New Book Offers Solutions to a Major Challenge in American Education: The Achievement Gap

The achievement gap is among the most important and troublesome issues in American education today. White students achieve at levels significantly higher than African American and Hispanic students. Despite enormous progress in eliminating racial segregation, equalizing spending on schools, and toughening academic standards for schools, students have not made similar strides. After some encouraging movement in the 1970s and 1980s, the achievement gap widened in the 1990s and remains frustratingly broad today.

Senior Fellow Tom Loveless, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, and John Chubb, Chief Education Officer of Edison Schools—a privately-owned education management organization—assembled a group of scholars to analyze various approaches to this persistent problem. The result is a new edited volume titled Bridging the Achievement Gap, a tough-minded but generally encouraging view of potential responses to this vital national challenge.

At this Brookings forum, three of the authors featured in the book will present their chapters and take questions from the audience.