Other Topic Reaction

I have been writing a literature review for a Math Education course, and I focused my research on the mathematics achievement gap between different socioeconomic and racial students. The gap itself has developed over the past 40 years really, and widened up until the late 1980's. Since then, the gap on a overall scale has stabilized with only isolated increases or decreases. These isolated incidences are in regional areas or in certain states. I was mostly shocked at how little research material there is on this subject. There's material regarding the achievement gap as a whole, but not as much as I thought there would be about mathematics. Typically, african-american students have less access to calculators, higher order thinking lessons, advanced courses, and properly trained teachers than their white counterparts. Most of my findings dealt with a research study done between 1992 and 2000 that concentrated results of classroom performance and standardized test scores of 4th, 8th, and 12th grade students from 34 states. These results showed the gap to be about 30 points different overall, and very little change in these between the states. There was a study done in a school district in Texas that showed black students as having 66% less of a chance to have a math teacher with either an undergraduate focus in mathematics or license in mathematics.
All of this was pretty startling to me. I did not realized we weren't making any real progress in this area. There are ideas about how to reform systems to help. Add funding to get access to better technology is the one written with the most frequency. There was a study performed to see if group counseling would benefit. If you would like to know if it does, please get back to me, I have to read and add that section to my review. It would be interesting to see if the test could be redone from 2000 to 2008, and see if there is any change. The program has the data available, we would just need the researchers who studied the data to look at the new test period.