Abstract
Education scholars argue that the term “achievement gap” promotes deficit orientations toward certain students of color, focuses the field on individualistic rather than structural sources of inequality, and narrows viable policy solutions for equity concerns. Using a randomized survey, I examine whether the term “racial opportunity gap” mitigates critiques of the achievement gap term. I find that teachers responding to this language less strongly attributed the gap to individual characteristics—student motivation, student effort, and parenting—and more strongly prioritized incorporating students’ racial/ethnic and cultural identities into instruction to address the gap than teachers responding to “racial achievement gap” language.
Keywords
The United States has faced long-standing inequities in education. Perhaps the most commonly discussed among policymakers, educators, scholars, and the public is the “achievement gap”—the gap in academic performance between Black, Latinx, and certain Asian cultural groups and low-income students compared with their White and affluent peers (Howard, 2019; Milner, 2020b; Reardon et al., 2014). The achievement gap has served as the motivation for a wide range of policies for decades, including instructional reform efforts. For instance, both the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) and the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015 explicitly stated that closing “the achievement gap” (or “achievement gaps” in ESSA's case) was the purpose of the legislation (ESSA, 2015; NCLB, 2002).
While these efforts may aim to ameliorate inequalities affecting certain students of color and low-income students, many have argued that this focus—and the use of the term “achievement gap” itself—has had negative consequences (Carey, 2014; Gutierrez & Dixon-Roman, 2011; Horsford & Grosland, 2021; Love, 2004; Milner, 2012a, 2013, 2020b). Carey (2014) contributed the concept of “achievement gap discourse” (AGD)—the assumption-laden language that the U.S. education field uses to talk about school reform and “to demarcate, in value-laden terms, what is good and bad about schools, their teachers, and their students” (Carey, 2014, pp. 443–444). This language, as Carey (2014) argues, “misplaces blame on teachers… students, and schools for broader social and cultural issues” (p. 443), overlooks structural inequalities as the root causes of disparities in education, and narrows viable policy solutions to technical fixes rather than confronting the complexity of social problems that converge on schooling.
Carey's (2014) AGD grew out of conversations among scholars of color who critiqued the field's focus on achievement gaps. First, scholars argue that achievement gap situates certain students of color and low-income students in a deficit framework. Gutierrez and Dixon-Roman (2011) referred to this as “gap gazing” in mathematics education—the field's tendency to scrutinize achievement gaps while largely overlooking how the focus on achievement gaps represents an “assimilationist goal” and perpetuates “deficit thinking and negative narratives about marginalized students” (p. 23). Milner (2013) critiqued “achievement gap talk” as instilling a deficit mindset toward students of color and called attention to the ways in which achievement gaps position White students as “intellectually and academically superior” (p. 696). Using a critical race theory lens, others have argued that the achievement gaps reflect a “master narrative” (Love, 2004) and serve as “badges of inferiority” (Horsford & Grosland, 2021) that stigmatize students based on race, class, or language while overlooking the historical and cultural conditions that have created and maintained inequalities. Inherent in these arguments is a critique of the deficit-laden nature of AGD and its positioning of White students as the norm (Carey, 2014).
Second, scholars have argued that focusing on achievement gaps diverts attention from the structural sources of inequality that produce achievement disparities. Attending to this concern, Ladson-Billings (2006) argued for a shift from focusing on the achievement gap to the education debt—the notion that achievement disparities result from the economic, historical, political, and moral practices and policies that have disenfranchised students and communities of color. Irvine (2010) characterized the achievement gap as “perceived”—in essence characterizing the achievement gap as a manufactured problem resulting from a lack of attention to the very real gaps in qualified teachers, rigorous curricula, school funding, housing, healthcare, childcare, and other resources between certain students of color and low-income students and their White and affluent peers. As Carter and Welner (2013) explain, the achievement gap is the “predictable result of systemic causes” (p. 9).
Third, scholars have argued that the attention to closing achievement gaps has narrowed the kinds of policies and practices that education stakeholders consider to be appropriate for addressing racial inequality in education. Carey (2014) argues that because of attention to achievement gaps, “we rely on technical and quick-fix interventions as solutions to problems that require far more complex understandings than what is implied and discussed in the public education reform debates” (p. 443). In the era of standards-based reform, these technical fixes have focused on standardized content and curricula and accountability metrics over other potential solutions (Mehta, 2013; Milner, 2012a). The language of “closing the achievement gap” frames the solution to this problem as a focus on improving student performance on achievement tests (Ladson-Billings, 2006) and standardization of reform practices and policies more generally (Milner, 2012a). This focus on standardization has resulted in color-evasive practices and precludes engagement in approaches like culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogies that aim to position students’ cultural and racial/ethnic identities as assets, rather than deficits, for instruction (Ladson-Billings, 1995; Milner, 2012a; Paris, 2012).
Grounded in these critiques, several scholars have offered the “opportunity gap” as an alternative to “achievement gap” framing. Milner's (2020b) opportunity gap framework urges educators to actively reject colorblind and context-neutral practices, the myth of meritocracy, and low expectations and deficit orientations toward students and instead center race and identity in education and use cultural conflicts as learning opportunities (p. 698). Carter and Welner (2013) posit that a shifting to an opportunity gap framework will focus the field's attention on the societal and structural inputs that explain disparities in student achievement. The opportunity gap framework refocuses attention in education on the root causes of the inequalities we see in schools: the disparities in educational opportunities between certain students of color and low-income students and their White affluent counterparts.
Importantly, despite this rich scholarship and some evidence of use of “opportunity gap” language in practice (e.g. Flores & Gunzenhauser, 2021), empirical studies examining the effects of AGD and potential alternatives are limited. Quinn's studies of AGD offer some insights. A series of experimental studies have shown that framing racial inequalities in education as a “racial achievement gap” elicited lower agreement from teachers and the general public that addressing the gap was a priority, compared with framing racial inequalities as “racial inequalities in educational outcomes” (Quinn, 2020; Quinn et al., 2019; Quinn & Desruisseaux, 2022). Quinn and Desruisseaux (2022) also showed that achievement gap language leads teachers and members of the general population to express negative racial stereotypes, providing evidence for the notion that the AGD promotes deficit-oriented conceptions of students and places blame on students for lack of academic achievement (Carey, 2014). However, no work to date has examined how the framing of those gaps—i.e. as an achievement gap versus an opportunity gap—influences education stakeholders’ support for particular policies or instructional approaches for redressing these gaps, despite ample conceptual arguments suggesting so.
In this study, I build on other work to heed scholars’ calls to interrogate the effects of the AGD (Carey, 2014) by replicating and extending Quinn et al.'s (2019) studies of the effects of AGD, which I operationalize using two key terms: “racial achievement gap” and “racial opportunity gap.” Replicating Quinn's work and reflecting arguments in the field, I hypothesize that the “racial opportunity gap” term will lead teachers to more strongly agree that addressing the gap is a priority and to attribute the gap to structural explanations, such as limited resources, rather than individualistic explanations, such as student deficits. Extending Quinn and aligned with conceptual arguments (e.g. Milner, 2012a), I also hypothesize that the “racial opportunity gap” term will elicit stronger support from teachers for policy proposals that target resources to schools based on racial demographics and instructional approaches that go beyond academic achievement to, for instance, emphasize aspects of culturally relevant pedagogy. I address the following research questions:
Does the terminology used to describe racial inequality in education (i.e. the “racial achievement gap” or “racial opportunity gap”) affect teachers’ perceptions of how much of a priority it is to address racial inequality in education? Does the terminology used to describe racial inequality in education affect teachers’ perceptions of what causes racial inequality in education? Does the terminology used to describe racial inequality in education affect teachers’ perceptions of how resources should be allocated and the instructional approaches that should be used to address racial inequality in education?
In addressing these questions, I focus on the effects of discourse about achievement in the United States, filling a need for macrolevel analyses of urban education (Milner & Lomotey, 2014). In conceptualizing urban education, Milner (2012b) offers a typology: urban intensive—applicable to districts in large metropolitan areas, urban emergent—applicable to districts in midsized cities, and urban characteristics—applicable to districts not in midsized or large cities but that are experiencing a strain on resources similar to urban-intensive or urban-emergent districts. I argue that the AGD likely has had the most tangible effects on schools in urban-intensive and urban-emergent districts, given that they have experienced the brunt of accountability sanctions based on achievement (Anderson & Dixson, 2016; Carey, 2014; Johnson, 2013). However, aligned with Carey (2014), I approach this study from the lens that, “The AGD has lent to the creation and reification of a problematic culture pervading the workings of public schools and the hearts, minds, and practices of those who work within and outside of them” (p. 442). In this way, the focus of my study is on how such discourse has shaped teachers’ beliefs across the education field, and that it has dire and tangible consequences for districts spanning Milner's (2012b) typology of urban education.
In what follows, I describe the conceptual framework guiding this study and review the literature in which this study is situated. I then present my methods, followed by results, limitations, and discussion and implications of this study on research and practice.
Conceptual Framework
This study is grounded in an interdisciplinary conceptual framework that examines how individuals’ personal beliefs and the dominant language, practices, and norms in their policy environments influence their support for particular policy solutions. Political science and sociology scholarship suggests that the language we use to describe policy problems prompts particular responses and signals the bounds for appropriate policy solutions (Chong & Druckman, 2007; Creed et al., 2002; Schön & Rein, 1994). A synergy in this scholarship is its attention to the ways in which individuals, organizations, and institutions organize ideas. “Frames” serve as cognitive structures that place boundaries around concepts, implicitly defining what ideas are relevant or irrelevant to a particular concept (Creed et al., 2002; Purdy et al., 2019). Framing theory, then, suggests that the way the education field frames educational problems influences the kinds of responses that educators perceive to be relevant to those problems.
In this study, I bridge framing theory with the concepts of AGD and the opportunity gap framework described previously. Grounded in framing theory, my study assumes that the terms “achievement gap” and “opportunity gap” represent two alternative conceptions of racial inequality in education. In framing theory terms, the acute focus on addressing achievement gaps has bounded the concept of educational gaps to focus on the deficits of certain students of color and low-income students and on solutions grounded in standardization, test-driven reforms, and individual performance (Carey, 2014). The “opportunity gap” frame represents a different cognitive structure—rather than attributing blame to students, the opportunity gap frame calls to mind the lack of opportunities provided to students (e.g. Ladson-Billings, 2013; Milner, 2012a). In this way, the language itself signals a different set of possible solutions that broaden the conceptual boundaries beyond individual achievement, such as inequitable resources and conditions in schools (Welsh, 2021). With this conceptual grounding in mind, I turn to existing literature to situate this study's contribution.
Literature Review
I situate my study in the literature on the field's focus on achievement gaps and the consequences for school reform policies and instruction, and the role of labels and language in education in shaping beliefs about instruction and policy.
Achievement Gaps and Shifts in Language Over Time
Despite efforts to shift language, AGD is still very much in use in academic scholarship and practice. There is an incredibly robust body of scholarship that aims to document and explain racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps (e.g. recent work includes Atteberry & McEachin, 2021; Hashim et al., 2020; Kirksey et al., 2020; Marianno, 2021; Reardon et al., 2018), with a resurgence of work amid the Covid-19 pandemic (e.g. Bailey et al., 2021; Cohodes et al., 2022).
Other terms to describe achievement gaps have begun to surface, such as “gaps in educational outcomes” (e.g. Kirksey et al., 2020) and “disparities in achievement” (e.g. Long et al., 2023). Some studies of achievement have begun to use opportunity gap language (e.g. Long et al., 2023; TNTP, 2018), though notably, in these contexts, and this language is still used to explain deficits between racial and socioeconomic groups (Milner, 2012a; Wright & Kim, 2023). Upholding tenets of the opportunity gap framework, some scholars have begun to use critical quantitative methodologies to highlight the nonneutrality of measurement and achievement and to surface factors like residential segregation and inequitable school funding (e.g. Anglum, 2023; Ramlackhan & Wang, 2024). Furthermore, despite a retreat in accountability policy from punitive school sanctions based on achievement in favor of supports (Desimone et al., 2019), addressing achievement gaps remains a prominent focus among practitioners in U.S. schools (e.g. see Flores & Gunzenhauser, 2021; Turner & Spain, 2020).
The Perverse Effects of the Achievement Gap
Empirical work supports Carey's (2014) conceptual arguments that a focus on achievement gaps has positioned students in a deficit framework and narrowed potential solutions. The goal of closing achievement gaps had led to reforms rooted in standardization and neoliberal principles like high-stakes accountability (Booher-Jennings, 2005; Crocco & Costigan, 2007; Miller et al., 2022; Milner, 2012a; Taylor, 2023). These reforms have influenced teacher practice: Even among teachers who have a critical orientation, the neoliberal logics of meritocracy, individualism, and high-stakes testing shape teachers’ instructional priorities (Au, 2016; Gibson, 2022; Stillman, 2011; Taylor, 2023).
This narrow focus comes at the expense of other instructional foci, especially justice-oriented pedagogies like social justice teaching and culturally relevant and responsive pedagogies (Gay, 2018; Gibson, 2022; Howard & Rodriguez-Minkoff, 2017; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Stillman, 2011; Young, 2010). Decades of scholarship on culturally relevant and responsive pedagogies has shown the importance of such approaches for a range of student outcomes—e.g. increased student interest and engagement; greater academic, behavioral, and social–emotional outcomes (for a review, see Aronson & Laugher, 2016). Most importantly, these pedagogies represent a liberatory conception of teaching that positions students’ cultural and racial identities as assets for learning, calls attention to “curriculum violence”—harm done when students do not have access to racially just schooling—and takes up issues of social justice and equity as central to the learning process (Milner, 2020a, 2020b). Qualitative studies have shown that teachers think engaging in culturally relevant and responsive pedagogies is an important aspect of addressing structural inequalities (e.g. Duncan-Andrade, 2007; Ladson-Billings, 1995). At the same time, teachers experience tensions between existing instructional policies focused on standardized achievement and their efforts to enact justice-oriented pedagogies (Comstock, 2023; Young, 2010). I hypothesize, then, that if gaps were framed differently—e.g. as “opportunity gaps”—teachers may consider instructional solutions that go beyond practices rooted in standardized achievement to, for instance, emphasize aspects of culturally relevant pedagogy.
Effect of Labels and Language in Education
Scholarship on the effects of labels and language in education suggest that language may play a role in framing teachers’ beliefs about problems and solutions in education. Youth of color, especially Black males, are assigned a range of deficit labels, such as “at risk” or “in crisis,” that contribute to further entrenchment of negative stereotypes in education (Howard, 2014; James, 2012; Kumah-Abiwu, 2022). There is ample evidence that teachers hold explicit and implicit racial biases toward students and that these biases influence their instructional decisions (Chin et al., 2020; Lewis & Diamond, 2015; Starck et al., 2020). We also know that teachers’ dispositions—beliefs, values, self-efficacy, and attitudes—inform their visions for instruction, which in turn deeply shape their instructional practices (Comstock et al., 2023; Hammerness, 2001; Vaughn et al., 2021).
Recent work has found that language can trigger these biases. In one experimental study, Quinn (2020) found that the use of the term in a public news story increased general viewers’ implicit bias against Black students. In another, Quinn and Desruisseaux (2022) showed that achievement gap language led teachers and members of the general population to deprioritize addressing racial inequality and to express negative racial stereotypes. There is some—albeit very limited—evidence that teachers do not believe that professional learning focused on culturally relevant pedagogy will help close the achievement gap (Mette et al., 2016). However, no work has examined the effects of using different language—like opportunity gaps—on teachers’ perceptions of the importance of different instructional approaches. Given evidence that language triggers particular beliefs about students, we would expect language to shape teachers’ instructional dispositions and, ultimately, to influence their support for different instructional approaches.
Complicating these efforts, scholars have documented how neoliberal reforms and efforts to enact social justice teaching take up the language of justice within a paradigm that emphasizes individualism and standardization and overlooks sociopolitical contexts that perpetuate injustice (Gibson, 2022; Miller et al., 2022; Scott, 2011). Thus, while my study is predicated on the premise that language matters and frames how we understand problems and solutions in education, other scholars caution the field about how justice-oriented language, such as “opportunity gap,” can be easily coopted to serve the status quo (Miller et al., 2022; Wright & Kim, 2023).
How Achievement Gaps and Discourse Affect Policy Support
Finally, we also know that achievement gaps will not be solved with instructional shifts alone, but necessitate attention to economic, political, historical, and moral inequalities (Ladson-Billings, 2006; Welsh, 2021) and that race-conscious policy that redresses racial inequality is politically fraught (Siegel-Hawley et al., 2023). Surprisingly little work examines teachers’ support for policies aimed at redressing racial inequality. Valant and Newark (2016) found that the general public tends to support policies aimed at redressing socioeconomic achievement gaps more strongly than policies aimed at redressing racial achievement gaps (e.g. offering no-cost summer school programs for low-income students versus for Black students, respectively). Rochmes et al. (2017) surveyed teachers in one district and found that a majority of teachers supported targeted within-district resource allocation; however, the district had an explicit equity focus. Given work that shows teachers tend to have similar levels of anti-Black/pro-White bias as the general public (Starck et al., 2020), Rochmes et al.'s (2017) work likely is not reflective of the teacher population as a whole. Notably, neither of these survey studies examined the effects of alternative frames of the gap itself (i.e. achievement gap versus an opportunity gap) on policy preferences.
Following these studies, which use vignette-based funding allocation survey questions to understand policy preferences, I examine the effects of AGD on teachers’ policy preferences for within-district funding allocation. This policy area is useful for several reasons. First, resource allocation plays a pivotal role in unequal conditions in schools (Mwangi, 2024)—as Welsh (2021) argued, “school funding is one of the primary sources of the unequal distribution of resources that foment inequality in education.” Second, resource distribution is a common way in which education stakeholders discuss equity (Freidus & Turner, 2023) and thus would be an easily understood policy with which to engage. Third, I administered my survey in 2021, during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the federal government was allocating relief funds to districts (Cardona & Rodríguez, 2022), making funding allocation questions particularly plausible.
This Study's Contribution
Grounded in this literature, I contribute to the scholarship on the politics and consequences of achievement gaps and AGD. First, in line with Milner and Lomotey's (2014) recommendations to address methodological gaps in urban education via replication studies, I replicate Quinn et al.'s (2019) work examining the effects of AGD on teachers’ beliefs about how much of a priority the gaps are and their causes. Second, my study extends existing work by examining how AGD affects teachers’ policy and instructional preferences. Quinn's work (e.g. Quinn, 2020; Quinn et al., 2019; Quinn & Desruisseaux, 2022) does not assess impact of the AGD on teachers’ policy and instructional preferences. Valant and Newark's (2016) work examines the effects of different types of achievement gaps on policy preferences, but does not examine the nature of how those gaps are framed—i.e. as achievement gaps or opportunity gaps. My study bridges this work by examining the effects of AGD on teachers’ beliefs about racial inequality and their policy and instructional preferences for addressing racial inequality in schools.
Positionality
My identity as both a teacher and a White woman who grew up with access to magnet programs in my public school district deeply shapes my relationship to this work. As a student, I benefited from labels like “gifted,” which afforded me access to rigorous and engaging educational experiences. As a teacher in the rural south, my students—who were primarily Black—were labeled “at risk” and required by school mandate to sit through high-stress test preparation to avoid further school sanctions. My experience is personal and has shaped my perspective, but it also reflects systemic patterns—the labels we use in education are racialized, and those racialized practices have become normalized (Carey, 2014; Horsford & Grosland, 2021; Milner IV, 2007). Far more often than White students, certain students of color—like my students—are labeled “at risk,” further entrenching stereotypes of youth of color as underachieving (James, 2012). And far more often than certain students of color, White students like me are deemed “gifted” without being held accountable to examining the role of Whiteness and the myth of meritocracy in those labels (Carey, 2014; Milner, 2020b).
I am an outsider to feeling the consequences of deficit-laden educational labels as a student, but my position affords me the opportunity to critique the structures and labels that delimit opportunities for other students and to amplify the perspectives of scholars of color who have long called attention to these problems (e.g. Carey, 2014; Howard, 2019; Ladson-Billings, 2006, 2013; Milner, 2012a, 2020b). I acknowledge my privilege in being able to study these consequences without experiencing their impact firsthand.
Method
In this study, I replicate and extend prior work from Quinn et al. (2019) using an experimental survey design. I randomly assigned teachers to one of two terms used to describe the achievement gap (“racial achievement gap” or “racial opportunity gap”) and compared responses across conditions. This design allows for causal inferences about the effects of terminology on teachers’ prioritization of and responses to racial inequality in education. Though the responses to this survey do not generalize to the broader population of teachers in the United States, they offer insights into possible causal mechanisms at play between macrolevel discourse and teachers’ beliefs in education.
Data and Sample
I contracted with CloudResearch (CloudResearch, 2021) to conduct the survey with a national (not nationally representative) sample of teachers. My sample for this study is 270 full-time teachers who teach any grade K-12 in a U.S. public school. Due to documented instructional differences across elementary, middle, and high school (e.g. Boon & Lewthwaite, 2015), I used a stratified random assignment strategy based on school level, resulting in 90 elementary, 92 middle, and 88 high school teachers. Given this design, this sample size yields 0.70 power to detect a main effect of 0.192 at an alpha level of 0.05.
Consistent with broader trends in the teacher workforce, the study sample is majority White and female (Table 1). A vast majority of teachers in the sample had a bachelor's degree or master's degree. The sample was fairly distributed between elementary, middle, and high school grade levels (as expected, given the stratified approach to sampling). Greater percentages of teachers taught English language arts (ELA) or mathematics compared with science or social studies. Approximately 15% of teachers identified as special education teachers. Over half of teachers identified their student population as primarily White (about 60%). About a third of teachers taught primarily Black students, and about a quarter of teachers taught primarily Latinx/Hispanic students. Much less common were teachers who taught primarily Native American or Asian students. About 25% of teachers in the sample identified their school as located in a rural area (defined on the survey as sparsely populated; located outside a city or unaffiliated with a city), 40% identified their school as located in a suburban area (e.g. mainly residential; located in an area bordering a city), and 34% identified their school as located in an urban area (e.g., densely populated; located within a city).
Descriptive Statistics, Baseline Equivalence, and Comparisons to U.S. Teacher Workforce.
Note. ELA = English language arts. Demographics of students taught indicates when the teacher identified half or more of her students as a particular race/ethnicity. Baseline equivalence patterns were identical when including school-level fixed effects. U.S. teacher workforce estimates from De Brey et al. (2021, p. 114). I exclude national comparisons to demographics of students taught, as my survey asked teachers to report on the students they teach specifically, which does not have a strong comparison in national data. Subject area estimates were derived from reports of number of teachers. All general elementary educators were included in calculation of estimates for ELA, mathematics, social studies, and science.
Procedures
Prior to survey administration, I conducted 18 cognitive interviews with 16 teachers to examine the clarity of language in the survey items in service of validity and reliability (Desimone & Le Floch, 2004). Cognitive interviews lasted approximately 20–45 min. I tested each of the two versions of the survey with half of the cognitive interview participants. During interviews, I asked teachers to read aloud each survey question and talk through their thinking as they selected their response to the question. I also asked explicitly about the key terminology that serves as the crux of the study (“racial achievement gap” or “racial opportunity gap”). Data from cognitive interviews allowed me to ensure that the terminology on my survey called to mind similar outcomes across teachers while emphasizing a narrow versus structural framing, supporting validity of the items. 1
Survey administration occurred in August 2021. The survey took approximately 5–10 min for teachers to complete. At the beginning of the survey, teachers were notified that the purpose of the study is to examine their beliefs about equity in education and their opinions about various education policy proposals.
Measures
The survey measures for this study fall into five categories. The first two categories assess teachers’ prioritization of and beliefs about the causes of racial inequality in education. These items are from Quinn et al. (2019), originally adapted from Valant and Newark (2016). The prioritization of racial inequality in education measure assessed the extent to which teachers see the racial achievement or racial opportunity gap in education as a policy priority on a 5-point Likert scale from not a priority to essential. The causes of racial inequality in education measures assessed the extent to which teachers attribute the racial achievement or racial opportunity gap in education to various sources (e.g. school quality, student motivation, parenting, and racism) on a 5-point Likert scale from not at all to extremely. In addition to items included in Quinn et al. (2019) and Valant and Newark (2016), I added “student effort to this measure,” which reflects the notion of the myth of meritocracy from Milner's (2020b) opportunity gap framework—the flawed logic behind the conception that the education system fairly rewards individuals based on merit or effort alone.
The next two categories assess teachers’ preferences for and prioritization of policy and instructional responses to racial inequality in education. The resource allocation preferences measure is a vignette-based item that asks teachers to reflect on three policy proposals about strategies for allocating funds in a hypothetical school district. The hypothetical district is low income, serves high percentages of Black and White students, and has a large equity gap (referred to as a “racial achievement gap” or “racial opportunity gap”) between Black and White students. This survey question asks teachers to consider three proposals: dividing funds evenly among all schools in the district, proportional to their number of students; dividing the funds evenly among just the five schools serving primarily Black students, proportional to their number of students; and providing some additional funds to all schools with the five predominantly Black schools receiving double the amount of other schools (which I refer to as the “sliding scale” option). This question, adapted from Rochmes et al. (2017), is designed to assess whether teachers are willing to support targeted allocation of financial resources based on race, and whether the framing of the gap (“racial achievement gap” or “racial opportunity gap”) affects their preferences.
Finally, the support for instructional approaches measures assessed the extent to which teachers believe different instructional approaches are a priority for addressing the racial achievement or racial opportunity gap in education. Given scholarship that suggests the field's focus on the achievement gap has led to an emphasis on standardized curricula and assessment strategies and precluded an emphasis on culturally relevant and responsive pedagogies (Carey, 2014; Ladson-Billings, 1995, 2013; Milner, 2012a, 2020a), these items include a range of practices that align with a standards-based reform perspective and culturally relevant pedagogy. For each instructional approach (e.g. incorporating students’ racial, ethnic, and cultural identities into instruction; implementing curricular materials with fidelity; supporting students to be civically engaged; focusing on test preparation; and engaging students in current political and social justice issues in content area courses), teachers indicated the extent to which they believe the instructional approach is a priority for addressing the racial achievement or racial opportunity gap in education.
Each of the measures above contained the experimental term to which the respondent was randomly assigned (“racial achievement gap” or “racial opportunity gap”). Importantly, my survey measures use single-item responses, rather than composite survey scales, so they do not allow for generation of reliability statistics. However, these types of items are consistent with other related experimental survey studies and items derived from other similar studies (Quinn et al., 2019; Rochmes et al., 2017; Valant & Newark, 2016) as well as scholarship (Carey, 2014; Ladson-Billings, 1995, 2013; Milner, 2012a).
Additionally, I asked additional demographic questions to check the baseline equivalence of my randomization procedures and to use as covariates in my analysis as needed: years of teaching experience, subject area, grade level, teacher racial identity, teacher gender, teacher education level, the nature of the school's geographic location, location (state), and characteristics of students served (i.e. race, socioeconomic status).
Analytic Approach
I used ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models with school-level fixed effects and robust standard errors to compare means across treatment conditions. In each regression model, I regress the outcome of interest (i.e. prioritization of racial inequality in education, causes of racial inequality in education, resource allocation preferences, and support for instructional approaches) on the binary variable indicating group assignment. The following equation represents the basic model for all analyses:
Robustness Checks
To assess whether the randomization resulted in equivalent groups, I conducted t-tests of group mean differences to compare demographic characteristics of the two samples. The results showed that the randomization was mostly effective in producing equivalent groups (Table 1). However, the treatment and control samples significantly differed in two key ways: the number of Black teachers and the number of teachers reporting that they serve primarily Black students. Overall, 13.3% of teachers in the achievement gap condition were Black, compared with 5.9% of the opportunity gap condition. This difference is driven by a difference in the elementary school level: 15.9% of elementary teachers in the achievement gap condition were Black, compared to 2.2% of elementary teachers in the opportunity gap condition (standard error = 0.059; p = 0.022). The difference between numbers of Black teachers in treatment conditions is not significant within the middle and high school blocks. Overall, more teachers in the achievement gap condition taught primarily Black students (39.3%) compared to the opportunity gap condition (24.5%). This difference was not driven by a particular school level. Despite these differences, when regressing treatment on all covariates, the omnibus F-test was not significant (F = 0.89, p = 0.635), indicating that overall, the treatment groups are not significantly different across characteristics.
These baseline differences present a potential threat to internal validity, for instance if the imbalance is driving the results, or if race is somehow related to treatment condition (e.g. Black teachers decide not to take the survey when they see the “opportunity gap framing”). To understand whether the imbalance in covariates is driving the results, I reran the same set of OLS models, including all covariates in the model. To understand whether race is related to my treatment, I reran the OLS models, including an indicator variable for Black teacher, an indicator variable for teachers serving primarily Black student populations, and interactions of each of those variables with the treatment variable (
Results
Unlike prior work (Quinn et al., 2019), I found differences in teachers’ perceptions of the causes of gaps based on the framing of the gap—specifically, teachers attribute the “racial opportunity gap” less strongly to individualistic causes, such as student motivation, student effort, and parenting, relative to the “racial achievement gap”—but these terms did not elicit different prioritizations of the gap. Extending prior work, I found that the “racial opportunity gap” framing did not elicit differences in resource allocation preferences; however, teachers receiving this framing agreed more strongly that incorporating students’ racial, ethnic, and cultural identities into instruction is an important practice to address the gap than teachers receiving “racial achievement gap” framing. I describe these findings in more detail in the following sections.
Framing Effects on Prioritization and Causes of Gaps
The results showed that while teachers across conditions did not differ in the extent to which they prioritized the gaps, they did vary in their perceptions of some causes of gaps (Table 2). Teachers in the achievement gap group more strongly agreed that student motivation, student effort, and parenting were causes of the gap, compared with teachers in the opportunity gap group. On a 5-point scale from not at all to extremely, the mean responses for student motivation, student effort, and parenting were 3.7, 3.6, and 4.0 among achievement gap teachers and 3.2, 3.2, and 3.6 among opportunity gap teachers. These results indicate that the achievement gap framing caused differences in teachers’ perceptions of causes of gaps. Specifically, in response to achievement gap framing, teachers are more likely to associate that gap with deficits of students and their parents.
Effects of Equity Gap Framing on Beliefs about Prioritization and Causes of Gaps.
Note. a Mean difference and means represent results from OLS regression models using fixed effects for elementary and middle school and robust standard errors.
There were no other differences between conditions in the causes they ascribe to the gaps. This lack of difference itself is important—while teachers may be more inclined to associate the racial achievement gap with student and parent deficits, they are not any more or less inclined to ascribe the gap to structural causes, like discrimination and racism, income levels, or neighborhood environments, compared with teachers who are prompted with opportunity gap framing. Furthermore, teachers across conditions also did not show any differences in the extent to which they ascribe the gaps to differences in innate intellectual abilities. Thus, achievement gap framing does prompt associations with student and parent deficits, but it does not prompt differences in beliefs about genetic predispositions or more structural causes, when compared with opportunity gap framing.
Framing Effects on Policy Preferences and Support for Instructional Approaches
The results also showed that teachers across conditions did not vary in their preferences for allocation of financial resources. The mean differences between conditions for each policy preference were in fact quite small, differing by a maximum of approximately 9% (Table 3). This is especially true for the targeted policy option, in which resources would be allocated to a subset of schools serving predominantly Black students in the hypothetical low-income district—preferences for this option were nearly identical across conditions.
Effects of Equity Gap Framing on Policy Preferences and Instructional Approaches.
Note. a Mean difference and means represent results from OLS regression models using school-level fixed effects and robust standard errors. Under resource allocation preferences, “evenly distributed” refers to the option where all funds would be evenly distributed across all schools in the district, “sliding scale” refers to the option where some funds would be given to all schools, with more going to schools serving primarily Black students, and “targeted” refers to the option where the funds would be evenly distributed among just the schools serving primarily Black students.
However, regarding preferred instructional responses, the results showed one statistically significant difference between groups: Teachers receiving the opportunity gap framing agreed more strongly with incorporating students’ racial, ethnic, and cultural identities into instruction as an important practice to address the gap than teachers receiving achievement gap framing. This difference is notable, as it may suggest that the opportunity gap framing makes space for teachers to think more broadly about what constitutes effective teaching for addressing equity concerns in education.
While no other instructional approaches produced statistically significant differences, it is notable that the directional patterns of the mean differences across instructional approaches align with my hypotheses. Teachers in the achievement gap condition reported, on average, higher (but not statistically significant) agreement with items aligned with intended or unintended effects of standards-based reform, such as ensuring students learn grade-level content, following curricular materials as closely as possible, preparing students for standardized tests, and prioritizing basic math and reading skills (Booher-Jennings, 2005; Carey, 2014; Crocco & Costigan, 2007; Milner, 2012a). In contrast, teachers in the opportunity gap conditions reported, on average, higher (but not statistically significant) agreement with items aligned with culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 2006), such as supporting students to understand their own and their classmates’ cultural identities, analyzing instructional materials for stereotypical content, and engaging students in current political and social justice issues.
Robustness
Models with covariates for Black teachers and majority Black student populations produced the same patterns in significance and direction as my main analysis, supporting the robustness of my findings (see Tables A1–A3 in Supplementary Appendix A). Models with interaction terms (see Tables A4–A6 Supplementary Appendix A) showed no differential effect of treatment on Black teachers or teachers of primarily Black students, suggesting that baseline inequivalence did not indicate selection bias.
Limitations
The key limitation to this study is constraints on statistical power, which concerns type II error specifically. A larger sample size would have allowed for greater power to detect a smaller effect size. It is possible that my results suffer from type II error—a failure to reject the null when in fact the differences between conditions represent true differences. Indeed, Quinn et al. (2019) found an effect of 0.11 on teachers’ prioritization of the gap. Several of my main effects were smaller than 0.11, indicating that type II error may account for lack of significance. My results, then, may be conservative; with greater statistical power, we may detect more relationships here than those reported here. These results, however, are still critical—they offer replication of prior work and extension of that work in ways that support long-standing arguments about the perverse effects of AGD.
A second important limitation is that while my sample has a good distribution of teachers across the country and is generally reflective of characteristics of the teacher workforce more broadly, my sample is not a nationally representative sample. Still, while I cannot generalize my findings to the broader population of teachers in the United States, my findings offer an indication of the causal mechanisms of the effects of framing of equity gaps in education on teachers’ beliefs.
Discussion
In this study, I aimed to understand whether AGD—the assumption-laden language that the U.S. education field uses to talk about school reform (Carey, 2014)—affects teachers’ beliefs about education and the policies and practices that they prioritize to address those gaps. Critiques emphasize how the focus on and language of achievement gaps promotes a deficit-laden and comparative framework that situates certain students of color and low-income students as inferior to their White and affluent peers (Carey, 2014; Gutierrez & Dixon-Roman, 2011; Horsford & Grosland, 2021; Love, 2004; Milner, 2012a, 2013). Scholars also highlight that the focus on achievement gaps has diverted attention from structural sources of inequality and the very real gaps in resources that are at root of disparities in achievement (Carter & Welner, 2013; Irvine, 2010; Ladson-Billings, 2006; Welsh, 2021). Finally, scholars argue that the attention to closing achievement gaps has focused narrowly on technical fixes rooted in standardization and individualism, rather than attending to liberatory instructional practices that embrace students’ cultural and racial identities (Milner, 2010) and policies that aim to shift inequitable resource allocation practices (Welsh, 2021). “Opportunity gap” language offers a reframing of achievement gaps, which scholars have argued better attends to the source of the disparities in performance—inequitable opportunities for high-quality learning experiences (Carter & Welner, 2013; Milner, 2020b).
Building on existing conceptual and empirical work (Carey, 2014; Quinn et al., 2019; Quinn & Desruisseaux, 2022), I hypothesized that the “racial opportunity gap” term will lead teachers to more highly prioritize addressing the gap and to attribute the gap to structural explanations, such as limited resources, rather than individualistic explanations, such as student deficits. Extending Quinn and aligned with conceptual arguments about the racial opportunity gap (e.g. Milner, 2020b), I also hypothesize that the “racial opportunity gap” term will elicit stronger support from teachers for policy proposals that target resources to schools based on racial demographics and instructional approaches that go beyond academic achievement to, for instance, emphasize aspects of culturally relevant pedagogy.
The findings in this study provide empirical evidence in support of some of the central critiques of the AGD. Specifically, this study shows that the framing of equity gaps in education has an effect on teachers’ beliefs in two key ways. First, framing the gap as an achievement versus opportunity gap affects what teachers see as the causes of those gaps. Specifically, teachers who responded to the “racial achievement gap” framing were more likely to agree with explanations for gaps that focus on students’ or their families’ actions/characteristics: student motivation, student effort, and parenting. Said another way, teachers who responded to “racial opportunity gap” framing were less likely to attribute the gap to these student-level characteristics. This finding is directly aligned with conceptual arguments in the scholarship on the unintended consequences of achievement gap framing in education (Gutierrez & Dixon-Roman, 2011; Ladson-Billings, 2006, 2013; Love, 2004; Milner, 2012a; Welner & Carter, 2013). While I did not find any differences in structural causes of gaps (e.g. income levels or discrimination and racism), the differences in individual-level explanations (e.g. student effort) suggest that the achievement gap framing may be implicitly leading to an individualized and deficit-oriented perspective of students.
Second, I found some support that the opportunity gap framing affected the instructional solutions teachers prioritized. I hypothesized that, because the “racial achievement gap” narrows the focus of attention on inequities in academic performance between certain students of color and White students, this terminology would lead teachers to prefer instructional approaches that focus on strategies aligned with contemporary conceptions of academic performance: preparing students for standardized tests, basic math and reading skills, ensuring students learn grade-level content, and following curricular materials as intended. In contrast, the “racial opportunity gap” framing, I hypothesized, would suggest a broader conception of the issue and would incorporate practices that explicitly incorporate race, culture, and power into classroom instruction. I found that teachers who received opportunity gap framing more strongly agreed that incorporating students’ racial, ethnic, and cultural identities into instruction was an important practice for addressing the gap than teachers who received the achievement gap framing. Importantly, while other instructional approaches were not statistically significantly different between treatment conditions, the treatment effects were directionally related to the hypotheses driving this analysis: teachers responding to the opportunity gap framing agreed more strongly with instructional approaches aligned with culturally responsive teaching and agreed less strongly with instructional approaches aligned with standards-based reform efforts.
These results resonate with scholars who have found that the focus on the achievement gap has contributed to a narrow focus on reforms rooted in standardization and neoliberal principles like high-stakes accountability (Booher-Jennings, 2005; Crocco & Costigan, 2007; Miller et al., 2022; Milner, 2012a; Taylor, 2023). Ladson-Billings (2006) and others (e.g. Comstock, 2023; Milner, 2020b) have argued that reforms emphasizing standardization push a focus on sameness, which ignores systemic and institutionalized inequalities and does nothing to address the lack of cultural relevance of existing curricula and educational experiences for marginalized students. Milner (2020b) offers the concept of opportunity-centered teaching as a way to connect teachers’ individual practices to a more systemic understanding of inequalities in education. Opportunity-centered teaching includes core practices such as forming relationships with students and connecting with the community. Milner (2020b) argues that these practices contribute to systemic change by providing students with transformational experiences in education that are responsive to their identities and experiences. This type of framework can support students to not only perform academically in school but also gain skills to challenge an inequitable system (Ladson-Billings, 1995).
This study also builds on scholars who have identified the importance of resource allocation to redressing racial inequality in education (Welsh, 2021) and work on the politics of race-conscious policy in solving achievement gaps (Valant & Newark, 2016). Importantly, while I found some evidence of AGD affecting teachers’ instructional preferences, my results did not show that AGD affected teachers’ beliefs about how within-district resources should be allocated.
Collectively, these results offer important contributions to conversations about educational achievement and racial inequality and speak to the complicated nature of language and discourse in education. On the one hand, these findings suggest that, indeed, language matters and that AGD has framed the way teachers think about the causes of racial inequality and appropriate instructional approaches to mitigating racial inequality. On the other hand, a simple language switch is not enough to alter teachers’ resource allocation preferences. Furthermore, scholarship shows that justice-oriented language, like opportunity gap framing, can be coopted to serve the same standardization and neoliberal agenda that resulted in these gaps in the first place (Gibson, 2022; Miller et al., 2022; Scott, 2011), so attending to how language in education continues to evolve will be critical for understanding racial inequality in schooling.
Implications
These findings have important implications for policy, practice, and research. Regarding practice, this study suggests that education stakeholders—especially policymakers, education leaders, and educators—should be aware of how they label, discuss, and frame equity issues in education. While attention to the achievement gap over the past several decades aimed to bring to light glaring inequities in educational opportunities for marginalized students, this study supports the notion that focusing on achievement gaps “might also contribute to the very problems [the field] seek[s] to solve” (Carey, 2014, p. 442).
At the same time, these results suggest that the “achievement gap” may now be representative of a larger set of ideological and social norms, values, and practices (Carey, 2014). While the terminology of the “achievement gap” in and of itself may be problematic, it also signals deeper-held rituals and practices that align with a particular ideological stance (Carey, 2014). As such, the fix to problematic terminology may not be a simple switch from one term to another, but a concerted effort to examine underlying ideological norms and assumptions driving policy and practice regarding equity in education. As Milner (2012) argues, “understanding [race, power, and culture] can allow us to think about how a social context shapes opportunity rather than focus primarily on the students themselves, on achievement gaps, or on an end result or outcome, such as a test score” (p. 709, emphasis added). Ultimately, adopting new terminology alongside a deeper reflection on the social context in which U.S. schooling operates may offer new explanations and solutions for persistent equity issues.
This study offers multiple important lines of inquiry for future studies. Given limitations in this study on statistical power and sample size, future studies should aim to study larger samples of teachers and ask more questions about teachers’ instructional and policy preferences. Resource allocation policies make for an easily understood and plausible policy, but future studies might ask about a range of policies that could redress racial inequality both within and outside education, such as teacher diversity policies, affirmative action, housing policies, and efforts to support political participation. In addition, existing work thus far focuses on teachers and the general public. Future work might examine other central actors within and outside education, such as school and district leaders and parents, and may focus on specific contexts—such as actors in urban intensive, urban emergent, or urban characteristic contexts (Milner, 2012b). Finally, future work should attend to the complex and evolving nature of discourse in education by examining how opportunity gap framing—or other alternative frames—are taken up, what assumptions those frames are grounded in, and the extent to which language reflects the maintenance of the status quo or a more meaningful shift in underlying values about redressing racial inequality.
Supplemental Material
sj-docx-1-uex-10.1177_00420859241279453 - Supplemental material for Gaps in Achievement or Opportunity? How Achievement Gap Discourse Affects Teachers’ Beliefs and Priorities
Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-uex-10.1177_00420859241279453 for Gaps in Achievement or Opportunity? How Achievement Gap Discourse Affects Teachers’ Beliefs and Priorities by Meghan Comstock in Urban Education
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305B200035 to the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Pennsylvania GAPSA-Provost Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Innovation.
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Notes
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References
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