Achievement gap
"Six students in the Philadelphia public school system were each given a video camera as part of an independent film project. That simple premise expanded radically over the next two years, resulting in this profound and vital documentary covering the difficulties these applicants faced preparing for college while dealing with the daily trials and tribulations inherent in being a student in schools with a 50% or worse drop-out rate. While conditions may be difficult, the film does offer signs of hope", writes reviewer, Alexander Russo.
Students at inner city and suburban high schools want equally to go to college, but do they get the same preparation and academic opportunities? In this movie, a leadership class at Brighton High School in Boston took on this question. They surveyed and interviewed students in three city and three suburban Boston schools to see how academic expectations and opportunities varied.
As part of a course called "Education and Power" students at Santa Monica High School shadowed students from Los Angeles High School for a day. A week later, L.A. High students visited Santa Monica High School and shadowed the students in "Education and Power" for a day. At the end of the second day, students met to dialogue about the differences they found at the two schools and to hypothesize about the reasons for those differences. Later, the students wrote papers evaluating each school and discussing to what degree each school provides the kind of education outlined in the Student's Bill of Rights (developed by IDEA, UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education & Access). The project allowed students to examine how race and socio-economic status affect a student's educational opportunities.
The prospect of needing to increase effort levels brings us to the question of whether particular strategies for eliciting more effort from students are likely to be more effective than others. Some insight in this regard comes from student responses to the following question in the Ed-Excel survey: "When you work really hard in school, which of the following reasons are most important to you?"
The West Virginia Education Alliance conducted focus groups to determine what low income, white and African-American students think schools should do to raise student achievement and close the achievement gap.
A coalition of high school-aged students from in and around New York City took on its own investigation of educational inequity. Led by Michelle Fine, a professor at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY), and working with a corps of graduate students, these young researchers conducted surveys, interviews, and focus groups that uncover, often dramatically, how race still colors learning in too many American classrooms.