Toward Excellence with Equity: An Emerging Vision for Closing the Achievement Gap

For the past 15 years, economist Ronald Ferguson has investigated the myriad factors that combine to create racial disparities in academic performance. This volume brings together Ferguson’s most important papers and most recent thinking on these issues. In language accessible and useful to education practitioners, Ferguson sets forth a wide-ranging and compelling vision for closing the achievement gap.

Beginning with his analysis of the impact of test scores in predicting racial wage gaps, Ferguson has explored how rates of progress in narrowing gaps have varied over the recent decades, the roles played by various school policies and practices, and the importance of lifestyles and informal social processes that play out between children and their parents and peers. He concludes that closing achievement gaps is more urgent today than ever before—and that dramatic success is possible.

Ronald F. Ferguson is a lecturer in public policy and senior research associate at the Wiener Center for Social Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he has taught since 1983. In addition, he has recently joined the faculty at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His research publications cover issues in education policy, youth development programming, community development, economic consequences of skill disparities, and state and local economic development. Much of his research since the mid-1990s has focused on racial achievement gaps, appearing in publications of the National Research Council, the Brookings Institution, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Educational Research Service, and in various other books and journals. Ferguson participates in a variety of local, state, and national consulting and policy advisory activities, including with state and local school districts, on closing achievement gaps. He is the founder of the Tripod Project for school improvement and the faculty cochair and director of the Achievement Gap Initiative (AGI) at Harvard. The AGI is a university-wide initiative to help close the nation’s achievement gaps by supporting new research and connecting research to policy and practice. Ferguson attended public schools in Cleveland, Ohio, later earning an undergraduate degree from Cornell University and a PhD from MIT, both in economics. He lives with his sons, Daniel and Darren, a nephew, Marcus, and his wife, Helen Mont-Ferguson, to whom he has been happily married for twenty-nine years.