the achievement gap became an especially strong interest for study in the turn of the century, and the early 2000s when a plethora of studies looked at factors such as standardized test scores, presence in class, gpa, enrollment, and dropout rates in secondary and post-secondary education. the problem came in the analyses of the studies which were criticized for looking at race and socioeconomic explanations to explain educational outcome without taking into account others such as s. j. lee, 2005, pang, kiang, & pak, 2004, and rothstein 2004 which provided broad postulations as to why race and ses accounted for varied success. president george w. bush's administration's no child left behind rhetoric of 2001 and 2002 left researchers limited to the type of research they could conduct for educational equity due to a need to appease policy makers among educational stakeholders. according to roderick l carey, word gap researcher, the nclb "mandated objective and quantitative ‘scientifically based' research, which left little room for qualitative research agendas that unpack contextual factors that add nuance to the understandings of how high-stakes accountability is felt and lived by students, teachers, and their families." the rhetoric also posed ideas that placed responsibility of achievement in institutions on their most proximal function oriented members, shifting responsibility to achieve positive outcomes on high-stakes standardized tests nearly entirely on teachers and schools, whilst the difference in achievement was largely believed to be due to factors outside of the classroom. various studies culminated to suggest general and vague underlying problems within specific communities which caused deficit in learning outcomes under this context.