In less than two decades, the majority of Americans under 21 will be non−white, with the largest non−white groups being Hispanic and African−American. But the achievement gap between racial groups perseveres. According to The New York Times, only 12 percent of black fourth−grade boys were proficient on a national reading test, in comparison to 38 percent of whites.
That's where Ronald Ferguson, a senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Kennedy School of Government, steps in.
"Thirty or 40 years ago, there was a lot of publicity being given to people who argued that racial differences in intelligence were biologically anchored, and while there are still some people saying that we've made enough progress at equalizing racial differences … not many people still make that argument," Ferguson told the Daily.
According to Ferguson, a significant racial achievement gap remains — though it's not unbridgeable.
"If we can give [non−whites] the opportunities and help people from less advantaged backgrounds to spend more time in ways that contribute to their academic growth, in a few decades from now, we can get to a place where we're much more equal than we are now," he said. "But to do that, we've got to lay everything out on the table and work it through."
Ferguson, the founder of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard and the creator of the Tripod Project for School Improvement, has spent over 30 years trying to ameliorate the economic and educational barriers faced by non−whites in America. Instead of basing his work on his own opinions, Ferguson has spent decades analyzing data and trying to apply his findings back into the nation's school systems.
With three boys of his own, one of whom graduated from Tufts last year, Ferguson has a serious stake in trying to close the achievement gap.
Raised in a blue−collar community in Cleveland, Ohio, Ferguson said that he considers himself lucky for his own educational experience. His school system was segregated but he characterized it as stable, as he attended before mandatory desegregation was enforced, when students were bused to schools in other neighborhoods to right racial imbalances.
"It was the kind of school where people were pretty optimistic about prospects for success," he said.
The 60−year−old professor pegs one specific moment during his freshman year at Cornell University as when he transformed from wallflower to advocate.
"[Cornell's Afro−American Society] took over the student−union building," Ferguson said. "We heard that the white fraternities were coming to kick us out of the building, and we heard that they had hunting rifles, so we ended up with 18 rifles and two pistols in a tense day−and−a−half occupation. I went in as a follower, but I realized that they'd already pretty much given us everything we'd asked for. That was when I learned to think for myself," he said.
Ferguson went on to major in economics before earning a Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After teaching for five years at Brandeis University, he was invited to apply for a faculty position at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
Ferguson had long been interested in economic development in low−income communities, but by the end of the 1980s, he was convinced that education was the nation's most important economic development issue. By the mid 1990s, he started studying the achievement gap, leading to the founding of the Tripod Project.
"A core aspect of what [the Tripod Project] does is to survey students and teachers about what they experience at the classroom level. Then we give that information back to schools to inform their improvement strategies," he said.
After catching the attention of the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Ferguson was asked to head the university's initiative on the racial achievement gap, which involved founding the school's Achievement Gap Initiative.
Ferguson's two books, three book−length reports and several dozen articles and papers have gained national attention, fueled in part by a front−page September article in The New York Times and a Feb. 13 profile in which the Times focused on Ferguson's lifelong work.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently relied on Tripod Project survey tools to measure students' classroom experiences for the Measures of Effective Teaching project, in which Ferguson asked students to rate their teachers in seven different categories. Based on their responses, he put together a survey in order to see if students' opinions on their teachers' effectiveness correlated with how much their standardized test scores improved from one year to the next.
The results were that student responses to questions about teaching predicted how much they learned, demonstrating the need to constantly improve teaching, he said.
"We need to focus a lot more effectively on making public schools places where teachers learn," he said. "The best schools are places where the teachers work on continually improving the quality of instruction. Weaker schools do not do this, and they blame the stagnant test scores on the students; at the stronger schools, the perspective is that we just haven't yet done what needs to be done for these students to improve."
Training teachers to create environments more conducive to learning, Ferguson said, is an importance goal for his initiatives in the next five to 10 years.
One area where racial differences have become a touchy subject is the home environment. Ferguson said that talking about racial differences in parenting is a social taboo and an obstacle that he often faces.
"People don't want to talk about it because they're afraid what is said will be misused," he said. "They're afraid that people will say it's their own fault, that members of low−achieving groups need to fix themselves. They're afraid that people will misuse information in bigoted ways. But if we can't have the conversation about things that we need to do differently, then we can't get around to actually doing them differently," he said.
Ferguson said that his perspective on the importance of both home and school was oversimplified in the Times profile.
"I think one of the points that I want to be really clear about … is that it's not about either home or school. It's both. There's a place in the Times article that said that half is economics and the other half is parenting, and that's the reporter's summary, not mine," he said.
Instead, Ferguson said, narrow solutions should be avoided and work must be done on several fronts, including peer culture, teaching and public policies that tackle the lack of equal opportunity.
"I do think there's a social movement that I see growing around the topic," he said. "I think the challenge is to structure the discussion in a way that engages all of the different groups in society to have a stake in the movement — in a fundamental way we're going through a shift in national identity. ... I think we're all going to get pulled into it."
The racial achievement gap will have broader consequences if it is not remedied. Unless substantial changes occur within the American education system, he said, the U.S. risks falling behind other nations in terms of academic accomplishment.
"The U.S. is seriously behind a number of other countries in a lot of achievement categories, and we got here by thinking that we were preeminent and by not being ambitious enough," he said. "Right now, we're kind of playing catch−up. … We need to understand that our standing in the world is going to be based on our ability to help people of all backgrounds to do better academically than we have done in the past."
