it is far from over

"when you are behind in a footrace, the only way to get ahead is to run faster than the man in front of you. So when your white roommate says he's tired and goes to sleep, you stay up and burn the midnight oil" - Dr. King, 1963

The achievement gap is as follows: you take a group of the most promising and proficient students you've encountered in a given school year, and you give them the SAT. These people are clearly and undisputably intelligent people - anyone who is human can, in having a conversation with any one of them, detect those obvious and ephemeral human qualities within that denote functional intelligence. They are, in short, the most impressive individuals you've encountered in a given teaching cycle, and deserve any and all opportinity to develop the excellence within them. So, you and a fellow teacher negotiate with a local foundation to provide them a Princeton Review SAT prep course free of charge (your colleague is a Princeton Review certified teacher) - and you give them the SAT to take before the course starts.

After getting back the results, you call up your younger brother - who's a senior at your old high school - and ask him what he imagines the average SAT score will be for a kid at your high school who is - to put it bluntly - useless (i.e. wasting time and space in the classroom, and showing no initiative or appreciation of the educational premise therein). It is a heartbreaking understanding - as heartbreaking as it is for your colleague who is a Princeton Review teacher, who has never seen scores so low - to know that your most intelligent and deserving students have scored drastically below individuals who are - from an insitutional sense - far less than their peers, yet in another academic environment. Furthermore, it is nauseating to see in this situation something profoundly unstated about the unanimous Blackness of your students (drawn, in turn, from a public high school in Jackson, MS that is 99.9% African-American), and the vaguely unbroken whiteness of your old high school (an all-male Jesuit school in Cleveland, OH). For, this is the thought that surfaces: a bunch of complete assholes will graduate from your old high school having never given a damn about the influence of educational advancement upon their opportunities to participate in the economy, then limp through some undergraduate Jesuit-school dumping ground, and end up comfortably suburban as a MBA wannabe (though perhaps a CPA flag-bearer) doing little to no work for a job secured by the dad or uncle of a friend-of-a-friend, floating on a $150K house and sending Jr. to the self-same Jesuit high school, while your ex-students - all of them so beautiful in their brilliance, self-awareness, and initiative, will sooner or later run up against the glass-ceiling of either their race or (more likely at this point) their intellectual upbringing, and god knows what will happen to them - a service economy cesspool, or - worse yet - "yes, sir" or "yes, ma'm" answering machine to the jerk-off country club middle managers who drank their way through what they will stumblingly recall as the best years of their life. All you can do at this point - the end of a school year, no less - is look at these beautiful, strange little people that you've become so attached to in the previous months, and want so much that their talents be recognized and cultivated to their fullest - all you can do is stare blankly at a leading indicator of their educational future (and look at how unfazed they are by performing in the 60th percentile when they belong in the 90th) and feel absolutely disgusted. This is the achievment gap: that the most brilliant and deserving of my students - all black - are going to get boxed out of higher education by a bunch of jaded shitheads who have taken for granted the undue benefits of a "culture of excellence" they want no part of, and by the time you meet your kids in high school, there's little you can do about it except stuff like pray that their SAT scores will jump about 500 points - pray that they never stop burning the midnight oil.

It is all the more devestating to have this happen two years in a row.