Thursday, September 28, 2017

Fixing education inequalities will require fixing broader societal inequities [feedly]

Fixing education inequalities will require fixing broader societal inequities
http://www.epi.org/blog/fixing-education-inequalities-will-require-fixing-broader-societal-inequities/

Every serious education research study concludes with a series of recommendations for further research and implications for education policy. Our recent paper comparing skills gaps among kindergartners an "academic generation" apart is no exception. What is perhaps different is how important we think major changes to policies outside the realm of education are to improving the education system itself.

In Reducing and averting achievement gapswe show that there was a large gap in preparedness between high and low social class students who began school in the fall of 2010. Furthermore, this gap changed very little over the prior twelve years. And it's not only a matter of math and reading skills—there are similar gaps in social and emotional skills, which interact with and inform those traditional academic abilities.

We recommend that our counterparts in the field take up questions that arose in the course of conducting this work—like, to what degree do these gaps persist and change as children progress through elementary school and beyond, and what explains the lack of change over the past decade?

The third part of our paper draws on studies of a dozen communities that have embraced a range of strategies to mitigate the impacts of poverty at the district level—including very early support for children and their families, efforts to engage parents as partners in their children's education, pre-K and improved kindergarten transitions, enriching, whole-child curricula, and wraparound health and nutrition services through the K–12 years. Our case studies highlight how feasible, and successful, this kind of comprehensive enrichment and support can be.

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