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School reform alone can never fully close achievement
gaps
School reforms to close the academic achievement gap
among our nation’s children cannot fully succeed unless supplemented by
reform in the social and economic institutions that affect children’s
ability to learn, according to a WestEd Policy Perspectives paper by
Richard Rothstein, Research Associate at the Economic Policy Institute.
"We exclusively target schools for reform because we wrongly assume that
schools must be the sole cause of persistent achievement gaps," says
Rothstein. "But the achievement gaps between middle and lower income
students, and between black and white students, cannot be eliminated
unless we also tackle the causes of these gaps which lie outside the
schoolhouse door."
Rothstein identifies six areas of reform, in addition
to school improvement, that could help narrow the achievement gap:
- Greater Income Equality: Support higher incomes for
adults working in low-wage jobs to ensure minimally adequate physical
and emotional security for their children.
- Stable, Adequate Housing: Decrease mobility in
lower-class neighborhoods to avoid disrupting children’s learning, and
create mixed-income housing to increase positive peer influences for
poor children.
- School-Community Clinics: Increase access to
high-quality health care to address health problems that impede
learning.
- Early Childhood Education: Provide high-quality
infant/toddler and pre-school programs so that low-income children
enter school ready to learn.
- After-School Programs: Replace excessive television
watching common in low-cost day care arrangements with after-school
programs that can improve children’s physical, social/emotional, and
academic skills.
- Summer Programs: Provide lower-class children with
summer experiences similar to those of middle-class children, such as
recreational reading, organized sports leagues, traveling, attending
camp, and visiting museums.
Funding these reforms would be more effective in
narrowing achievement gaps than concentrating resources solely on
traditional, stand-alone school reform efforts such as smaller class
size and higher teacher pay. As Rothstein says, "Schools, no matter how
good, cannot carry the entire burden of narrowing our substantial, and
growing, income inequalities and social class differences."
A free copy of this Policy Perspectives paper is
available at
www.WestEd.org/reforms
Press release
17 June 2006
http://www.prleap.com/pr/38537/
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