NAEP

Achievement Gaps

Achievement gaps in educational outcomes are persistent disparities in measures of educational performance among subgroups of U.S. students. Most notable are gaps between groups defined by race or ethnicity, income, and gender. An achievement gap can surface in a variety of outcome measures, including standardized test scores, grades, dropout rates, college enrollment and completion rates. I’m going to focus here on standardized test scores. If we want to make comparisons across U.