Mediating knowledge construction: Towards a dynamic model of assessment and learning

THE GAP is back. Actually, the differences between the achievement of white and Asian students and that of black, Hispanic, and other minority students never completely disappeared, but so much progress was made during the 1970s and 1980s that there seemed to be a tacit assumption that the gap would eventually close altogether. The standards and assessment efforts of the past decade were at least partly meant to speed up the process of closing the gap. If districts, schools, and parents are chafing under accountability measures (often hastily and thoughtlessly implemented), it is because state policy makers were under the gun to find ways to close the gap even further. Federal laws, especially Title I, said that all students were to be held to the same high standards, a mandate that rippled through state policies for all districts and schools. The requirement that assessment data be disaggregated by race and ethnicity also ensured that the problem of the gap would remain public. Indeed it did, especially in a rash of reports released as the new school year began, including the annual release of SAT scores from the College Board. One who believes, as I do, that the standards-based movement is essential to closing the gap, must conclude that not enough schools are using standards-based reforms to give low-performing students, especially minorities, access to the same curriculum as everyone else. The latest trend report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tells the story of the gap for the past 25-plus years. And it was a good story for a long time. Between 1970 and 1988, the gap between the NAEP reading scores of black students and those of white students was cut in half; the math score gap, cut by one-third. Obviously, schools were doing something right, and black students were showing they could indeed learn when given greater opportunities to do so. Then in the 1990s, the progress stopped. Actually, it stopped for everyone (at slightly higher levels than in the 1970s), but black and Hispanic NAEP scores climbed aboard a roller coaster. They fell back, began to improve in some subjects, then regressed again. By 1999, the scores of black and Hispanic students were far below the records set in 1988. Trying to put a good face on a disturbing picture, NAEP officials and Secretary of Education Richard Riley pointed to steady improvements overall in math scores and higher rates of enrollment in more advanced math classes. The same arguments were heard with the College Board's release of the 2000 SAT scores: last year's seniors posted the highest math scores since 1969; verbal scores were unchanged. The percentage of minorities taking the SAT has increased 47% since 1987 and would be expected to pull the average scores down, so this was good news. However, the gap remains very wide, with blacks scoring 104 points lower than whites on the math portion of the SAT and 94 points lower on the verbal portion. These score gaps on the SAT actually widened during the 1990s. So what happened? At a time when state statutes, a general consensus about content standards, improved professional development, greater knowledge from research on learning, and pressure for accountability have been working more or less in tandem, why have the academic gaps grown larger? Researchers are scratching their heads on this one. David Grissmer of RAND points to the unprecedented resources made available to low-income schools by the War on Poverty as one factor in narrowing the gap and to a rising black middle class as another. However, he couldn't explain why the progress ended. His most recent research, described in Improving Student Achievement (RAND, 2000), uses the improvement of fourth- and eighth-grade NAEP math scores as the context for making state comparisons. The rise in scores in some states, he says, is a result primar-ily of both higher per-pupil expenditures and how the money is spent. …

In 1969 Congress charged U.S. Department of Education through National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) with developing and implementing nationally representative and continuing measurement of student achievement in American schools. Assessment of visual arts achievement began with 1974 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and continued in 1978. Findings from these assessments provided initiative for similar high stakes, large-scale, state level assessments of visual arts achievement in 1980s (Sabol, 1990, 1994, 1998a; Shuler & Connealy, 1998). However, subsequent NAEP visual arts assessments were not forthcoming. It was not until 17 years later that visual arts were included again as part of NAEP. Only after arts was added to nation's goals as a core subject (U.S. Department of Education, 1994) and Congress stated that the arts are forms of understanding and knowing that are fundamentally important to education (U.S. Congress, 1994, p 2) were arts reintroduced in assessment. Subsequently, assessments were done in visual arts, music, and theater. Dance was not included in 1997 NAEP. Each student who participated in assessment was assessed in one of three arts. The National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) was established to formulate policy guidelines for NAEP. It is responsible for selecting subject areas to be assessed, developing assessment objectives, identifying appropriate achievement goals for each grade level and subject tested, and establishing standards and procedures for interstate and national comparisons (National Assessment Governing Board, 1997). The NAGB divided processes involved in visual arts into creating and responding categories and outlined specific knowledge and skills content for each category in its assessment framework for arts (National Assessment Governing Board, 1997). The NAEP framework was deliberately designed to reflect best practices from field and to be compatible with national arts standards (Music Educators National Conference, 1994; National Assessment Governing Board, 1997). Assessment exercises included authentic tasks that assessed knowledge and skills in creating and responding to visual arts. Independent sets of exercises on 1997 NAEP in art were divided into Creating and Responding blocks. Items in these blocks focused on content knowledge, skills, and processes used in making and responding to art. Measurement of students' Creating and Responding ability also is compatible with national visual arts standards (Music Educators National Conference, 1994), visual arts curriculum development (Sabol, 1994), and visual arts classroom practices. A total of eight blocks were developed including three Creating blocks, two Responding blocks, and three blocks that combined assessment of creating and responding knowledge and skills in visual arts.1 No student completed all blocks of assessment. Students completed either one Responding block and one Creating block or two Responding blocks. In order to measure students' knowledge and skills in creating, students were required to create and work with various media to make visual art. Students showed abilities to communicate in works of art, think of different solutions to visual problems, generate for works of art and design, and use their technical proficiency in realizing those ideas (Persky, Sandene, & Askew, 1998, p. 80). They also were asked to evaluate their own work in written form. Evaluation questions asked students to identify, describe, and analyze important qualities in their work. Responding blocks included exercises in which students viewed works of art representing a variety of cultures, genres, and historical periods. Responding questions focused on students' ability to demonstrate their knowledge of media and techniques, visual organization, cultural contexts of artworks, and how user needs are met with well-- designed functional objects. …

Student preparedness in entry level college mathematics courses has decreased in the past. In order for students to be successful in these courses, early intervention is required. Texas A&M International University (TAMIU) has implemented an early intervention program, the Mathematics Enrichment Program (MEP), which will target freshman students entering College Algebra courses in Spring 2009. This project is part of the STEM Recruitment, Retention, and Graduation program, recently funded by the US Department of Education. This paper will highlight the components of the project, most importantly the extent of the intervention, how the project is planned, and preliminary results.

Mainstream education research and policy is dominated by social science orientations that primarily rely on positivist theories, models, and interpretations of the mathematical competence of African Americans or Blacks (terms are used interchangeably). Contemporary scholarship and national discourse surrounding the education of Blacks often center on the notion of pathology, a view largely supported by deficit perspectives (Martin, 2009a; Stinson 2006). As Martin has pointed out, research and policy is a site where degradation of African American children occurs (Martin, 2009a, p. 1) in part because of the on-going discussions of racial achievement gaps and comparisons to White and Asian American students.An official and public conversation about achievement gaps has been going on at least since 1969 when The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) began reporting racially disaggregated achievement data (see National Center for Education Statistics website at http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/). Most policymakers and researchers use NAEP data to make consequential claims about U.S. students' outcomes - Black students' outcomes in particular. The claims can be consequential because school districts, teachers, and even families and students themselves view the interpretations of the standardized assessments as normative, correlated with intelligence, and generally disconnected from institutional issues and contexts.There are explanations in the literature for why achievement gaps exist. Some researchers point to factors such as inequitable distribution of quality teachers (Adamson & Darling-Hammond, 2012). Others position Black parents negatively, blaming them for placing low value on early education (Jencks & Phillips, 1998). Still other scholars contend that the U.S. does not have an achievement gap at all, but an educational debt (Ladson-Billings, 2006). Mathematics education research and policy continue to use achievement gap language in decontextualized ways despite a growing body of literature that suggests race-comparative approaches position Black students at the bottom of the racial hierarchy of ability (Martin, 2009a, b, c). These approaches do not address issues of identity and power, which are important for decentering the assimilationist perspective in many education policy documents (Gutierrez, 2008). The perspective can be viewed as assimilationist because there is little recognition of the linguistic and cultural resources that marginalized students bring to the classroom or to the discipline of mathematics (Gutierrez, 2008, p. 361). Moreover, there is limited effort by mainstream education research and policy to understand what it means to learn while also being Black (Martin, 2012). Critical Race Theory (Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller, & Thomas, 2000; Delgado & Stefancic, 2012) points out that race and racism are endemic in U.S. society; therefore, it is critical to analyze the intersection at the teaching and learning of and the story of race to interrogate ways race influences Black people's educational experiences and production of mathematical knowledge.The rise in national focus on the achievement of Blacks using state and national summative assessments can be marked by important legal decisions beginning with Brown v. Board of Education (1954), but also the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. What did the education of Blacks look like before these legal decisions? While very little is known about the education of Blacks pre-Brown, there is some documentation of important issues we might find at that intersection of teaching and learning and race during segregation (Russell, 2014). The field also knows that new narratives describing the segregated schooling of Blacks, mainly in the South have challenged the master narrative that reduced all Black schools and students to unilateral inferiority (Anderson, 1988; Siddle-Walker, 2009). …

WHEN EDUCATORS open their Fibber McGee's closets of past reforms, a pile of silver bullets will spill out onto the floor. For at least the past 20 years, the sense of public confidence in public education has been fed by an arsenal of such quick, often creative, but largely unsubstantiated remedies for turning schools and kids around. And the pile became much larger this fall. The highest-caliber bullet of all--the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act--landed on top of the pile. But it was not the only presumed salvation of the public schools to lose some of its luster recently. Collecting data about these failed silver bullets can often tell us more than we've known before. The first National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) report on reading and math scores that fairly reflects changes under NCLB showed essentially that, so far, this silver bullet is pretty much of a dud. Reading scores were flat, and math scores were up only a bit. Despite statements by the Bush Administration that sought to put a happy face on the findings, the NAEP data showed that progress had been better before NCLB became law than it has been since it was enacted. The data also indicate something that few pundits seem willing to acknowledge. Since the passage of NCLB, about four years ago, changes in the demographics of the student population have accelerated, and schools all over the country are feeling the impact of more English-language learners than ever before. It is to the schools' credit that NAEP reading scores--in the early grades, at least --did not go down. Moreover, the very slight improvement in math scores could be attributed partially to the fact that math test items in the early grades, and even to some extent on the eighth-grade tests, do not require advanced reading skills. (Another possible explanatory factor is that the efforts of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics have given us some semblance of national math standards and that these standards have been in various stages of implementation for more than 15 years.) The NAEP data also underscore the accident-of-birth unfairness built into state accountability systems. The erratic performance of students on state measures of achievement, compared to their performance on NAEP, demonstrates that students in some states are being held accountable for much higher levels of performance than students in other states. And no state has made much progress, as revealed in the NAEP scores. Some 20 states claim to have made progress on their own eighth-grade reading assessments between 2003 and 2005, but only three showed any progress at even the basic level on NAEP. And, according to the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, only eight of 25 states that did announce progress on their own fourth-grade reading tests had more than one-third as much progress at the basic level on NAEP. As might be expected, proponents and opponents of charter schools took the very same data and came up with different analyses. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools found them to be making more progress than other schools; the American Federation of Teachers found them to be making less, even after accounting for student-level racial/economic variables. Another silver bullet to land atop the pile of spent ones is the grandiose array of promises made by Edison Schools, Inc. In the immortal tradition of Edward R. Murrow's series You Are There, I was there when Tennessee entrepreneur Chris Whittle announced that he would launch a network of at least 100 new schools that would rival public schools in terms of technology and student achievement. …

Many autism advocacy groups use the data collected by the US Department of Education (USDE) to show a rapidly increasing prevalence of autism. Closer examination of these data to follow each birth-year cohort reveals anomalies within the USDE data on autism. The USDE data show not only a rise in overall autism prevalence with time but also a significant and nearly linear rise in autism prevalence within a birth-year cohort as it ages, with significant numbers of new cases as late as 17 years of age. In addition, an unexpected reduction in the rise of autism prevalence occurs in most cohorts at 12 years of age, the age when most children would be entering middle school. These anomalies point to internal problems in the USDE data that make them unsuitable for tracking autism prevalence.

Currently, more than 250 public schools in the United States are named after Confederate leaders who actively fought to preserve slavery in America. This history, however, is implicitly omitted when their names are emblazoned over the entryway to a school. The current research considers how the use of Confederate names at the school level impacts how individuals construct and interpret both the Confederacy and the history of white racist violence in the South more generally, by linking Confederate naming to racialized punishment outcomes. To do so, we combine data from 65,820 schools in the US Department of Education's Civil Rights Data Collection for 2017–2018 with data on Confederate naming of schools from the Southern Poverty Law Center and use both bivariate and multivariate analyses to examine school characteristics associated with Confederate naming, as well as the impact of Confederate naming on racialized punishment. Results reveal that Confederate-named schools (1) have larger Black populations and (2) are more punitive, especially toward Black students, than non-Confederate schools. These findings suggest the need for Confederate-named schools to be renamed, at the very least, as a preliminary step toward addressing the structural disadvantages producing negative racialized outcomes for Black students.

This year's Bracey Report begins and ends with the item that will continue to dominate education news: No Child Left Behind. TO PRODUCE last year's report required me to sift through 21/2 drawers full of materials. This year, there were 31/2 drawers. Attention is being paid to public education; much of it is not benign. On the education news front, budgets and No Child Left Behind (NCLB) dominated. Because readers certainly know the budget situation in their own states, we begin with NCLB, in two parts. NCLB: The AYP Trap Last year's report said of No Child Left Behind, [It's] a trap, a Trojan Horse . . . choose your metaphor. These days, Americans speak mostly in war images, so I now call NCLB a weapon of mass destruction targeted at the public schools in a campaign of shock and awe, which, given the incredible underreaction of educators, I must conclude is working. I first expressed that sentiment in an article that no one would publish in April 2002. (The article can be found at www.america-tomorrow.com/bracey/EDDRA.) No one seemed to believe it then. They do now. At the April 2003 meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), several employees of the U.S. Department of Education approached me to express dismay over NCLB and over working for an ideologically driven department. These are sad times, indeed. One career staffer declared that NCLB should be renamed: NCL-B.S. As all Kappan readers surely know by now, all schools must test all students every year in grades 3 through 8 in reading and math, with science to be added in 2006-07. Schools must demonstrate adequate yearly progress (AYP). For a school to show AYP, all ethnic groups, all major socioeconomic groups, English-language learners, and special education students must make AYP separately. Ninety-five percent of each group must be tested, and, if any one group fails to make AYP, the school as a whole fails. The official phrase is needs improvement, but headlines across the nation reveal how everyone actually thinks about it: Most Schools in Failing, Los Angeles Daily News, 24 July 2003; State Adds 544 Schools to Failing List -- for Now, Grand Rapids Press, 12 July 2003; It's Pass or Fail; All or Nothing, Raleigh News Observer, 13 July 2003. Schools must continue to make AYP until, by 2014, 100% of a school's students must score In last year's report, I contended that, while the law allowed each state to define proficient, that wouldn't last and that the NAEP (National Assessment of Education Progress) definition of would come to rule. I claimed that this would happen even though the NAEP achievement levels have been rejected as fundamentally flawed by everyone who has ever analyzed them. This includes the General Accounting Office, the Center for Research in Evaluation, Student Standards, and Testing (CRESST), the National Academy of Education, and the National Academy of Sciences. Even so, in his presidential address to AERA, Robert Linn, co-director of CRESST at the University of Colorado and UCLA, made no attempt to provide or use any definition of proficient other than that rendered by NAEP.1 Educational researchers now assume that proficient means NAEP proficient. Secretary of Education Rod Paige has said that he will use the discrepancy between the performance on NAEP and the performance on state tests to shame schools into better performance.2 Certainly those discrepancies will be there for Paige to point to, and in many instances they will be huge. To see why, we need only look at the Princeton Review's comparisons of performance on state tests with performance on NAEP.3 Ironically, the largest discrepancy is for Texas, the home state of Secretary Paige and President Bush. Texas declared 91% of its eighth-graders proficient in math. NAEP says only 24% of Texas students reach that level. Although there are some states where the differences are small and even four states that have tougher requirements than NAEP (Arizona, Louisiana, Missouri, and Maine), the average difference is 23%, and for 22 states, the difference exceeds 30%. …

This chapter gives an overview of the design and the statistical and psychometric analysis methods developed for use in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). For more than 20 years, NAEP has provided information about the educational achievements of students in American schools. In recent years, NAEP has been gaining in prominence and has also been growing bigger and more complex. In 1990, an assessment of individual states was added to NAEP. Also, it is anticipated that the legislation that prohibits NAEP from reporting district and school results may be removed and that NAEP may return to annual rather than biennial assessments. In addition, future assessments will involve a larger number of innovative items, such as questions for which students must produce their own answers rather than selecting among specified options, tasks in which students are asked to read aloud, and portfolios that consist of classroom work produced over a period of time. NAEP’s never-ending growth and evolution continue to provide new technological challenges to its statisticians and psychometricians.

NEWT GINGRICH has suggested that Democrats run their election campaigns on a simple slogan: Had enough? (1) Bush Administration shenanigans and Congressional political ploys so brazen as to be unbelievable--for instance, tying a rise in minimum wage that would benefit millions to a reduction in estate tax that would benefit nation's 7,500 wealthiest families--had me nodding in agreement. Herewith, year in review. DESPERATELY SEEKING STRAWS TO GRASP This law is helping us learn about what works in our schools. And clearly, high and accountability are working. Over last five years, our 9-year-olds have made more progress in reading than in previous 28 combined. So said Margaret Spellings at Child Left Behind Summit in April 2006, referring to gains on National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). (2) In statistical circles, what secretary is doing is called picking. And in this instance, careless and self-serving cherry picking, too. Those last five years Spellings spoke of span 1999 to 2004. For two of those years Bill Clinton was President, and it is possible that all that gain--all 7 points--occurred on his watch. In two of those five years, NCLB did not exist. In 2001-02, NCLB (signed into law in January 2002) would have been in existence only three months before a NAEP assessment--had there been one. And given confusion that reigned from 2002 to 2004 and hostility between states and U.S. Department of Education, it is not likely that much gain occurred then. (Remember that in 2002, then-Secretary Rod Paige accused some states of trying to ratchet down their standards and thus of being enemies of equal justice and equal opportunity and ... apologists for failure. (3) It's surprising he didn't go on to call them terrorist organizations.) Spellings' statement is true only if you start in NAEP's first trend year, 1971. Begin in year of NAEP's previous trend high point, 1980, and gain would be only 4 points. Then, too, there was no gain from 1999 to 2004 for 13-year-olds and a decline of 3 points for 17-year-olds. And why didn't she mention math trends, since 9-year-olds showed a 9-point gain and 13-year-olds a 5-point gain? Seventeen-year-olds, though, showed a 1-point decline. Spellings also said, Scores are at all-time highs for African American and Hispanic students. (4) Well, if she meant reading scores for 9-year-olds, that was true. But it wasn't true for 17-year-old blacks or 13- and 17-year-old Hispanics (13-year-old blacks were at an all-time high by a single point). The statement would have been true, too, in mathematics, except for black and Hispanic 17-year-olds. The NAEP assessment of 2005, though, proved less upbeat. The regular NAEP assessments, ones billed as the nation's report card, change items over time in conjunction with curricular shifts; NAEP that yields trends administers same items at each assessment. In assessment for 2005, fourth-grade reading reached same level as it had at onset of NCLB in 2002, and eighth-grade reading declined 2 points. In math, scores rose 3 points for fourth-graders from 2003 and 1 point for eighth-graders. In reading, proportion of students at or above proficient level was static for fourth-graders at 31% and fell for eighth-graders from 33% to 31%. In mathematics, proportion of fourth-graders at or above proficient rose from 32% to 36%, while for eighth-graders it rose from 29% to 30%. While the Administration scrambled to put best face on numbers and to defend law that some complain forces a test-driven curriculum on classroom, Lois Romano reported in Washington Post, Ross Wiener of Education Trust had a more common reaction: No one can be satisfied with these results. There's been a discernible slowdown in progress since '03, at a time when we desperately need to accelerate gains. …

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract Partnership to Improve Student Achievement through Real World Learning in Engineering, Science, Mathematics and Technology Abstract Through a state-sponsored Math-Science Partnership (MSP) program, elementary teachers in New Jersey are receiving professional development in innovative, research-based, science and engineering curricula; classroom-based technical and pedagogical support; and ongoing coaching and mentoring. Two universities, a science center, and a teacher education institution are collaborating on delivering project services to schools. The program is strengthening the science content knowledge of 56 Grade 3-5 teachers in six urban districts in northern New Jersey. Preliminary findings from the pre and post tests of experimental group teachers indicate that participants significantly increased their content knowledge in specific life science topics and concepts involving the engineering design process. A study between the experimental and comparison group of teachers indicated a significant difference between the achievements attained by the two groups. This paper describes the first year of a three-year effort. Introduction The Partnership to Improve Student Achievement (PISA) project is a New Jersey Department of Education-sponsored Math-Science Partnership (MSP) grant, which derives from a U.S. Department of Education (USED) grant. USED MSP program goals focus on strengthening teacher content knowledge in science and mathematics in order to improve student achievement in these subjects. The involvement of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) faculty at institutions of higher education is a requirement of all MSP grants. The PISA program presents a novel approach to accomplishing MSP goals by integrating the use of exemplary, research-based elementary engineering curricula, engineering explorations and problem-based activities to strengthen teachers’ science learning. An intensive summer institute, followed by in-class mentoring and coaching support, and online help, represent key program interventions. An important component of the project design is the requirement that teachers work in groups on the design of a STEM Learning Module (SLM) that incorporates science, mathematics, and technology toward the solution of an engineering problem. In creating this SLM, teachers engage in professional inquiry related to STEM content, pedagogy, assessment, and curricular resources relevant to the engineering challenge they are implementing or creating. Teachers work collaboratively on developing the module, including identification of student science learning objectives (tied to the district science curriculum and standards), lesson plans, implementation and classroom management plans, and student assessments. The overarching aim of the three-year PISA program is to: (a) demonstrate and institutionalize within participating schools a methodology, supporting curriculum materials, and other instructional resources and strategies to increase student interest, engagement, and achievement in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology and further, to (b) promote a culture of inventiveness and creativity that calls upon students to demonstrate 21st century workforce skills and to apply science and mathematics toward the solution of relevant, real-world problems. Key

Lack of racial diversity remains a persistent problem in medicine, most notably in the field of orthopaedic surgery. In 1999, an analysis by England and Pierce of orthopaedic residents who had been selected for residency programs from 1983 to 1995 found that the percentage of Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans had changed minimally over that 12-year period1. During that time, the rate of Black orthopaedic residents in training never surpassed 3.5%. In the >2 decades that have followed, there has been a continued call to increase recruitment of underrepresented minorities (URMs), particularly Blacks, into orthopaedic surgery2-6. Despite these directed efforts, orthopaedic surgery remains the least racially and ethnically diverse field among both surgical and nonsurgical specialties7,8. Lack of racial diversity correlates with substantial disparities in the culturally competent care of minority patients, with well-documented negative implications9-11. Improving diversity within our specialty is essential to achieving equitable postoperative and functional outcomes in our diverse patient population. While barriers to improving gender diversity have been and should continue to be explored, the profession of orthopaedic surgery must critically evaluate the barriers to recruiting URM applicants, particularly Black applicants. This is essential to help usher in the next decade with a racially diverse, inclusive, and equitable workforce. This article serves as the first in a series exploring the barriers to achieving a diverse, inclusive, and equitable environment for Black orthopaedic surgeons. The focus of the article is to examine the barriers to successful recruitment of Black applicants and provide tangible recommendations for improving racial diversity in residency. What Obstacles Do Black Candidates Face in Matching into Orthopaedic Surgery? The barriers to Black students' pursuit of orthopaedic surgery as a career are both intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsically, Black students assess the career choices that are available to them by evaluating what those in their own communities are doing or are expected to do. In a 2013 article, Hill and Vaughan explored the concept of "paradigmatic trajectories" to explain ways that students self-select out of pursuing surgical specialties12. Black medical students are frequently unable to see, identify, or interact with orthopaedic surgeons who look like them. These students are repeatedly informed about the difficulty of getting into orthopaedics and are denied "experiences of participation," which leads them to being unable to see themselves as orthopaedic surgeons. By contrast, their majority peers often have the opposite experience: they see many available role models in orthopaedics who match their demographic, serve as role models, and provide hands-on experiences. As this scenario is repeated each academic year, the disparity between the number of White and Black medical students choosing to pursue orthopaedics as a specialty increases, a process that, to date, appears perpetual. Extrinsically, the pipeline of minority students to orthopaedic residency positions is filled with detours due to the redirection of minority students to other career pathways. This discouragement begins early for Black students, particularly Black male students, especially in educational environments in which their teachers are White. A study using survey data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002, which was conducted by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics, evaluated how teacher expectations influenced student performance among 6,000 high school students13. It found that there were clear racial disparities in teacher expectations of student performance. For example, the study found that teachers expected 58% of White high school students to obtain a 4-year college degree, but expected only 37% of Black students to do so. Furthermore, when considering these same Black students, White teachers were significantly less likely than their Black colleagues to expect the students to achieve a 4-year college degree. This difference was even more pronounced when the student was a Black male. Ultimately, the study concluded that negative expectation bias contributed to a self-fulfilling prophecy: only 29% of Black students in the study obtained a 4-year degree. Certainly, diminished expectations of Black students may carry similar consequences in higher education. For Black medical students, the lack of early exposure to orthopaedic surgery and the elimination of student-generated stereotypes regarding their potential fit for the specialty are critical roadblocks to increasing applications to residency programs. Schmidt et al. noted that the timing of exposure and student-perceived stereotypes, among other factors, were major determinants in a medical student's decision to pursue surgery14. An early introduction to the field of surgery was particularly important in increasing a student's interest in a surgical career. For those Black students who persevere in choosing orthopaedics, being chosen for an orthopaedic residency program is still problematic. The benchmarks that are used for resident selection are arbitrary at best, and biased and discriminatory at worst. In the 2018 National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) survey of program directors15, 91% of orthopaedic residency program directors cited the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) Step-1 score as the most important factor for selecting students to interview. Membership in the Alpha Omega Alpha (AΩA) honor society was the third most important factor listed, and the Medical Student Performance Evaluation (MSPE) was noted as the seventh factor. Ramkumar et al. confirmed that orthopaedic surgery interview offers for applicants correlated most with AΩA status, the Step-2 Clinical Knowledge score, and the Step-1 score16. This has important implications for URM students. Wijesekera et al. reported that the USMLE perpetuates downstream pipeline disparities stemming from parental education or socioeconomic status, especially for URM students17. Clinical clerkship evaluations and the MSPE have demonstrated a negative bias toward Black students compared with their White counterparts18, and there are implicit differences in the words that are used to describe different ethnic groups19. Boatright et al. reported that Black students were less likely than an equivalent White student to be selected for the AΩA honor society, even after controlling for Step-1 scores, research, leadership roles, and membership in the Gold Humanism Honor Society20. The data reveal that there is inherent bias in the objective measures that are used by orthopaedic surgery programs to vet their applicants. Although the current measures select excellent future orthopaedic surgeons, these measures ultimately favor a specific group, which is defined by Rubright et al. as "a native English-speaking White male U.S. citizen at average age"21 at the expense of applicants who do not fit this mold. What Current Strategies Have Been Implemented to Increase the Number of Black Medical Students Applying into Orthopaedic Surgery? In 2020, racial inequality, health disparities, and social injustice have played a central role in the civil discourse within and outside of the field of medicine. The lack of racial and ethnic diversity in orthopaedic surgery deprives the specialty of the diversity of ideas and lived experiences that can speak to social issues that affect our diverse patient population. Different national organizations have attempted to champion diversity efforts in orthopaedics. The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) has incorporated diversity initiatives into its strategic goals. These goals include understanding and responding to the diversity of the patient population, enhancing the delivery of culturally competent care, and supporting efforts to diversify the profession and the orthopaedic workforce. Despite these efforts, orthopaedic surgery still critically lags behind other subspecialties with regard to increasing the diversity of its surgeon workforce, which speaks to a critical need to further prioritize diversity in orthopaedics through a coordinated multidisciplinary approach. At the 2011 AAOS/ORS (Orthopaedic Research Society)/ABJS (Association of Bone and Joint Surgeons) Musculoskeletal Healthcare Disparities Research Symposium, Dy and Nelson proposed that cross-cultural communication and workplace diversity should be valued by all orthopaedic surgeons and should be championed by the leaders of academic orthopaedic departments2. They suggested that structured collaborative initiatives should be implemented by departmental leadership at each medical school in coordination with female and URM orthopaedic surgeon role models. Furthermore, they recommended that national orthopaedic societies like the AAOS should work in concert with diversity-minded orthopaedic associations such as the Ruth Jackson Orthopaedic Society, the J. Robert Gladden Orthopaedic Society (JRGOS), and the American Association of Latino Orthopaedic Surgeons to recruit and prioritize the mentorship of underrepresented populations into the field of orthopaedic surgery. In tandem with the efforts of the AAOS, mentoring pipeline programs such as Nth Dimensions coach applicants on how to prepare and position themselves as highly qualified applicants into the field of orthopaedic surgery. Nth Dimensions has developed a longitudinal pipeline curriculum that is designed to engage medical students in their first year of medical school. The program has multiple phases that maintain contact after exposure, including webinars, symposia, and an immersive summer internship program, as well as longitudinal mentorship and professional development. The program intentionally exposes students to multiple hands-on experiences through bioskills workshops and physician-shadowing. In addition, Black students are exposed to an extensive network of Black orthopaedic surgeons with a wide variety of lived experiences. From the initial contact through residency completion, the Nth Dimensions "community" reinforces orthopaedics as a viable career. This exposure was found to significantly increase the odds of URM participants applying to orthopaedic residencies by 15-fold22,23. To our knowledge, no other pipeline programs that focus on improving racial diversity within medicine exist with data to support their success. For Programs That Historically Lack Ethnic Diversity, How Can Residency Program Leadership Increase Recruitment of Black Orthopaedic Residents? A study by Adelani et al. recently reported that the number of orthopaedic training programs with no Black residents actually increased from 40 programs in 2002 to 60 programs in 2016, with the worst year being 2011, when 76 programs had no Black residents24. Recently, McDonald et al. surveyed program directors and coordinators on perceived barriers to increasing the diversity of their individual orthopaedic programs25. Nearly 70% of respondents said that the lack of enough URM faculty hindered their ability to recruit URM applicants. Fifty-six percent of programs responded that they consistently ranked URM applicants to match, but these applicants matched elsewhere. Fifty-five percent of programs felt that their programs could be more diverse, but the programs simply did not receive enough applications from URMs. Interestingly, 32% of programs were not specifically trying to recruit URM applicants at all. While pipeline programs such as Nth Dimensions provide a solid foundation for improving the number of Black students pursuing orthopaedics, future strategies need to implement program-level initiatives to further these goals. Orthopaedic residency programs that are affiliated with medical schools should nurture an early interest in orthopaedic surgery and musculoskeletal care among Black and other URM applicants through endorsement of a musculoskeletal education curriculum for medical students. Early exposure to orthopaedic surgery fosters more interest in the field, particularly among minorities and women22,23. Bernstein et al. reported that medical schools that required instruction in musculoskeletal medicine had significantly higher rates of application to orthopaedic residency programs26. This difference was even more pronounced among female and URM medical students. On a broader scale, increasing the diversity of orthopaedic faculty has downstream implications in the growth of diversity in residency programs. Okike et al. reported that URM medical students who attended medical school at institutions with high URM representation among orthopaedic faculty (>8.8%) or orthopaedic residents (>10.5%) were more likely to apply into orthopaedics than those with low URM representation among orthopaedic faculty (<4.0%) and orthopaedic residents (<6.1%)27. We would also submit that simply hiring Black faculty is not sufficient to move the needle toward a more diverse workforce. To improve racial equity and inclusion, there needs to be a concerted effort to support and advocate for Black faculty in leadership roles within orthopaedic departments and on a national level. We also suggest that orthopaedic department leadership become actively involved in diversity-related orthopaedic organizations such as the JRGOS and Nth Dimensions. This offers opportunities to interact with the majority of Black residents, fellows, and faculty within the orthopaedic specialty nationwide, and goes a long way toward improving a culture of inclusion within the field. Nearly every medical school in the U.S. has local chapters of medical student URM groups such as the Student National Medical Association (SNMA) and the Latino Medical Student Association (LMSA). Sponsorship of an SNMA or LMSA meeting by the affiliated orthopaedic department provides a rich opportunity to interact with Black and other URM students and provides exposure to the orthopaedic specialty. This also allows faculty to interact with more Black students, developing critical mentorship and sponsorship opportunities for these students that not only foster a more inclusive environment within that orthopaedic program but develop critical pipelines for future Black faculty recruitment and development. In "Ten Key Steps for Chairs, Program Directors, and Faculty to Serve as Allies During This Racial Crisis," Ross et al. highlighted the importance of developing transparent nationwide metrics on racial diversity in orthopaedics28. This concept mirrors that of the value-based care philosophy that links financial incentives to surgeon performance on a set of defined measures29. The JRGOS has the most comprehensive database of Black orthopaedic surgeons in the U.S. Based on their data, a diversity ranking was created for the 2020-2021 academic year30. Of the 56 orthopaedic residency programs that had Black residents this academic year, the following programs were ranked in the top 5 in terms of the highest percentage of Black residents: Howard University (70%), Tulane University (27%), Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center (20%), New York University (15%), and Stanford University (14%). One argument against ranking metrics such as these is that they could potentially foster competition between programs for a small finite population of qualified Black applicants. However, the counterargument to this would be that the applicant pool is not truly finite. Poon et al. evaluated orthopaedic applicants between 2005 and 2014 and found that 5.7% were Black applicants and 71% were White applicants8. However, during that same period, only 3.8% of orthopaedic matriculants were Black while 74.7% of orthopaedic matriculants were White (an acceptance rate of 46% versus 73%). As established diversity pipeline initiatives increase the number of Black and other URM applicants into orthopaedic surgery, there needs to be an increase in the acceptance and retention of these students among a broader group of residencies. Recruitment of Black and other URM applicants must be an active and sustained effort. Diversity metrics such as the JRGOS rankings allow residencies that lack diversity to objectively compare themselves with more diverse programs on a granular level. However, we would further argue that program-level information on underrepresented populations in orthopaedics should be readily available through national orthopaedic associations such as the AAOS or the American Orthopaedic Association (AOA). Furthermore, programs should perform an objective and critical analysis of negative factors that have impeded the recruitment and retention of Black residents and faculty at their programs. These factors could contribute to the outward perception of a noninclusive, even hostile, environment, which could deter Black applicants from considering a program. Exploring the root causes that impede diversity may not achieve immediate gains in recruitment, but may help prepare a program for future Black applicants. These applicants will eventually recognize concerted efforts by a program for achieving inclusive culture, and they may choose to attend a program that may not historically have been diverse. The successful recruitment of Black applicants into the field of orthopaedic surgery also requires that the resident selection process eliminate unconscious biases in the screening of potential applicants. One means of achieving a diverse selection pool is to modify the screening criteria of potential applicants. Blind screening of potential candidates has been proposed as a way to mitigate racial, ethnic, gender, and medical school bias in the screening process28,31. Fadem et al. found a significant correlation between the income level of a medical student's parents and that student's Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) and USMLE scores for both minorities and nonminorities32. A study evaluating general surgery applicants found that discrete USMLE cutoffs eliminated URM applicants at a higher rate than non-URM applicants33. The concept of "distance traveled" is another screening process that is used in the technology and corporate sectors as a means of mitigating unconscious bias in hiring practices, which have favored more privileged and homogeneous applicants34,35. The "distance-traveled" concept factors in where a job candidate came from and how many obstacles he or she had to overcome to get to where he or she is currently. Recently, medical schools have used "distance-traveled" metrics to admit a more racially/ethnically, culturally, and financially diverse group of medical students while deemphasizing reliance on standardized test scores in screening practices36,37. As the USMLE Step-1 shifts to a pass/fail format from the numerical score format that has been perceived as disadvantageous to minority students38, use of a "distance-traveled" screening measure may allow for the prioritization of candidates from diverse backgrounds who demonstrate higher levels of resilience and "grit," which are considered desirable traits among successful orthopaedic residents39,40. Furthermore, we recommend that all selection committee members at residency programs should complete bias/allyship training prior to the selection process. In a study by Capers et al., investigators evaluated the value of identifying bias in medical school admissions41. All 140 members of the Ohio State University College of Medicine (OSUCOM) admissions committee were administered the Black-White Implicit Association Test (IAT) prior to the 2012-2013 application cycle. All of the groups surveyed, particularly male members and medical school faculty, demonstrated a significant White male preference. The IAT results were released to the participants, with 48% admitting that they were conscious of their individual results when interviewing candidates during the next application cycle. This information resulted in measurable change: the class that matriculated following the IAT exercise was the most diverse in OSUCOM's history at that time. The implementation of comparable bias training programs within orthopaedic residencies may achieve a similar effect. Summary Orthopaedic surgery has the lowest percentage of Black representation of any specialty, and there has been minimal to no improvement on this front over the last 2 decades. As racial and ethnic inequities in America are increasingly highlighted, it is clear that orthopaedic surgery as a field has fallen short regarding diversity. Orthopaedic surgery can improve its racial diversity with concerted effort and the active engagement of future applicants of color. We recommend active recruitment of Black applicants with the utilization of established pipeline programs and organizational resources. Furthermore, strategies to increase the number of Black applicants to orthopaedic residency programs require paradigm shifts in medical students' perception of orthopaedics as a viable career path and strategic preparation of residency program environments for URM-resident recruitment. Most importantly, programs must take a proactive role in creating a safe and fair working environment for their URM residents. Our hope is that these strategic collaborations can contribute to measurable change in racial diversity in orthopaedics over the next decade.

The Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) has been used to document and track an achievement gap between white and minority students in Texas. Some educators have credited the TAAS with fueling a drive to close the achievement gap while others suggest that TAAS scores may be misleading because of factors such as score inflation and a possible ceiling effect. The purpose of this study was to analyze the gap in mathematics achievement for eighth grade students. The study compared TAAS and National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test results to determine if the achievement gap between white, Hispanic, and African-American Students had narrowed between 1996 and 2000. Results indicate that TAAS mean scores increased significantly for all three ethnic groups between 1996 and 2000. Comparison of the TAAS test score frequency distributions for each ethnic group indicated that white students' scores shifted from the middle to the upper portion of the test score range while minority students' scores shifted from the lower to the middle and higher score range. Both white and minority students' TAAS test score distributions were significantly more negatively skewed in 2000 than in 1996. Comparisons between white and minority students' TAAS scores showed that white students had significantly higher scores than either Hispanic or African-American students in both 1996 and 2000. Comparison of mean score differences in 1996 and 2000 indicated that the achievement gap between white and minority students had narrowed. NAEP scores increased significantly from 1996 to 2000 for Hispanic students, but not for white or African-American students. However, test score distribution patterns showed small positive changes for all three ethnic groups. Comparisons between ethnic groups indicated that there were significant differences between white and minority students' scores in both 1996 and 2000. Comparison of mean score differences in 1996 and 2000 indicated that the achievement gap between Hispanic white students had narrowed slightly but that there was no change in the achievement gap between white and African-American students. Analysis of the TAAS test score distribution patterns indicated the likelihood that a ceiling effect had impacted students' scores. The evidence for a ceiling effect was strongest for white students. In 2000, 60.4% of white students had a TAAS score that fell in the top 10% of the score range. In contrast, there was no evidence of a ceiling effect for the NAEP. Mean score gains on the TAAS are only partially substantiated by the NAEP data. Furthermore, there is a very strong possibility that a ceiling effect artificially restricted the 2000 TAAS scores for white students and created the illusion that the achievement gap between minority and white students had been narrowed.

This chapter seeks to examine the impact of two federal policies, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), on educators in the USA during the past decade of reform. NCLB was signed into law in 2002 and is having a profound effect on the education of all students, including students considered at risk for academic failure, such as students with disabilities, students from diverse racial and ethnic minority groups, students from low socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds, and students who are Limited English Proficient (LEP), better known as English Language Learners (ELLs). NCLB “moved the federal government’s role in education from being primarily a source of funding—now about 9% of every public school dollar—to being a major factor in shaping the substance of P-12 curriculum and instruction” (Lieberman, 2008: 1). The most central requirements of NCLB relate to accountability and raising academic expectations. This law mandates that all students (including those from the aforementioned groups) must make adequate yearly progress (AYP). The overall goal is that all students should be achieving reading and math at grade level by the end of the 2013–2014 school year. NCLB establishes that all students must be taught core academic content by teachers who are highly qualified. A 2007 report by the US Department of Education (USDOE) states NCLB requires states to set standards for all teachers to be considered highly qualified and districts to notify parents of students … if their child’s teacher does not meet these ­standards. The requirements apply to all teachers of core academic subjects: English, reading or language arts, mathematics, science, foreign languages, civics and government, economics, arts, history, and geography and the requirements also apply to teachers who provide instruction in these subjects to students with limited English proficiency (LEP) and students with disabilities. (USDOE/www.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/teaching/nclb/execsum.html)

More than 10 years ago, our team—consisting of instructional designers, game developers, science education experts, and researchers—began work on a set of four digital science games and instructional materials for middle-school educators. Collectively called Possible Worlds, with funding from the US Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (Award # R305C080022), and later the National Science Foundation (DRL-1252382), we were motivated by the desire to provide teachers with engaging and easy-to-use resources to help students overcome persistent science misconceptions and gain a deeper understanding of abstract science concepts that can be difficult to visualize. For example, students often struggle to understand the concept that a solid material like plant matter can be made from a liquid (water) and a gas (carbon dioxide). Students (and adults) who cannot imagine processes that take place at the molecular level are likely to hold the misconception that plants “eat” a solid material such as soil and transform that into plant matter, another solid material.