Beyond a Test Score

Abstract

The author shares an opportunity gap explanatory framework to assist educational researchers and theorists in analyzing, explaining, and naming educational practice, especially in highly diverse and urban social contexts. The author argues that too much attention is placed on achievement gaps and challenges researchers and theorists to expand their analyses to opportunity gaps. Focusing on opportunity allows researchers to examine the causes of disparities that exist between and among students in schools. Emerging from the author’s own research and from an established body of theory and research, the framework encompasses five interrelated tenets essential to understanding and explaining educational practice related to opportunity: color blindness, cultural conflicts, meritocracy, deficit mindsets and low expectations, and context-neutral mindsets and practices. Implications of the framework point to potential synergy in language and research emphases that can shed light in the educational literature on deeply inequitable systems, processes, structures, policies, and practices that can prevent some students from reaching their full capacity.