What Is the Achievement Gap
One of the clearest and most sobering ways for Black students and their parents to measure where things stand academically is the achievement gap. Simply put, the achievement gap is the persistent difference in standardized test scores between Black and white students, and it shows up across grade levels, subject matters, and schools regardless of geography or zip code. It is not subtle, and it is not shrinking fast enough. This article will name the problem with data, then offer concrete solutions families can begin implementing today.
The Data
The most authoritative measure of student achievement in the United States is the National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly known as the NAEP or the Nation’s Report Card. It tests more than 450,000 fourth and eighth graders every two years and is considered the gold standard of educational measurement. The 2024 results, released in January 2025, are deeply troubling.
Over 60 percent of Black eighth-grade students scored below basic in math, meaning they lack even foundational skills for their grade level. Students in the top 25 percent of scorers nationally are 61 percent white and only 5 percent Black. The pandemic made a bad situation worse by hitting the lowest-performing students the hardest, and Black students are disproportionately represented among that group. The pandemic learning losses for students in the bottom 10 percent grew 70 percent larger between 2022 and 2024. Higher-achieving students, who are disproportionately white, partially recovered during that same period. The gap within the gap is widening.
High school graduation tells a similar story. As of the most recent federal data, the graduation rate for Black public school students was 81 percent, nine percentage points below white students at 90 percent. Black students had lower graduation rates than white students in every single state in the country. The college completion picture is just as stark. Only about 41 percent of Black students who start college as first-time, full-time freshmen earn a bachelor’s degree within six years, a rate 22 percentage points below their white peers.
Some will argue that this is really a class problem, not a race problem. The data does not support that conclusion. Research shows that socioeconomic factors explain between 34 and 64 percent of the Black-white achievement gap depending on the subject and grade level, which means a substantial portion of the gap remains after you account for income entirely. Even more damning is research showing that high-income Black families still tend to live in neighborhoods with less resourced schools, less experienced teachers, and lower graduation rates than white families at the same income level. In other words, money alone cannot buy Black families into equal school quality. Race is an independent variable in this equation.
Stanford researcher Linda Darling-Hammond put it plainly at the 2024 American Educational Research Association conference when she noted that the achievement gap is now 30 percent larger than it was 35 years ago. The gap was actually narrowing during the War on Poverty era. It reversed when those investments were dismantled. That history matters because it tells us this gap is not natural, not inevitable, and not a reflection of Black children’s capacity.
Which brings us to solutions. I offered many of these ideas in my book, Education Injustice: How Public Schools Fail African American Males. While that book focuses specifically on the crisis facing Black boys and young men, where the data is particularly alarming, the solutions below apply to all Black children. Also, the data has changed since I wrote it, but the solutions in large part remain the same.
Wholesome and Structured Homes
A child’s home is where academic achievement is either planted or neglected. Parents must be intentional about creating an environment where education is not an afterthought but a staple of daily life. That means structure, expectations, and clear rules of engagement. Children thrive in environments where the standards are clear and consistently enforced. A home where learning is celebrated rather than tolerated produces students who approach school with purpose.
Early Reading
Research shows that language comprehension begins from the earliest weeks of life. Infants begin processing the sounds and rhythms of their native language before their first birthday. Around 18 months, most toddlers experience what researchers call a word spurt, a rapid expansion of vocabulary in which children begin to understand that objects have names and can map new words to meaning after hearing them only a few times. What this means practically is that parents should not wait. Reading to children from birth, talking to them constantly, narrating the world around them, and filling their environment with words and stories gives them an enormous developmental head start long before they ever set foot in a classroom. The earlier a child is introduced to reading as something joyful and normal, the more naturally academic confidence tends to follow.
Cultural Support
Black parents must actively help their children understand that education is a deeply held Black value, not something imposed from outside the culture or in conflict with Black identity. This is especially critical when certain currents in popular Black culture subtly or not so subtly dismiss academic achievement as something foreign or uncool. Parents must push back against that drift with intention.
One powerful way to do this is to expose children to the parts of Black culture that have always revered education. Historically Black Colleges and Universities are a perfect example. HBCUs were built by our ancestors during and after slavery and through the brutal decades of Jim Crow, when Black people were legally denied access to education and still built institutions of extraordinary learning and excellence. Taking children to HBCU campuses, attending homecomings, and telling those stories roots academic ambition in cultural pride rather than in opposition to it.
Positive Exposure
What children see consistently is what children learn to want. Many Black children grow up seeing Black excellence represented almost exclusively through sports and entertainment. Those are legitimate expressions of talent, but they represent an extraordinarily narrow path with a devastatingly low probability of success. A Division I college football or basketball player has roughly a two percent chance of making it to the professional level. And here is the part that rarely gets said out loud: not only do almost none go pro, at least 19 percent of Black players in Division I college football and basketball fail to graduate as well, meaning many chase a dream that does not materialize and walk away without the degree that was supposed to be the fallback. When these are the primary images of success a child absorbs, it quietly orients their ambitions toward a path where the odds are stacked at every turn.
Parents must be deliberate about expanding that frame. Expose children to Black doctors, scientists, engineers, lawyers, educators, entrepreneurs, and writers. Protect their ear and eye gate from content that glorifies ignorance, and fill those gates with a flow of positive energy and info from people and stories that create a genuine appetite for intellectual achievement.
High Expectations
Research consistently shows that students tend to rise or fall to the expectations set for them. Low expectations communicate to a child that you do not believe they are capable. High expectations, clearly communicated and consistently held, tell a child they have something worth reaching for. Proverbs 22:6 says train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it. That applies directly here.
In our home, we expected our children’s grades to never fall below a B, at minimum. We had assessed what they were capable of and we held them to it. Both graduated in the top 15% of their classes. That was not luck. It was the result of expectations set early, held firmly, and reinforced daily. Do not allow your children to skate through on mediocrity and call it acceptable. Mediocrity in childhood becomes a habit that is very hard to break in adulthood.
Conclusion
Closing the achievement gap is absolutely achievable. Black children are not academically inferior. They never were. This gap does not exist because of any deficiency in the intellectual capacity of Black children. It exists because of deliberate historical disinvestment in Black schools and communities, ongoing structural inequalities in how schools are funded and resourced, and in some cases gaps in what is being cultivated at home. The data shows where the problem lives. The solutions above show where the work begins. And the first place to start that work is at home, at the kitchen table, with a book in hand and expectations high. Let’s get busy closing this thing.
