Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of 53. Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 5:56 PM for 10h 34m 47s of daytime. The moon is new with none of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Adlai Stevenson shows the United Nations Security Council reconnaissance photographs of Soviet ballistic missiles in Cuba.
Rory Linnane, Molly Beck, and La Risa R. Lynch report Wisconsin reports widest score gap between Black and white students in nation:
In the first national assessment of students since the pandemic, Wisconsin again posted the widest score gaps between Black and white students of any state, now by even greater margins.
At the same time, Wisconsin scores statewide climbed in the rankings. Though the state’s 2022 scores declined since the last national assessment in 2019, most states saw steeper drops.
Known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) was administered to sample schools in every state between January and March 2022. It tested fourth- and eighth-graders in reading and math.
Wisconsin scores continued to exceed most other states, ranking in the top 10 in math for fourth and eighth grades, and in reading for eighth grade. Fourth-grade reading, as it was in 2019, continued to be the state’s worst area.
….
In a statement, state Superintendent Jill Underly also acknowledged the persisting opportunity gap between Black and white students.
“We’ve known Wisconsin’s racial disparities in assessment results are among the widest in the nation for too long, and these troubling results are yet one more indication that we must close the opportunity gap in our state,” Underly said.
While about a dozen states didn’t report test scores for Black students because of low numbers, all other states reported score gaps between Black and white students. Wisconsin had the widest gap out of every state in each category, although Washington, D.C., was worse.
….
But she [Dr. Carrie Streiff-Stuessy, executive director for Common Ground’s Forward Scholars program] said the data showing the disparity in reading and math scores has been a persistent problem. Streiff-Stuessy doesn’t refer to it as an achievement gap but an opportunity gap.
“The discrepancy in students’ test scores stems for the lack of opportunities they have,” she said. “Whether a student experienced poverty versus someone who is not or whether a family faces a job disruption from the pandemic or being shuffled being shuffled among families because a lack of daycare while parents work.
“The opportunities for students in the suburbs were completely different than the opportunities for students in the city, and more of the students in the city are Black, so that hits them harder; it hits them differently.
“My word is ‘action.’ I have had enough looking at the data, but we have to do something about that data,” she said. “Wisconsin has had a black-white discrepancy on testing for such a long time; it’s time we do something about it.”
(Emphasis added.)
The gaps between the same racial groups in different states are so varying from each other that these gaps can only be environmental and not natural. Wisconsin is simply failing some racial groups in a way that other states are not, and in a way that Wisconsin need not and should not fail anyone.
The racial gap in test scores between Wisconsin and other states is a consequence of our own policy failures. Its persistence is a consequence of our own indifference and indolence.
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