Opinion: The achievement gap in Southern California’s education system

This inaccessibility due to expenses is one example of the achievement gap. In schools, the achievement gap is a difference in academic performance between groups of students. It arises at a young age, when students are born into a particular social class, race, disability, or gender. 

Although these factors shouldn’t hinder students, they can create barriers like unequal learning advantages, which prevents students from scoring as high as more privileged students on standardized tests. 

In Anaheim, a field trip showed Superintendent Matsuda the persistence of poverty among his students. While taking his students out on a field trip to a World War II US-Japanese internment camp, one student remarked how the camps had better housing conditions than his own home. 

After hearing this, Matsuda reported the incident to his administrators, asking, “How far have we come? Which is not very far, right? If our kids are sleeping in worse conditions than the concentration camp.” In Anaheim, if a student could barely afford housing, how would they be able to buy school materials?

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