'Nation's Report Card' Finds Achievement Gap Persists

The new test scores from "the nation's report card" are out, and one of the big takeaways is that the "achievement gap" between white and minority students still persists. If you look at it over time, we've made a lot of progress on this since 1973, but not so much in the last few years.

This has been one of the most troubling problems in American education for a long time, and much of the debate of the No Child Left Behind law focused on whether the country was making progress on this. One thing we can say is this problem isn't seen solely as a matter of test scores.

In Public Agenda's Reality Check surveys, we found black and Hispanic students reported more problems in their schools in a host of areas: discipline, dropouts, cutting class and an overall lack of respect.

It's not just students, either. Minority parents are also more likely to report serious academic and social problems in their schools. Half of black (49%) and Hispanic (52%) parents say that it is a very serious problem that local schools are not getting enough money to do a good job, compared to a third of white parents (33%). Minority parents are also twice as likely as white parents to say fighting and weapons are very serious issues and are more likely to question whether local school district superintendents do enough to ensure that schools are safe and orderly.