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Despite the intense focus on the achievement gap that exists between African American, Latino, and other students of color and their White counterparts, the achievement gap discourse keeps us locked in the deficit paradigm. This article challenges us to look at the inherent fallacies of the achievement gap discourse and place students' academic struggles in the larger context of social failure including health, wealth, and funding gaps that impede their school success.
In my American Educational Research Association (AERA) Presidential address in San Francisco in April of 2006 (Ladson-Billings, 2006), I challenged my colleagues in education research to reconceptualize this notion of the achievement gap and to begin to think about the incredible education debt we, as a nation, have accumulated. Thus, rather than focusing on telling people to "catch up" we have to think about how we will begin to pay down this mountain of debt we have amassed at the expense of entire groups of people and their subsequent generations. Looking at our current educational problems as an "achievement gap" forces us to look to the year-to-year progress on various standardized test measures and allows us to conclude that the problem lies solely in the realm of scholastic disparity.
Specifically, the problem I have with constructing our current concern as an achievement gap is both substantive and semantic. Let me start with the semantic issue. When we speak of an achievement gap (and believe me, everyone is speaking of it-regardless of their political or ideological position), we are suggesting that some groups of students are doing just fine and we have to find a way to get the groups that are not doing fine to catch up with them. This presents two problems. First, student academic performance is not static. Those students who are achieving at acceptable levels are not waiting for those who are lagging to catch up with them. Thus, the primary premise of closing the gap rests on a notion of slowed performance at the top while there is simultaneous increased performance at the lower levels.
Given the increased pressure to achieve (via standardized testing), it is unlikely that highperforming students will stand still. Long term trends from the National Center for Education Statistics indicate that all students' scores...