Closing Achievement Gaps Can Boost Enrollment and Completion

By: Tony Holland (Dean of Instruction Wallace Community College)

Article Summary
Tony Holland, the Dean of Instruction at Wallace Community College, wrote an article
about a year ago addressing ways to close the achievement gap. It specifically focused on
community colleges and how they were going to support their mission which states, ensuring
that millions of diverse and often underserved students attain a high-quality education.
Programs that have been put into place to address the issues of achievement gaps have just
continued to stretch out ineffective teaching strategies. It also focuses on teaching not learning,
in that, as long as the teachers cover all the material they are upholding their responsibility.
According to the article, the student achievement gap mainly exists because of instructional
effectiveness. It was found that if the students had more engagement in classes, it results in
increased attendance, persistence, satisfaction, and preparation for class. It was also found that
the best strategies to close the gap are also the same strategies that could diversify student
population. The main reason the student achievement gap exists because of instructional
effectiveness gaps. As Holland stated, Research consistently shows that teachers using the
most effective active learning and intrusive intervention strategies have minimal achievement
gaps in their classes, if there are any at all. So, instead of focusing on actually making the
population diverse, which could have negative effects, you should focus on making the learning
more effective, which would go ahead and diversify. The success of socioeconomic factors of
our country depends on the community college and should address these issues with a positive
attitude.

Article Rhetorical Analysis

The author of this article is Tony Holland and he is the Dean of Instruction at Wallace
Community College. Therefore, I feel that his argument is well-backed. Through his work
position, he probably has a lot of access to first hand statistics and research. The purpose of the
article was to inform people about the issues of the student achievement gap and strategies to
combat the issues. The intended audience is people doing research projects, higher education
faculty interested in addressing their own achievement gap issues, and people interested in
dynamics of community college learning.