User:AbiL7/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
(Provide a link to the article here.) Racial achievement gap in the United States

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
(Briefly explain why you chose it, why it matters, and what your preliminary impression of it was.)

I chose this article as a sector issue that college access programs attempt to alleviate and hopefully work towards targeting the root cause of education inequality for racial minorities in the United States. The article has a well defined lead section for such a complicated topic and the contents allow for greater exploration of the multifaceted factors involved in exploring the racial achievement gap in the United States.

Evaluate the article
(Compose a detailed evaluation of the article here, considering each of the key aspects listed above. Consider the guiding questions, and check out the examples of what a useful Wikipedia article evaluation looks like.)

The lead section of the article is very well structured, including relevant contextual information about the topic in its first paragraph and then moving on to important historical debates regarding the causes and potential solutions to the racial achievement gap. In addition, it introduces important further complexities of this social issue by briefly touching on political histories and the role of government in contributing to the gap. Lastly, the final paragraph of the lead section includes an objective statement about the impact of the achievement gap on societal factors and continues on to list historical solutions to this structural issue.

The Talk Page is very detailed in the reasoning for their changes and the potential improvements authors can make. I appreciate the diversity of voices that speak up about the way the article presents and labels certain ethnicities, races, and cultures. Editors seem to attempt to be cognizant of the controversies behind this topic of education inequality and also actively try to bring in more data on less covered topics and peoples.

In terms of overall structure, the use of specific organized subtitles help paint a useful picture for greater exploration of the topic. Some sections like "Education Debt" can use more resources and a greater description on how Ladson-Billings has explained this concept in addition to its relevance to the previous discussions of structural and institutional factors. Perhaps incorporating the discussion into a broader political-economic section that leads into the more detailed subtitles. I also noticed that in the covering of cultural factors, there is less information on "Asian American cultural factors" and in general, Asian Americans are underrepresented in this discussion, only presenting the data in contrast to white achievement an Latino Americans and Black Americans. The factors specific to refugees can also use some more resources.

For further improvement, this article can benefit from having an additional section for the role of college access programs under the larger heading of "Efforts to narrow the achievement gap". The article touches upon organizations like Teach for America and the privatization of education that attempts to tackle the issue beyond the institutional level where the government has failed. In addition, under the quantitative data showing long term trends and measurements of test scores, the article can introduce more qualitative studies regarding culturally competent teaching and students' perceptions of achievement and self-identity. This falls under the last section on "Interventions on Non-Cognitive Factors", which is under covered and can benefit from more resources talking about culturally competent teaching and the relevance of education as also an act of healing, i.e. from "Hope and Healing in Urban Education: How Urban Activists and Teachers are Reclaiming Matters of the Heart" by Ginwright, Shawn. The sources have mainly articles and research papers, perhaps adding more literature in the form of sociology books can add more discussion regarding the ethnic studies side of educational achievement.