Word: gapping
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...retailer, such as an unwillingness to throw money at updating stores without clear evidence of a return, and a firm refusal to play the short-term, quarterly-earnings game that Wall Street so often demands. In April, he brought in a design team led by former Gap executives to freshen up Kmart's clothing lines. "Eddie is relentless and a harder-nosed operator than most people want to believe," says Henry Miller, a leading business-restructuring adviser who worked with Kmart during its bankruptcy. "In point of fact, he is a retailer, in his mind. He will fight...
Similar questions about the achievement gap between blacks and whites are perplexing school administrators in suburban communities across the U.S. Nationally, black students in the class of 2004 scored 104 points lower than whites on the math SAT and 98 points lower on the verbal section. In the past, the academic-achievement gap has been attributed to the economic and social disparities between black kids attending inner-city schools and white kids going to those in the suburbs. In their controversial book exploring the issue, No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning (2003), the follow-up to America...
...harder to explain the gap in places like Ann Arbor, where so many students come from seemingly similar backgrounds. After studying the difficulties of black students in middle-class Shaker Heights, Ohio, in 1997, John Ogbu, an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, posited that academic achievement for those black students was hindered by cultural attitudesmost notably the fear of being labeled as "acting white" if they performed well or studied too much in school. His theories have helped inspire barbed public comments from such prominent African Americans as Bill Cosby, who bemoans negligent parenting, and Barack Obama, Illinois...
Enter Ronald Ferguson, a Harvard Kennedy School of Government professor who canvassed junior high and high schoolers from Ann Arbor and 14 other integrated, middle- and upper-middle-class communities four years ago and developed a more nuanced explanation for the middle-class gap, as well as some specific prescriptions for bridging it. Looking at the affluent districts, Ferguson found that blacks and whites there weren't as homogeneous as they appeared at first glance. For starters, blacks were less affluent. Only 21% of blacks were upper middle class or higher, whereas 73% of whites were. Academically, there were...
Superintendents from the districts Ferguson studied, including Rossi Ray-Taylor, Fornero's predecessor in Ann Arbor, had created a network to share gap-closing ideas even before Ferguson began his research. His findings formed the basis for the efforts Ray-Taylor started in 2002, which Fornero expanded when he took over in January 2003. "Our goal is achievement and opportunity for all students--and I'm serious about it," Fornero says...