Connecting Social Disorganization Theory to African-American Outcomes to Explain the Achievement Gap‪.‬

African-American student achievement outcomes have been and continue to be a critical concern for education researchers. Scholars have made strides in their analysis of pertinent factors that explain achievement gaps between African-American and White students such as poverty, family composition, teacher/school quality, and achievement motivation among others (Davis-Kean, 2005; Entwisle &Alexander, 1992; Rankin&Quane, 2002). Moreover, researchers and practitioners have designed interventions to contribute to African-American student outcomes (Hudley, Graham,&Taylor 2007; Reynolds et. al, 2001; Slavin&Madden, 2006) with a goal being to address achievement gaps. Much of the framing of African-American student outcomes centers on what is known as achievement gaps that exist between African-American and White students. Unfortunately, these gaps have remained roughly the same since the 1950s (Roach, 2001) due, partly, to a lack of attention to what Milner (2007) called "unseen dangers" (p. 388) in education research. Unseen dangers, according to Milner are those implicit, hidden, and oftentimes not properly identified factors that are essential to understand when researchers study populations of color and problems that they face such as issues around the achievement gap and outcomes of African Americans. Social disorganization theory, a theory developed in the sociological and criminology literature, can help education researchers address important unseen dangers in studying African-American outcomes and achievement gaps. In this article, I address the following question: How can social disorganization theory explain African-American outcomes and the Achievement Gap by uncovering unseen dangers? In the next section, before explaining how social disorganization theory can assist researchers in explaining African-American outcomes and achievement in education, I address what I mean by the achievement gap and provide an argument for its existence. This will make clearer both the areas for both potential dangers for education researchers and applications of social disorganization theory towards uncovering those dangers.