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The achievement gap is one of the most talked-about issues in U.S. education. The term refers to the disparities in standardized test scores between Black and White, Latina/o and White, and recent immigrant and White students. This article argues that a focus on the gap is misplaced. Instead, we need to look at the "education debt" that has accumulated over time. This debt comprises historical, economic, sociopolitical, and moral components. The author draws an analogy with the concept of national debt-which she contrasts with that of a national budget deficit-to argue the significance of the education debt.
I have spent a better part of this year reading the presidential addresses of a number of former AERA presidents. Most take the wise course of giving addresses about something they know well-their own research. Of course, I was not fully persuaded by their wisdom. Instead, I attempted to learn something new, and, unfortunately, the readers will have to determine whether I learned it well enough to share it with my professional colleagues.
The questions that plague me about education research are not new ones. I am concerned about the meaning of our work for the larger public-for real students, teachers, administrators, parents, policymakers, and communities in real school settings. I know these are not new concerns; they have been raised by others, people like the late Kenneth B. Clark, who, in the 1950s, was one of the first social scientists to bring research to the public in a meaningful way. His work with his wife and colleague Mamie formed the basis for the landmark Brown v. Board of Education (1954) case that reversed legal segregation in public schools and other public accommodations. However, in his classic volume Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power, first published in 1965, Clark took social scientists to task for their failure to fully engage and understand the plight of the poor:
To my knowledge, there is at present nothing in the vast literature of social science treatises and textbooks and nothing in the practical and field training of graduate students in social science to prepare them for the realities and complexities of this type of involvement in a real, dynamic, turbulent, and at times seemingly chaotic community. And what is...