Distance to 100
= "focuses on “the gap between 100% proficiency for all students and [their] current performance levels.” Rowe believes that such an approach would reveal the common causes that prevent students of all skin colors from achieving basic benchmarks of academic performance". [1]
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"Ian V. Rowe questioned our education system’s single-minded focus on closing performance gaps between ethnic groups. Since racism is frequently invoked as the sole cause for such disparities, other approaches are largely ignored even though decades of effort aimed at lessening these gaps have failed. Rowe writes:
In my view, the multi-decade obsession with closing achievement gaps by certain categories has done something even worse: ushered in a mono-causal type of thinking that crowds out the ability to identify solutions across categories. If one believes systemic racism is the sole or primary cause of racial disparities, then a tendency of that conclusion is to identify a narrow universe of solutions focused on race as well. But that incomplete set of solutions has clearly not worked.
Rowe proposes an alternative approach that he calls “Distance to 100” which is not primarily concerned with closing gaps between students with different skin colors, but rather focuses on “the gap between 100% proficiency for all students and [their] current performance levels.” Rowe believes that such an approach would reveal the common causes that prevent students of all skin colors from achieving basic benchmarks of academic performance."