With all the talk and media coverage the past year of the achievement gap, I thought it would be worthwhile to explore that subject in-depth and find out what schools in San Mateo County are doing to tackle that problem.

Here’s the package if you missed it Saturday. It includes a profile of a Latino family in Redwood City that is in the middle of this ongoing fight to close the achievement gap, which shows a performance disparity among students of different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds.

I’ll continue taking a look at the achievement-gap issue from various angles as this has become a top priority with local, state and national education leaders.

The state Department of Education has a section on the achievement gap you can check out here.

This week, the department will release results of the Academic Performance Index, a yearly yardstick based on student test scores.

As with other performance measures, the API will likely show that minority and disadvantaged students have improved but that Latinos and African Americans, in particular, continue to lag far behind their white and Asian peers.