A Clear Vision for Closing the Achievement Gap Closing the Achievement Gap: A Vision for Changing Beliefs and Practices. Belinda

Cities are in trouble. The movement of people, jobs, and businesses away from once vibrant, bustling places has resulted in crime-ridden, economically depressed cities that struggle to keep their inhabitants fed, employed, and educated. Those living in the city are mostly poor minorities who have no choice but to live in what economists call “no zones” – places where there is no formal economy (Noguera 17). These conditions surround many urban public schools. Daily, urban public schools receive an overwhelming amount of students whose parents are either unemployed, in jail, or on drugs. Test scores show that these urban students, the majority of whom are poor minorities, academically perform well below students who are white and from the suburbs. What can be done to reduce this dramatic gap between urban students and other “normal” students? In Closing the Achievement Gap: A Vision for Changing Beliefs and Practices, Belinda Williams organizes a forceful collection of essays that both analyze the factors that contribute to the achievement gap and present concrete solutions for the narrowing of this gap. Addressing what United States Secretary of Education Rod Paige calls “an education emergency,” Closing the Achievement Gap is an essential piece of scholarship that identifies explicit steps to take for the reduction of the achievement gap (Education Department).