Background/Context: Despite decades of educational reforms, the achievement gap based on socioeconomic status (SES) persists in the United States. Not only does the SES-based achievement gap persist, it has also been widening. In the heated scholarly discussion on narrowing the SES-based achievement gap many researchers have looked into improving school characteristics and practice, however they have neglected the role of students themselves.
Purpose/Research Question of Study: This study focused on the role of students, hypothesizing that students might reduce the SES-based achievement gap by increasing their learning time and persistence.
Research Design: I used both ANOVA and two-level hierarchical linear models (HLM) to analyze the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) United States data.
Findings/Results: This study suggested that students viewing themselves to be persistent were likely to perform better than those viewing themselves to be less persistent. Also increased time learning in school was associated with increased achievement. However, high-SES students generally spent more time learning in school and viewed themselves to be more persistent. Thus learning time and persistence were not likely to address the SES constraint on achievement for a majority of low-SES students.
Conclusions: The SES-based achievement gap is a social problem reflecting inequality within settings of students’ daily lives and the social structures shaping those settings. Individual students’ effort and persistence are bounded within these layers of systems. Without systemic, societal changes in schools, families, and communities to address problems like income polarization, the SES-based achievement gap will most likely remain.
Huang, H. (accepted with revisions). Facing the constraint of socioeconomic status: Can students themselves make a difference to narrow the achievement gap? Education Policy Analysis Archives, 23(108), 1-39.