Two Studies Track Achievement-Gap Trends

Social Conditions and State Policies Linked to Changes

Two studies unveiled last month paint a fuller picture of the persistent achievement gap in mathematics that separates the nation’s black and Latino students from their higher-achieving white peers, and the kinds of efforts that might—or might not—help to eliminate it.

Since at least the 1970s, federal statistics have shown that some groups of minority students tend to lag behind white and Asian-American students academically, but experts differ on the primary causes of those gaps or on how to narrow them. The new studies—one by current and former researchers from the RAND Corp., the Santa Monica, Calif.-based think tank, and the other led by researchers from the Princeton, N.J.-based Educational Testing Service—don’t pinpoint any new cures either. But both call for broadening the approaches commonly used to address the problem now.

“Oftentimes, educational researchers focus on education policy in thinking about the achievement gap, but we also need to think about extending that to welfare policy,” said Mark Berends of Vanderbilt University, the lead author of the RAND study, “and to think about extending opportunities not only to students but to parents...