achievement Differentials Among Preadolescent Gifted and Nongifted African American Males and Females.” The Journal of Negro Education, vol. 61, no. 1, 1992, pp. 45–64. JSTOR, Accessed 16 Mar. 2020.
King Jr., Martin Luther. “Where Are We?” Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Beacon, 2010. pp. 177-202.
Lumumba-Zapata Coalition. “Demands for the Third College.”
Mariscal, Jorge. “To Demand that the University Work for Our People.” Brown-Eyed Children of the Sun. University of New Mexico Press, 2005. pp. 210-246.
Rothstein, Richard. “Racial Zoning” and “Own Your Own Home.” The Color of Law. Liveright, 2017. Pp. 39-75
Twohig, Niall. “The World We Want.” OB Rag, 10 Feb. 2020.