Although Wisconsin has made slight improvements in closing racial gaps in education, a recent report showed Wisconsin public schools rank below average in levels of achievement, attainment and opportunity for minority students.

The Education Watch Series report released Tuesday, conducted by the Education Trust, presented detailed state-by-state statistics for educators and policymakers to encourage schools to address racial and socioeconomic divides.

“What we know and what we have long known is that there is a huge gap in achievement and attainment separating low-income students and students of color from their peers,” said Daria Hall, director of K-12 policy for the Education Trust. “This gap is well-documented; however, we have not been making nearly enough progress on closing the gap, nationally or in the states.”

The data, based on fourth-grade reading scores, eighth-grade math scores, high school graduation and college graduation, concluded black students in particular are performing far behind their peers, according to Hall.

Reading scores for fourth graders from 1998 to 2007, for example, showed black fourth-graders nationwide gained 11 points in a standardized testing program known as the National Assessment of Education Progress. Black Wisconsin students, on the other hand, only gained four points.

“What this tells us is Wisconsin has a crisis on its hands,” Hall said. “And it’s the responsibility of educators and policy makers in Wisconsin to learn from those leading states and scale up the practices and policies that have proven successful in other places.”

While John Johnson, communications director for the state Department of Public Instruction, agreed the educational achievement gaps between different groups of students within the state should be addressed, he said the gap is not nearly as significant as the study suggests.

According to Johnson, the sample size of the study was not big enough to make such conclusions about grade school students, though a gap among high school and college students was evident.

“They are snapshots of time with small cell sizes, and then they extrapolate statistically what it might look like for a state,” Johnson said. “The important thing is not to talk about this report or that report or the findings of the national think tank. It’s really to get change in the classroom.”

In an effort to close these gaps, Johnson said the state is focusing money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment stimulus package towards improving Milwaukee school districts.

“We have an opportunity for our largest school district, which has the 12th highest concentration of child poverty in the nation for any urban area,” Johnson said. “We need to come together as a state to work to improve the future lives and the current lives of the students, both in their schools and outside their schools.”