Gaps in Achievement or Opportunity? How Achievement Gap Discourse Affects Teachers’ Beliefs and Priorities

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.