In October 2005 I moved to Oxford, England, with a Rhodes Scholarship to pursue a doctorate in education. I came to investigate the British education system and consider how it might improve our understanding of the achievement gap between white and minority students in the United States—why it exists, and how to close it. My interest in the topic is far more than an academic exercise, however. The impact of the achievement gap is all around me—it came into Room 13 each day when I was a teacher, it shows up at my church on Sundays and it always attends family gatherings. I grew up with the achievement gap, a disquieting obstacle that I managed to overcome, but one that I cannot ignore.

While Oxford is a long way from my family's home in Maryland, the attitudes and ideas that sustain the achievement gap are never far away. I recently stood in a university hallway talking to a fellow American classmate (I'll call her Sarah). The conversation started innocently enough when I suggested that students need teachers who can demonstrate a solid knowledge of the subject matter they teach. Sarah sharply disagreed. "I don't really believe that teachers should come into the classroom assuming they have all the knowledge to give to the students," she said. "I believe in a more constructivist approach where teachers can learn the information they're teaching alongside the students."   

I cringed as I pictured myself learning long division "alongside" the fourth graders I taught during my two years as an elementary school teacher in the rural South. The conversation continued along these lines for another hour and a half; by the time Sarah suggested that it was fairly simple to tell early on that some children just weren't cut out for college, I was ready to leave. "My cousin went to drama school instead," she said. "Some kids just aren't that academic. You speak as if going to college is the only way to be successful." I thought again about my predominantly poor, minority, 9-year-old students and wondered how many of them would have been labeled "not that academic." Furthermore, how many of them would have had access to a drama school? Wal-Mart and catfish factories were more likely outlets for the ‘non-academic' students in Indianola, Mississippi.

As my blood pressure rose rapidly, I made one last attempt: "Have you ever noticed," I responded, "that those children who are labeled early on as 'not so academic' seem to be disproportionately from minority backgrounds?"

Sarah shrugged off my retort. As far as she was concerned, I had brought race into the conversation unnecessarily. "There are plenty of white students who aren't that academic either," she answered. I decided to continue our conversation another day.  

Unfortunately, this was far from my first confrontation with low expectations for minority students. I attended a private prep school in Washington, D.C., for middle and high school, a decision involving great sacrifices of finances and time on my parents' part and social sacrifices on my own part. My middle and upper class, majority-white school looked nothing like my neighborhood, my church, or my extended family. I soon realized that the education I was receiving looked nothing like that of my friends in local public schools.  

While I was coming home with three to four hours of homework, many of my friends were able to complete their assignments in class. By the time I started geometry in the 9th grade, my public school peers were more than a year behind. My foreign language teachers challenged me as well; by eleventh grade, I was reading Sartre and writing essays on existentialism in French.  

As my educational experiences diverged from those of my friends, unsurprisingly, so did our aspirations. We all had professed a desire to attend college and even participated in a college fair our freshman year. But four years later many didn't go on to college and even fewer ultimately graduated with a college degree.  

After high school I left for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a full scholarship. I decided to major in English and pursue education in my spare time, looking at the education world from as many perspectives as I possibly could. In the summer after my freshman year I worked in a year-old charter school, Amistad Academy, that educated predominantly black and Latino students in New Haven, Conn. Amistad addressed the achievement gap with extended school days, individual homework help in study halls, and a school ethos that promoted hard work, respect, community building, academic achievement, and enthusiasm.  

I was struck by the large amount of additional work that was required to help these students, many of whom lagged far behind academically, and I marveled at an entire school that was wholly and openly devoted to eliminating educational disparities. As I watched these dedicated teachers work nights, weekends, and summers to help struggling students, however, I wondered how sustainable this commitment could be. How many teachers would be willing to make such great personal sacrifices for their students and how long they could maintain that intense level of dedication? I left Amistad without an answer, but with a greater respect for the sheer amount of work required to close the achievement gap.  

After returning to UNC I continued to investigate the complicated education world, witnessing administrative and leadership challenges in a local school district and seeing the business side of things at the New Schools Venture Fund. I decided that a career in education policy would best allow me to address the systemic educational disparities facing so many of my peers.  

I hesitated, however, to pursue graduate school for education policy without having taught myself. I had spent enough time in classrooms to recognize that what teachers did could not be taken lightly. I had seen the tensions that existed between teachers and policymakers and realized that any policy work I did would be significantly enhanced if I had actually experienced the implementation of the ideas I wanted to study. Rather than simply advocating for high standards, I wanted to be responsible for setting them for my own students. In search of another perspective, I chose to teach in the rural Mississippi Delta through Teach For America.  

I began in the fall of 2002, just as the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act were being implemented. Given the previous year's test scores, we were told our school would have been "in need of improvement." The label told us nothing we didn't already know. A few of my fourth graders had come to me reading at a pre-primary level—struggling with Dr. Seuss—while my few "advanced" students were reading just below grade level. We spent a significant portion of 4th grade learning multiplication tables. When I visited home for the holidays, I was challenged by a Washington Post article about 4th grade students in wealthy D.C. suburbs who were mastering long division by Christmas. Only four years into their primary education and my children were already significantly behind; it was not going to be an easy task to help them catch up. As their teacher, it became my primary goal. 

These are the students who came to mind when my Oxford classmate Sarah discussed children who were "not so academic." If Michael is two grades behind in math, does that mean he is no longer college-bound? If Alyssa is reading at a first grade level, but has a flair for singing, does that mean we should push her toward choir and ignore her inability to read? Clearly not. I came to school each morning believing that my students had the capacity to learn every skill, fact, and strategy taught to the 4th graders on the wealthier, white side of the tracks. If my students later chose not to pursue college, it would not be because I didn't work long hours to help them gain the skills they would need to get there.  

I won't pretend that external circumstances didn't affect my students. Room 13 absorbed the aftershocks of students who were arrested for assault, hurried out of their homes in the middle of the night because of impending drug raids, and moved to a different town to escape sexual abuse. The school itself provided its own challenges, which I duly noted as I used personal funds to pay for photocopies because I had no access to a school copier. I taught to the accompaniment of a leaky roof which distributed its rhythmic notes in buckets strategically placed around my classroom. In the face of these very real challenges, I realized how crucial dedication, support, and training were to teachers' ability to provide their students with the skills they desperately needed.  

After two years in the classroom, I was ready to see things from a new angle. I came back to Washington, D.C. for a summer internship at The Education Trust, where I saw how advocacy for closing the achievement gap played out in Congress and in the national media. Then I left again to start my master's degree in Education Policy and Management at Harvard's Graduate School of Education (HGSE). Many of my colleagues there shared my passion for helping disadvantaged students learn. But while I ran into few classmates like Sarah, a number of others disagreed with my perspective in a different way, suggesting that societal factors like poverty and broken families were too great for schools to overcome. The implication seemed to be that we should all throw our hands in the air and give up.  

I quickly tired of those arguments as I thought back to my classroom and the many teachers who had dedicated their lives to teaching their supposedly uneducable students. Was it really fair to ask those students to wait for health care, housing, employment, and family structures to improve before offering them an excellent education? Perhaps that argument had its place in sociology departments, but in departments full of educators and education researchers, it seemed to make more sense to focus on supporting educators in the field with the resources they needed instead of telling them their work was futile.  

A course on educational testing at HGSE opened my eyes to the inherent fallibility of many of the tests currently in use for high-stakes accountability decisions—the same tests that often define the depth and breadth of the achievement gap. But my classroom experience reminded me of the benefit those tests provided when I simply could not give extensive, personalized assessments to every child. Rarely did standardized tests reveal shockingly new information; they often simply confirmed the qualitative observations I had already made. This was only one example of my heavy reliance on my time in the classroom as I developed my views on education policy at HGSE. I was all too aware of the mediating role of the teacher in implementing education policy, and how real-world educational practice can be very different from legislation so painstakingly laid out on paper.  

Since arriving in Oxford, I've continued to focus on this other kind of gap—the distance that separates teachers, policymakers, and researchers in their common goal of improving education for minority students. Having been involved in each of these areas, I find it frustrating that these wells of incredible expertise often exist with little confluence of effort. I recently abandoned the ancient Oxford libraries and mounds of academic reading to attend a meeting of community leaders, teachers, and a few academics in London focused on the education of black students in British schools. I was struck by the fact that no one was talking about increasing diversity of school types, whether phonics or whole language methods should be used to teach reading, or whether schools should have increased autonomy—all high-profile topics in the British education policy world. 

Instead, teachers shared anecdotes of colleagues who focused more on praising their black students' good behavior instead of detailing their academic progress. The student teachers were concerned that their preparation focused too much on how to teach the mandatory National Curriculum without any attention to issues that might arise in multi-cultural classrooms. One individual noted that she had seen black students consistently encouraged by counselors to take the least-challenging academic courses, no matter what the student's previous performance. I thought back to the relatively emotionless academic lectures I had attended in Oxford which focused on the quantitative data on educational disparities in Europe. A glaring discrepancy existed between the issues the teachers viewed as problematic, the numbers the researchers focused on, and the concerns the government chose to address.  

Teachers, researchers, and policymakers each have a piece of the puzzle needed to close the achievement gaps that plague so many minority students. Yet instead of widespread collaboration, discord often abounds. Policymakers decry a lack of research that tells them "what works," researchers criticize what they see as the policymakers' myopic or uninformed priorities, and teachers suffer from either a dearth of useful research or mandatory policies that don't appear to work in their classrooms. Much of this conflict seems to arise from a lack of effective communication between the groups. We recognize the benefits of being multi-lingual in our increasingly connected world, yet we cannot even understand the dialects spoken by each other in the much smaller sphere of education.  

Having participated in education from many different standpoints, however, I am convinced that a sustained partnership between those making policies, those conducting research, and those teaching our children could address the achievement gap more effectively than any one group could alone. We all have something to teach, and we all have much to learn.