Americans assume that big achievement gaps are bad and little ones are good. The national champion of achievement gaps, scoring pretty close to zero in the difference between whites and those two minorities on that scale, was Detroit. There are several ways that narrowing achievement gaps can signal trouble, not improvement. The Stanford study provides the first comparable measures of ethnic achievement gaps in every U.S. school district, Reardon said. Narrowing achievement gaps is not always a sign of improvement in school districts.

Source: Washington Post June 12, 2016 21:21 UTC