InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies

Addressing the “achievement gap” in academic performance has become prominent in educational reform efforts.   However, too often, outcomes gathered from accountability measures are used to create hierarchies between students’ performance based on gender and race/ethnicity.  In Academic Profiling: Latinos, Asian American, and the Achievement Gap, Gilda L. Ochoa examines how a focus on the “achievement gap,” which she argues gives the “illusion” that inequality is being addressed by shifting the focus to high-stakes testing, hinders both Latina/o and Asian American students by ignoring structural and systemic injustices that “perpetuate hierarchical and binary thinking.”