Recasting the Vision for Achieving Equity

Introduction

Over the last 30 years, standards-based education, with an increasing focus on articulating standards and raising academic achievement, has become the primary focus of education policy in the United States. As a corollary issue, public educators concerned with equity have frequently been confronted with a singular question: How do we raise academic achievement for underperforming student populations—usually predictable by low socioeconomic status (SES) or minority status? Although some high-poverty schools and fewer high-poverty districts, often comprised of disproportionately high numbers of minority students, have successfully attained high academic standings, this trend continues to be the exception more than the rule. Some have pointed to structural constraints as the reason for this (Boykin & Noguera, 2011; Hilliard, 2003). The opportunity gap identified by Linda Darling-Hammond and opportunity to learn standards as suggested by John Jackson of the Schott Foundation provide a plausible framework for initial steps toward remediation (Darling-Hammond, 2007, 2010; Schott Foundation, 2009). “Opportunities,” in the purview of these scholars, are understood as the accumulated educational experiences, assets, and supports available to students—often but not necessarily correlated to SES. This paradigm shift, from “achievement gap” to “opportunity gap,” is supported by the research of scholars indicating that achievement disparities emerge not from race but from structural constraints and systematic biases, which propound “racialized” outcomes (Delpit, 2006; Hilliard, 1994, 1995, 2003).

Provided the changing context of education reform discourse in the 21st century, the goal of increasing academic outcomes to achieve standards has more readily been couched within a broader, seemingly all-encompassing question, namely: How do we provide each student with the appropriate network of supports—in a collective, routine, systematic fashion—at a degree of saturation equivalent to their more opportunity rich peers? In other words, what is the appropriate “dosage” of collective resources needed to reach a school-wide (or, greater yet, community-wide) educational tipping point—one in which each student receives the same kind of supports and exposure that account for systematic tendencies fostering, in a majority of cases, the greater academic gains of high-achieving students (Gladwell, 2006; Hilliard, 2003; Tough, 2008; Wilson, 1987)? This article seeks to identify some of the elements of this question by examining the ways in which standardized testing emerging from education policy—most recently, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and now Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)—has historically failed to satisfactorily assess the educational needs impacting academic outcomes of African Americans—the group most marginalized in a majority of states across the nation. Thereby, the author explicates an expectation gap—defined here as the gap between the articulations of supports necessary to achieve policy ends, inclusive of effective delivery mechanisms, and the effectual execution of support in the advancement of policy goals (Hilliard, 2003; Steele & Aronson, 1995). This is to suggest that the observation of differential achievement between certain “racial” groups (the purported achievement gap) is ephemeral, and instead indicates the persistence of an opportunity gap, which historically has been inoculated against policy remediation by the pervasiveness of an expectation gap. Moreover, this disparity is not ubiquitous; some African Americans outperform Caucasians and Asian students, and is even less meaningful as one considers America’s lagging achievement (amid its best students regardless of race) in international comparisons (Daniel & Walker, 2014; Darling-Hammond, 2010; Hilliard, 2003; Wagner, 2008; Walker, 2012).

Testing and the “Achievement Gap”: Origins Affecting Current and Future Policy

The evolution of testing practices in the United States provides appropriate context for an analysis of the purported “achievement gap” as it has been framed by educational executives and policy makers. Herein, the nature of utilizing the bell curve or normal curve as a mechanism for standardizing, and hence, comparing the performance of students is explored. Furthermore, the author reviews the outcomes of standardized testing practices, as it relates to the academic attainment and matriculation of African Americans in K-12 settings, and the implications of these results for NCLB, ESSA and future education policy.

The Bell Curve: History and Implications

The history of the bell curve and its impact on the education of African Americans does not begin with achievement tests but with the advent of IQ testing in the field of social science. Specifically, the imposition of the false biological presuppositions regarding intelligence and race has proved a most stubborn impediment to those seeking the advancement of African Americans (Gould, 1996). As forecasted by Frederick Douglas in 1854, “the evils most fostered by slavery and oppression are precisely those which slave holders and oppressors would transfer from their system to the inherent character of their victims” (Gates, 1995, p. 94). Presently, geneticists and biological scholars have proffered research that refutes the alleged inferiority of African Americans (Cameron & Wycoff, 1998; Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, & Piazza, 1994). Hence, it should be acknowledged that the achievement disparities between the performance of African Americans and other minorities, as compared with Caucasians, emerge from structural and systemic constraints, not innate characteristics. To this end, considering the impact of desegregation in the 1970s, Crain and Mahard discovered that desegregation did improve the achievement of African American students. One observation of this research was that improved results (of African Americans) were influenced by the fact that integration efforts often resulted in improved material resources and curriculum. Interestingly, their research indicated that African American achievement was the highest in those schools that were 72% to 81% Caucasian, but dropped when school demographics fell outside of this “optimum” mix (Crain & Mahard, 1978, 1982). The Schott foundation has interpreted such results as emanating from institutional marginalizing processes—analyzing how and when underrepresented groups are more likely to be relegated to under-resourced spaces (Hilliard, 2003; Schott Foundation, 2009, 2015).

Despite integration, the achievement gap has proven resilient (Schott Foundation, 2015). Even when SES is similar, the disparity persists, and the work of some scholars indicates that the dissonance is greater at higher income brackets. To wit, their research purports that SES may not be as great a predictor of academic success for African Americans and other minority students as it is for Asian and Caucasian students because neighborhood indicators of SES are more salient for African American students than family SES—making it a counterintuitive predictor of the achievement gap (Dornbusch, Ritter, & Steinberg, 1991; Gonzales, Cauce, Friedman, & Mason, 1996; Parrish, Matsumoto, & Fowler, 1995; Unnever, Kerckhoff, & Robinson, 2000; Wilson, 1987, 1996). This might be explained by the trend that African Americans families, despite higher earnings, are more likely to live in neighborhoods with “higher educational risk factors” than their Caucasian counterparts at similar income levels—reinforcing the notion that “place matters” (Sampson, 2012; Sirin, 2005).

Educator Horace Mann Bond argued that the inequity of standardized tests lays in their transposition of ability and preparation, namely, purporting to measure ability but in actuality measuring preparation. In support of this claim, other scholars have suggested that standardized tests measure what the dominant group knows or can come to know, due to increased access, in a more efficient manner relative to the rest of the population—thus maintaining, as status quo, their academic advantage and higher performance gains. For this reason, some practitioners and scholars alike have codified standardized tests as “white preference” examinations, noting that the culturally biased content of the tests (or at least the cultural preparation and knowledge of how to take the tests) renders them dubious and incomplete measures of academic ability or capacity (Delpit, 2006; Johnson, Boyden, & Pittz, 2001; Schott Foundation, 2009).

With this paradigm in mind, S-bias and V-bias are important to understanding the fallacious construction behind the purported “achievement gap.” Stephen J. Gould explains the difference between S-bias and V-Bias in IQ tests, norm-referenced tests utilizing the bell curve, as a difference of predictability and validity. S-Bias relates to the predictability of a test such that, when a test is predictable, it consistently measures the same capacity between individuals from different groups. An African American male scoring 100 on a given IQ test, where there is no S-bias, would have the same ability for doing anything that a Caucasian male scoring 100 would be able to do. This is applicable to the items on the test itself and merely suggests an equivalence of “ability” to perform the tasks as presented within the context of a particular assessment. Notably, retention records of colleges and universities admitting students on the basis of grade point average (GPA) and high school class rank indicate that academic success in higher education, for all ethnic groups, is better predicted by those measures than college-entrance exams, which, like IQ tests, are also norm-referenced metrics (Hiss & Franks, 2014).

V-bias, however, considers whether the African American normative average of 85 on IQ tests is lower than the Caucasian normative average of 100 “because of” the social mistreatment of African Americans. The fact that S-bias within a test does not exist does not answer, and cannot answer, this question (Gould, 1996). In fact, the same challenge might reasonably be asserted as it applies to American College Test (ACT) and Scholatic Aptitute Test (SAT) college-entrance examination results “revealing” differential outcomes between groups. Notably, knowing that standardized norm-referenced tests have predictable results and demonstrate (statistically) disparate outcomes for members of certain groups in no way answers the question about validity—“what the source” of the gap is, and, just as important, remedy—“what it might reasonably take to mitigate it.” This author leans to the conclusions of scholars who consider inadequate pupil preparation, and not innate intellectual deficiency, as explanatory of group performance disparities (Delpit, 2006; Marzano, 2003; Wilson, 1987).

Conversely, Herrnstein and Murray defend the validity (V-bias) of standardized tests by regarding differential “race”-based outcomes as an indicator of African American inferiority. They point to the presence of both external and internal “predictability.” The tests, they assert, effectively predict the performance of African American students in the “real world” in the same way that they predict the performance for Caucasian students in the “real world.” Moreover, as it relates to internal bias, they observe that African American and Caucasian students perform similarly on items that might be considered easy or difficult (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994). In assessing the possibility that race prejudice might pervade society to the extent that it produces the effect of a group performance disparity, these writers purport that “it is not good enough to accept without question that a general ‘background radiation’ of bias, uniform and ubiquitous, explains away black and white difference in test scores and performance measures” (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994, p. 285). They fail to answer the question in response, “why not?” The fact that African American and Caucasian students with similar scores perform similarly in, for example, college is not the issue, but rather, why fewer African American students tend to have the higher scores than Caucasian children, and what opportunities such scores “avail” or “close” to them because of these scores—especially because, as suggested earlier, it has been observed by college admittance boards that GPA and high school rank are more accurate predictors of college success (for all groups) than normative-test scores (Hiss & Franks, 2014).

Moreover, another more pressing question to be addressed by such writers is, “why are we measuring against the Caucasian-norm.” Racism is conceived as the multipronged process of economic, legal, and social domination, which “maintains racial categorizations” as a mechanism for differentially distributing resources among certain groups within society (Lewis, James, Hancock, & Hill-Jackson, 2008). Scholars have observed that a performance gap, resulting from the measurement of intellectual outcomes, entails “comparison.” This comparison may be with others (i.e., the normal curve), or with some preestablished standard (Howard & Hammond, 1985). As such, even the conceptualization of the African American–Caucasian achievement gap, reifying race and codifying “racialized” outcomes, is rightly understood as a product of racism, which reinforces racist notions. To wit, the pragmatic goal of achieving equity within the achievement gap framework is supplanted by the very platform it utilizes to convey the need for redress. Begging the question of “race as a social construct,” it suggests the quandary: How does one dismantle the societal consequences of “race as a social construct” without reinforcing the notion itself? To remedy this, scholars have set forth the alternative heuristic of the “opportunity gap,” and, the author proposes here—the “expectation gap,” both which refute suppositions of African American and minority deficiency.

Rumors of Inferiority: Outcomes of Testing Impacting Policy

The 2000 National Center for Education Statistics report concluded that African American students in the 12th grade perform at a normative level commensurate to that of Caucasian eighth-grade students (Lewis et al., 2008). Significantly, assessing the policy impact of NCLB (2001) on all student groups, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—the only nation-wide measurement during this time—indicated that in the first 4 years after the law was adopted, there was minimal or no growth in scores (Ravitch, 2010). In regard to African American students, some research indicates that the accountability demands imposed by NCLB may be exacerbating performance disparities (Guisbond & Neill, 2004; Haney, 2000; Jones, 2004; Langana-Riordan & Aguilar, 2009). This was initially masked by the fact that many states first attempted to meet mandates of NCLB by lowering the standards of state tests; and thereby, rates of proficiency were inflated. One such state, Mississippi, although NAEP data indicated that just 18% of fourth graders in the state were proficient, produced a fourth-grade proficiency rating of 89% on the state’s test (Ravitch, 2010).

In an attempt to understand the purported “achievement gap,” scholars have set forth various frameworks. The work of Lewis and others articulates three ideologies, which provide an explanation for the test score disparity between African Americans and their Caucasian and Asian counterparts: (a) social–structural, (b) deficit, and (c) discontinuity. The social–structural inequality paradigm conceives that it is the larger society—influenced by concepts of racism affecting historical, economic, and political processes—that is responsible for African American and minority performance disparities (Lewis et al., 2008; Skrla & Scheurich, 2001). The deficit paradigm, in opposition to this view, purports that the pathologies of African American families and cultures, as opposed to the ills of society, are the impetus for the differences in racial group outcomes. While the discontinuity paradigm, discounting deficit orientations, conceives that teachers, utilizing culturally responsive pedagogy, are able to facilitate learning that leads to increased academic achievement for African American students (Lewis et al., 2008).

Whether the racial group outcome disparities are perceived to be the result of sociostructural inequity, deficit, or discontinuity makes a significant difference in the way in which conclusions are drawn pertaining to its origin and persistence. Indeed, the fact that the “gap” has so often been conceived of in terms of “achievement” is indicative more so of the deficit paradigm than either the sociostructural inequity or discontinuity frames—placing the focus on “what African Americans students achieve, in comparison with Caucasian or Asian students,” and not on “how they come to achieve what they do, in comparison with Caucasian or Asian students.” Moreover, as previously mentioned, it privileges normative achievement, typically the “average” achievement of Caucasian students, above a ubiquitous standard of excellence. Some scholars argue that this “framing” lends itself to “rumors of inferiority” pertaining to African American students, proposing that suppressed expectancy affects both the behavior (intensity of effort) and cognition (mental processing) of African Americans as it relates to academic preparedness and testing success (Howard & Hammond, 1985; Marable, 1983, 2007).

In an attempt to shift this focus, Linda Darling-Hammond has proffered the “opportunity gap,” which constructs the disparity in scores between African Americans and Caucasians in terms of an “education debt” (Ladson-Billings, 2006). Ladson-Billings conceptualizes the education debt in terms of four different but interrelated aspects: (a) the historical debt, (b) the economic debt, (c) the sociopolitical debt, and (d) the moral debt. As such, historical debt refers to education inequities codified in terms of race, class, and gender, which are reinforced by institutional norms and practices that have impacted particular groups over time. This is distinguished from economic debt, which describes differences in funding between urban and suburban schools and indicates, statistically, that as the number of Caucasian students in a school rises funding also rises. Third, the sociopolitical debt reflects limited “access to” and “knowledge of” civic processes impacting the ability of marginalized groups to effectively advocate for their children, and last, the moral debt describes the ethical obligation owed to those individuals who are the descendants of people groups that have been historically mistreated, maligned, or otherwise abused.

Based on the persistence of the achievement score disparity between African Americans and Caucasians and the legacy of failed policy efforts to remedy it, the author presents now in full context the aforementioned “expectation gap,” which describes the dissonance between the support individuals or groups need to achieve at a particular level (identified as a policy objective) and the ability of a remedy to facilitate processes for structural change necessary to provide such support. The expectation gap arises from a “complex convergence” of reified economic, social, and political beliefs (Daniel & Walker, 2014). Historically, African disenfranchisement in the United States emerged from the economic impetus to garner cheap labor expressed through American slavery, which was inculcated through the social norms of “Manifest Destiny” and codified by law (Gossett, 1997; Marable, 1983; Takaki, 1992). Presently, both the achievement disparity between African Americans and their Caucasian counterparts and the current trend toward resegregation—in degree of severity akin to pre-Brown conditions—provide evidence of persistent structural and systemic issues that undermine the stated policy goal of “leaving no child behind” and ensuring that “every student succeeds” (Balkin & Levinson, 2001; Kozol, 2005; Sampson, 2012). This, in essence, is the “gap in expectations” the author seeks to articulate and redress.

Considering its semantic implications, the “expectation gap” explains results by way of efficacy in policy construction, the “achievement gap” in terms of relative group performance, and the “opportunity gap” from the context of societal inequities. Each approach conveys implicit and explicit understandings that are imposed upon any framework of associated ideas being brought into consideration. In regard to NCLB testing mandates and the concepts hitherto set forth by the author, analyzing how the accountability expectations of a policy might exceed the capacity of an organization to respond to that policy’s mandates, the heuristic of an expectation gap provides meaningful insight. In such cases, schools serving economically disadvantaged and large minority populations, subject to high testing accountability with sparse support, are particularly susceptible to both (a) cheating and (b) failure. The challenge from both a policy and pragmatic standpoint becomes helping such organizations create, adapt, and leverage improvement procedures aimed at cultivating best practices, and mindfully focusing change efforts on the processes that lead to results rather than emphasizing results in isolation (Boykin & Noguera, 2011; Langer, 1989; Reeves, 2003).

Systemic Effects of High-Stakes Standardized Testing

Based on more recent Elementary Secondary Education Act (ESEA) mandates, the answer to the performance disparity between student groups, as practically implemented, has been the exercise of accountability mechanisms with low or no support—leading to perverse pedagogical and disciplinary outcomes in regard to minority populations including “forced grade repetition, remedial tracking and increased drop out rates” (Johnson et al., 2001). None of these outcomes expand access and opportunities for African American students and other marginalized groups. Hence, accountability alone is not enough.

Perverse Incentives Associated With Testing

As previously noted, it has generally been observed that NCLB reforms have exacerbated rather than ameliorated the marginalization of African American males and other minorities groups, which it purports to serve. Scholars noted in Chicago that while “mandated interventions” resulted in increased standards and curricular alignment in some settings, in the district at large, although there were some initial gains, most schools developed a shallow, test-driven curricula that alienated the most effective teachers and encouraged a test-driven pedagogy aimed at raising scores (Lipman & Haines, 2007). As a result, student responsive pedagogy, which focused on facilitating learning that was narrow and deep, was often replaced by test preparation. School leaders, inadequately prepared to translate testing accountability into a broader structure promoting lifelong learning, in many cases inadvertently succumbed to pressure for results. As such, they implemented superficial pedagogies that alienated strong teachers and led to short-term increased outcomes with a “glass ceiling” effect.

Scholars point to anecdotal evidence that in some cases, the pressure to “raise standards” has resulted in gaming practices, which disenfranchised African American students via limited admission or increased expulsion rates, which elude official scrutiny when test scores are calculated and create a false perception of achievement (Gillborn, 2005). In Texas, where significant progress was made in the closing of the achievement gap—making it the chief model for the federal NCLB Act—only about 60% of the ninth graders who began graduate school actually made it to graduation (Johnson et al., 2001). Thus, minority graduation rates became the “sacrificial lamb,” causing tens of thousands to disappear from school and testing counts, for attainment of pseudo-equality and increased academic achievement (Darling-Hammond, 2007).

Evidence suggests that unfunded mandates, in an era of accountability, are powerless to produce sustained equalizing results. NCLB labeling practices, rather than addressing this issue, have largely distracted public awareness by shifting the policy conversation from racial equity to accountability—which, in reality, threatens to “leave more children behind” by fostering systematic propensities, which exploit the most educationally vulnerable students to “achieve” organizational “academic gains” (Darling-Hammond, 2007). Rather than strengthening educational opportunities and increasing access for minority students, the argument could be made that NCLB has actually adversely affected their status.

Policy Implications Influencing Testing

Scholars observe education policies are, at their core, essentially political—such that issues within American education are actually fundamentally political issues concerned not with how to make schools more effective but with garnering consensus around what goals schools should pursue. This understanding is essential to an accurate knowledge of the ways in which education policy is informed and interpreted as schools reside at the precarious intersection between our hopes for society and what we believe it actually is—between “political ideals and economic realities” (Labaree, 1997). As such, education policy serves an intermediary function, situated between intent and outcome, and between liberty and constraint. Not everyone agrees on what the goals of schooling should be. Some are interested in racial equity, whereas others, as long as their children are receiving a “good” education—as indicated by high testing outcomes—are disinterested in regard to whether or not different schools are similarly resourced. Significantly, common ground may be found, not in shared goals but in shared desires, appealing to broader societal concerns—such as funding social security—to illuminate “shared interests”—such as a quality education for all (Bell, 1980, 1992). However, considering both America’s “ethical” democratic and “amoral” capitalistic roots, a tension remains.

Researchers observe that although most parents feel that “all children” should have the opportunity to learn, they simultaneously want the “best education” possible for “their children.” Pragmatically, this often means some children getting a better quality education than other children—where educational benefits are allocated differently among varying individuals and groups (Delpit, 2006; Labaree, 1997). Therein, the competitiveness that is central to American individuality (and capitalism) serves to mitigate the democratic goal of social mobility—where the aspiration for a “best education” exposes the strain between rugged individualism and equity in a society facially committed to both free market ideals and social justice. The working class and poor, disproportionately comprised of African American students and their families, are less likely to embrace the “meritocratic” promises of education as they lack successful models and practical experience (Andre-Bechely, 2005; Ball, 1994; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977).

Paradigm Shift—Process Accountability and Collaborative Approaches

The difficulty of the current policy paradigm in addressing systemic issues with enough potency to effect meaningful change is the manner in which reform structures narrowly frame proposed solutions to broad social challenges. Currently, researchers have begun taking note of practitioner efforts to implement comprehensive school reform approaches that seek to collaboratively address elements of poverty (including poor health care, nutrition, social services, and housing conditions influencing lagging academic outcomes), which influence lagging academic outcomes. President Obama, adopting this platform, has proposed the establishment of 20 Promise Neighborhoods across the nation to significantly improve outcomes for students within their neighborhood context (Jean-Louis, Farrow, Schorr, Bell, & Smith, 2010). This approach differs from other efforts that have led to increased academic outcomes for African American students—specifically “some” charter schools, private schools, and public schools of choice—in that it endeavors to affect change at the community level, impacting the most marginalized students and families, those least likely to take advantage of “improved” educational options available via bureaucratic school processes (Andre- Bechely, 2005; Ball, 1994).

Promise Neighborhoods, as with other collaborative efforts around the nation, foster coordination among multiple stakeholders leveraging common interests to bridge diverse constituencies with varying political leanings. This enables educational institutions to focus on “root causes,” symptomatically expressed via poor test results. In light of the expectation gap, these “causes” include lagging systems, structures, and supports that are poorly conceived, aligned, or both to achieve sustainable results for students with significant learning gaps. University Park Campus School, Steubenville City School District, P.S. 124 Osmond A. Church, and the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) have each achieved increased academic outcomes in the public school arena utilizing comprehensive approaches (Boykin & Noguera, 2011; Tough, 2008).

It is well established by researchers that students with effective teachers for at least 3 consecutive years will statistically improve from the 50th percentile to the 96th percentile, where school- and teacher-level factors account for about 20% of the influence on student achievement and the other 80% is impacted by home environment, background knowledge, and motivation (Marzano, 2000, 2003). Within traditional school settings, the significant progress of certain programs in working with largely minority disadvantaged students from urban systems, inclusive of both public schools and charter schools—such as the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP)—is indicative of such findings (Marzano, 2003; Tough, 2008, 2012). These schools leverage teacher best practices and school-wide strategies to close student skill gaps and accelerate learning outcomes (Marzano, 2000, 2003; Reeves, 2003). Much can be gleaned from the work of practitioners in these settings in regard to honing the efficiency of urban instructional programs to maximize value-added and achievement outcomes.

However, such findings often obscure the complexity of systemic issues within educational structures that contribute to student achievement. There is no doubt that teacher quality matters. There is also no doubt that teachers in nonselective urban schools deal with vastly different circumstances than teachers in selective “choice settings”—or suburban schools—such that what constitutes “effectiveness” in these environments is not identical. Teacher effectiveness in urban environments—namely, the skill and applied effort required from urban educators to produce student outcomes comparable with their suburban peers—is, respectively, more nuanced and demanding. In general, it takes urban educators more effort, along with specific individual and collective pedagogical strategies (not readily taught in colleges of education) to achieve outcomes at the same level as their suburban colleagues (Hilliard, 2003; Tough, 2008, 2012).

Contributing to the public’s confusion, relative teacher effectiveness is often conflated with comparable district testing outcomes—when in fact, the higher academic outcomes of suburban districts compared with urban districts do not necessarily entail greater teacher effectiveness (especially as one considers the “other 80%”). Furthermore, all urban schools are not “created equal”; rather, they exist along a spectrum as more or less “closed” or “open” systems. School choice mechanisms in urban districts and urban charter schools, intentionally or unintentionally, have facilitated learning “pockets”—relatively closed systems—that tend toward high achievement by cultivating student bodies with greater home support and student motivation. Such environments are formal and informal selective settings, where students without the contextual understanding and/or drive to meet rigorous academic standards typically do not apply for attendance or are pushed to the margins—usually returning to a district school with more porous or “open” admission standards (Andre-Bechely, 2005; Ball, 1994; Walker, 2012).

The expectation gap asserts that the public school reform agenda should be process-based, such that districts are evaluated and monitored based on a demonstrated alignment of collaborative support systems and structures, inclusive but not limited to teacher and licensed support professional development, with identified student needs to achieve increased standardized assessment outcomes. As with the aforementioned HCZ and preliminary work of promise neighborhoods, this implies creating pathways of engagement for community stakeholders that provide meaningful and timely supports for students’ learning. Whereas the challenge to this methodology lies in the slow adaptability and flexibility of the public sector to achieve such ends, ultimately, what is to be tested, above the ingenuity of organizations in leveraging their collective capacities, is the resolve of politicians and policy makers to fashion a system of accountability that measures and rewards efforts that promote equity (Jencks, 1992; Tough, 2008; Wilson, 1987). This necessitates the acknowledgment of an “affection gap” as the root of both expectation and opportunity gaps, apparent when individual political actors and organizations resist the notion that, indeed, we are “our brother’s keeper,” and, as such, to those whom much is given, much is required.