YATW Blog Post: African American student test scores

Blog Post #1

My name is Brandon Jones and I am a freshman at Science Leadership Academy. In my English class we were given an assignment to tackle an issue we found and blog about it. The issue I picked was the  test scores of children from different ethnicities and how the scores of African American children were alarmingly low.

For my blog post I researched and found many interesting and informative articles. This particular article reported that African American children scored lower than European Americans in Vocabulary, Reading and Mathematics test. This true, but aggravating statement made me realize how serious this issue is. It is disheartening to read that the gap between the two ethnicities starts before children enter kindergarten and sadly leads into adulthood. The article states that even though this problem cut down since 1970, the average African American child still scores 75% below the average Caucasian child and on some tests, African American children score 85% below Caucasian children.

*above are the percentages of white, black and hispanic students who scored at or above proficient on standardized test*

The article here and the graph above, concerns me and makes me wonder what could be done about this issue. To solve an issue, you must first address the problem, however for his particular issue, there are many possible problems. One being improper funding for students. In Lower Merion, the School District spends $21,399 per student and the School District of Philadelphia only provides $11,078 per student. Another problem is racism and making children feel lesser than what they can be.

As for the solutions, I could go on for days about the possible theories and solutions on solve the issue at hand. Sadly, most of the solutions might not work. For my YATW(You and the World) project me and my partner are going out in the world and going to try to find a solution to this impending issue.