All Blog Posts by Tian Carney

This is the third post in a Pass the Chalk series on the term "achievement gap."

There is a gap, yes, but not an achievement gap. More like an opportunity gap. With the right resources, there is no gap. Resources do not have to be material things such as money for proper textbooks. The best resource for a student is a teacher.

There are two types of teachers in the world, a teacher who cares about their students’ performance and a teacher who could care less about students’ performance. I was fortunate to have gone to a KIPP middle school where the teachers never underestimated us. The majority of the students at KIPP: Nashville when I attended were African Americans from North and East Nashville. Teachers knew our potential when we didn’t. At KIPP, we didn’t have any math textbooks, but that didn’t stop us from learning in our Math class. We didn’t have a proper library, but that didn’t stop our English teachers from sectioning off a quarter of their classroom for a ‘mini-library’ so we could still read books.

Photo by Eggsalad77 via WikiCommons