students.According toAyers (1995) and Kohl (1998), little is known about the effec-tiveness of White teachers with Black student achievement. Most of the case study districts have used creative strategies and funding mechanisms to enhance state programs or fill in holes in pre-K access. Raising the minimum wage to $15 in 2024 would benefit nearly one-quarter of U.S. children (19 million have at least one parent who would get a raise). Parallel gains in Kalamazoo are translating into promising futures for African American girls in that city: these girls are graduating high school at higher rates than their state-level peers, and 85 percent of those who graduate go on to college. 5. Our analyses also document stark disparities in child and family characteristics and other factors that are known to affect school readiness.9 Compared with their high-SES peers, low-SES kindergartners are less likely to speak English at home, to live with two parents, to have been in center-based pre-K care in the previous year, and to have engaged in early literacy practices at home. Parents, on the other hand, may be basing their expectations on family, community, culture, or other factors. 29. Here's how to tilt it back. These data, however, which are from the National Institute of Early Education Research State of Preschool yearbook and pages for each of the states, suggest that increases in quality took place in a small subset of states and did not serve enough poor children to substantially influence these data. In Vancouver and New York City, the whole-child education experience is delivered by full-service community schools (community schools are public schools that serve as hubs for the provision of academic, health, and social services to students and families). A number of districts focus in particular on helping students—many of whom will be the first in their families to go to college—prepare for and make that transition. This involves teachers and students simultaneously collecting and analyzing student learning information to determine where students are and where they need improvement. The gap in 2010 equals the gap in 1998 plus the change in the gap from 1998 to 2010. Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances, Greg J. Duncan and Richard Murnane, eds. These community-level whole-child approaches would alleviate many disparities in opportunity and thus narrow achievement gaps. Family and Community Resource Centers (FCRCs) currently serve 16 of the highest-needs Vancouver Public Schools (VPS) district schools, with mobile and lighter-touch support in other schools and plans to expand districtwide by 2020. The City Connects program in Boston, Massachusetts, provides targeted academic, social, emotional, and health supports to every child in 20 of the city’s schools with the highest shares of low-income, black, Hispanic, and immigrant students. These economic headwinds for low-social-class families are reflected in our data across SES groups. Comprehensive, community-level education strategies that begin addressing children’s needs before kindergarten show promise in narrowing these gaps. Other research has shown that early learning gaps do not go away. She holds a Ph.D. in public policy from the George Washington University and a J.D. It also had less of a negative effect on children’s self-control in 2010 than it had earlier. 1. Fifty years ago, the evidence in the congressionally authorized Coleman Report put a twist on Brown, suggesting that socioeconomic school integration could increase … 11. While the social and emotional skill levels as measured by teachers are similar to the social and emotional skill levels as measured by parents, how teachers assess the skills likely differs from how parents do. Weiss came to BBA from the Pew Charitable Trusts, where she served as project manager for Pew’s Partnership for America’s Economic Success campaign. Authoritative, up-to-date data on the living standards of American workers. “Right now, in many states, schools with the highest-need students receive fewer resources than those serving the most affluent, which translates to less experienced teachers, larger classes, and, ultimately, lower graduation rates and lower achievement levels. Second, these initiatives share little in common with so-called turnaround initiatives that were highly touted in the past decade. 6�D*���=�$��a0��T�f���hɷD����������b`�9����{� ��m See related work on Education, Student achievement, Educational inequity, Children, Economic inequality, Inequality and Poverty, and Early childhood. Better Communities, a presentation published online by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, draws on dozens of sources to present a comprehensive picture of the threats to academic success posed by lack of strong health and the many ways that healthy eating, exercising, and other activities that promote child well-being drive success in school. Because parents are their children’s first and most important teachers, earlier efforts tend to focus on engaging parents and working with parents and children together. But the skills gaps did not increase. Pre-K programs have expanded over the past decade but have done so slowly and unevenly: both access and quality are still wildly disparate across states and overall availability is severely insufficient.24 Home visiting programs (to support pregnant women and parents of infants and toddlers) and quality child care are still in too-short supply.25 Child poverty has increased sharply, as has its concentration, and the schools into which the most disadvantaged children enter face increasing economic and racial segregation but even fewer resources than in 1998 to deal with them.26 In addition, while momentum to enact “Broader, Bolder Approaches” to education is growing, such initiatives are expanding slowly, still reaching too few students, and not gaining steam nearly as quickly as children, and our country, need them to. The 1998 to 2010 change estimates are not significant for math, self-control as reported by teachers, and approaches to learning as reported by parents. Key findings from the report ‘Education inequalities at the school starting gate’ and comprehensive strategies to mitigate early skills gaps, Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy, Economic Analysis and Research Network (EARN), The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility since 1940, Socioeconomic Status and the 25×25 Risk Factors as Determinants of Premature Mortality: A Multicohort Study and Meta-Analysis of 1.7 Million Men and Women, Policy Statement to Support the Alignment of Health and Early Learning Systems. To put this into perspective, if a student is randomly assigned to a teacher whose expectations are 40 percent higher, which is the average difference in expectations faced by … Successful Students. Because an underlying tenet of multicultural education is that all students benefitfrom information about or models of persons with similar racial and cultural backgrounds (Manning & Other investments in young children and their families include outdoor play-and-learn opportunities for parents and their children such as Clay County, Kentucky’s Community Storywalk and Joplin’s Born Learning Trail. Table 1 lists the case study communities and the service areas. See boldapproach.org. It is this measure of relative advantage (the average performance of children in the top fifth of the SES distribution compared with the average performance of children in the bottom fifth) that we are talking about when we refer to “readiness gaps.” Skills measured include reading and mathematics, along with self-control and approaches to learning as reported by both teachers and parents. These increases in turn suggest that critical knowledge about child development and how to nurture it became more widely known in this period and that low-SES parents disproportionately acted on it. lower achievement. They are implementing comprehensive support strategies that seek to compensate at the community level for children’s lack of access to key foundational resources and to reduce poverty-related barriers to effective teaching and learning. Inclusion and achievement: Student achievement in secondary schools with higher and lower proportions of pupils designated as having special educational needs In an effort to identify more effective policy solutions, we also look at how and why performance gaps and children’s circumstances have changed over time. Student achievement measures the amount of academic content a student learns in a determined amount of time. 27. These strategies are often referred to as “whole-child” approaches to education, in reflection of their holistic nature. Introduction Among the factors influencing students’ learning, motivation is thought to be a very important reason for different achievement. Despite the positive trends outlined above—the growing awareness of the importance of the first years of life in child development, increased understanding of the serious impact of child poverty on that development, and the expansion of pre-K programs nationwide—gaps between the school readiness of low-SES children and their more advantaged peers have not shrunk. But even if these interventions were sufficient, integrated, and sustained over time, we would still be far from attaining the level and scale of supports that are demanded: this set of strategies represents, at best, a way to counter some of the consequences of the highly inequitable economic situation that U.S. policy choices have created over the past few decades. Components include enriching curricula and in-class experiences; lessons that are aligned with hands-on out-of-school activities that are available to all students; mentoring and tutoring to ensure strong adult–student relationships; and targeted strategies designed to improve students’ readiness for college, careers, and civic engagement. All these interventions—at both the school and community levels—are critically needed, given significant and persistent early education gaps by social class. These comprehensive interventions are starting to narrow early achievement gaps and boost test scores, increase measures of student well-being, and lead to higher rates of advanced course placement and high school graduation among low-income and minority students. Persistently large achievement gaps between high-social-class and low-social-class children in America, and the disparities in opportunity that drive these achievement gaps, threaten the very notion of the American Dream. For example, fewer low-SES children than high-SES children have access to center-based pre-K programs; therefore, their school readiness is likely to be lower than the readiness of students who do have access to such programs. 137, no. Focus-ing on groups with lower skills levels and on reducing skills disparities within the student population would thus seem to be an efficient strategy for pursuing The fact that this did not occur indicates the influence of other, positive, noneconomic factors. Extensive research has demonstrated that these programs help ensure that children do not suffer the effects of poverty. As to the latter, positive finding, it could be due to parents who are more inclined to participate in their children’s early play and education being more likely to perceive that their engagement has an impact on their children’s skills and thus to report that. Copy the code below to embed this chart on your website. 13. Strategies include early exposure to postsecondary campuses for Joplin and Pea Ridge students; programs to help middle-school students in Joplin, Missouri, and Vancouver, Washington transition to high school; and clubs and specialized courses that teach organizational and social skills to students in Vancouver, Washington, and Montgomery County, Maryland. Using a measure of socioeconomic status (SES) that takes into account parents’ educational attainment and job status as well as household income, we divide the children in each cohort into five SES quintiles or fifths. Note that the pre-K measure is a crude one—it records only whether a child attended a center-based program but says nothing about the program’s size or quality, or about the teacher’s qualifications—so positive impacts of high-quality programs are probably underestimated here, while some negative impacts of poor-quality programs may be muted. The problem of low academic achievement of students in the examinations is one of the most challenging problems that faces students as well as teachers. Privacy Policy • Contact Us. The 12 case studies featured here have employed comprehensive, community-level educational strategies to ensure that more children, especially those who are most disadvantaged, have strong early academic and life foundations; that early gains are sustained and built on throughout children’s K–12 years; and that race- and income-based achievement gaps are narrowed. Phone: 202-775-8810 • epi@epi.org So state pre-K investments are unlikely to have been a significant factor in holding gaps steady.10 Rather, a major factor seems to be a set of personal investments that low-SES parents made in their children. See references in Emma García and Elaine Weiss, Making Whole-Child Education the Norm: How Research and Policy Initiatives Can Make Social and Emotional Skills a Focal Point of Children’s Education, Economic Policy Institute, 2016. The Northside Achievement Zone (NAZ) is a Promise Neighborhood, a designation awarded by the U.S. Department of Education Promise Neighborhoods program to some of the most distressed neighborhoods in the nation. EPI’s research helps policymakers, opinion leaders, advocates, journalists, and the public understand the bread-and-butter issues affecting ordinary Americans. endstream endobj 4103 0 obj <>/Metadata 197 0 R/Outlines 265 0 R/Pages 4092 0 R/StructTreeRoot 278 0 R/Type/Catalog>> endobj 4104 0 obj <>/ExtGState<>/Font<>/ProcSet[/PDF/Text/ImageC/ImageI]/XObject<>>>/Rotate 0/StructParents 0/TrimBox[0.0 0.0 612.0 792.0]/Type/Page>> endobj 4105 0 obj <>stream Since 1979, the total share of income claimed by the top 10 percent of Americans has steadily increased, and the gap between the incomes of the top 10 percent and the rest of the population has widened substantially. Student engagement: African American and Hispanic high school students in Joplin, Missouri, closed the attendance gap with their white peers, with the district’s overall attendance rate rising above 95 percent. *Indicates that while the initiative covers the entire county or region, a portion of the county or region receives more intensive services. Also, as the case studies indicate, some communities are embracing systems of comprehensive enrichment and supports to close skills gaps based on social class and to provide children with a more authentic equality of opportunity. 21. How do taxes and spending work, and where do you fit in? In math, however, the results tell a less rosy story: Student achievement was lower than the pre-COVID-19 performance by same-grade students in … Standardized test scores: Elementary school students participating in Boston’s City Connects program have much higher scores than their peers outside the program in both reading and math on the Stanford Achievement Test as well as on state standardized tests. Bright Futures also provides meaningful service learning opportunities in every school. For the sources of the facts regarding those case studies that were not yet published (Austin, Texas; Kalamazoo, Michigan; Montgomery County, Maryland; and Tangelo Park in Orlando, Florida), see Emma García and Elaine Weiss, Education Inequalities at the School Starting Gate: Gaps, Trends, and Strategies to Address Them, Economic Policy Institute and the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, 2017. Community schools in Vancouver and New York City specialize in outreach and engagement, drawing on parental input to shape school policies and practices and providing parents with opportunities to collaborate. A network of state and local organizations improving workers' lives through research and advocacy. 8. If, for example, women had better access to prenatal care, that would have helped children’s health, and thus their school readiness,11 from 1998 to 2010—but we cannot control for that in our study. For example, some educational activities (such as digital education games) are not included in these metrics because they did not exist in 1998, but these activities likely had an influence on children’s skills development. As a Bright Futures affiliate, Pea Ridge is making good progress toward identifying and meeting students’ basic needs, engaging the community to meet longer-term needs, and making service learning a core component of school policy and practice. For example, the range of talents and needs in a given teacher’s classroom may call for arts and music activities, small-group sessions on healthy eating, training on dealing with bullies, and referrals to mental health providers.18. A composite of reading/literacy activities has a strong, positive relationship with virtually all skills. See, e.g., Shelia Smalley and Maria Reyes-Blanes, “Reaching Out to African American Parents in an Urban Community: A Community-University Partnership,” Urban Education vol. Studies show that when low-achieving students are placed in a class with mostly high-achieving students, their academic performance tends to improve. Socioeconomic status refers to the level of education, income, and professionalism of an individual or group. These poor judgments can be further exacerbated when teachers assess students with Understanding these changes would tell us whether and to what extent strategies to narrow the gaps are working. As these results illustrate, low-SES children continue to enter kindergarten far behind their more affluent peers despite low-SES parents’ increased efforts to compensate for the disadvantages their children face. 22910, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2016; and Economic Policy Institute, The Agenda to Raise America’s Pay, last updated December 6, 2016. This relationship is stable over time for reading and math skills and for noncognitive skills as assessed by teachers (although the influence of reading and literacy activities has shrunk for noncognitive skills assessed by parents, as we explain later). In the last three and a half decades, the majority of total national gains in income have gone to the top 1 percent.1 These trends might be somewhat less troubling if our education system and social safety net were able to help children rise above their birth circumstances, but that has not been the case in recent decades. 4144 0 obj <>stream This report was produced in collaboration with the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education. This is the fundamental premise of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: that until basic or foundational needs—for food, clothing, shelter, health care, and nurturing—are met, higher-order needs, such as the need for complex learning, remain out of reach. Our analysis finds little change from 1998 to 2010 in the gaps in readiness between high-SES and low-SES children. The case studies were produced to illustrate the wide range of “Broader, Bolder Approaches” to education that can be employed. %%EOF For example, the gap in approaches to learning as reported by teachers in 2010 is 0.51 sd (0.63 – 0.12). They also tend to score higher on standardized tests and to graduate at higher rates than their peers in comparable districts. In recent years, a growing number of reports have emerged that some charter schools—which are technically public schools and often tout their successes in serving disadvantaged students—keep out students unlikely to succeed through complex application processes, fees, parent participation contracts, and other mechanisms, and then further winnow the student body of such students by pushing them out when they prove to be academically or behaviorally challenging. And because more and earlier supports are critical to meaningful school readiness, almost all of the 12 districts have gone beyond these pre-K investments to enhance early childhood care and education experiences long before entry into kindergarten and to engage parents in activities that ensure their children are ready for school. Including the controls also narrows the gaps in social and emotional skills, though less uniformly. Providing children and their families with a broad range of supports from birth through 12th grade (and, in some cases, beyond) has helped these districts make progress toward a range of goals. Likely a major reason that relative advantages grew for children in higher-income families is the much greater investments that high-income parents are able to make in their children, including the time these parents are able to spend with their children for leisure and for academically enriching activities.5. Report • By Emma García and Elaine Weiss • September 27, 2017. Policy (and financial) incentives established in recent years have prompted most other schools, in contrast, to focus heavily on a narrow set of academic factors and associated assessments. This change could indicate that these factors no longer capture, to the same extent as they had, what parents are doing to nurture their children’s development, or that other programs or services that are helping children are not included in these metrics. The Tangelo Park Program (TPP) provides cradle-to-college support for all children residing in Orlando’s high-poverty, heavily African American Tangelo Park neighborhood. See Raj Chetty et al., The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility since 1940, NBER Working Paper no. Each year students attend schools that represent a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds. It admits only economically disadvantaged, academically promising students, most of whom are the first in their families to obtain postsecondary education, and it charges no tuition, so every student admitted can afford to enroll and graduates debt-free.). And similar tracking of prekindergartners in Minneapolis’s Northside Achievement Zone (NAZ) finds that NAZ students are 14 percentage points more likely than their non-NAZ peers to be ready for kindergarten. 25. Specifically, this brief argues the following: Interventions to close performance gaps must start early in children’s lives because skill and performance gaps take root before children enter kindergarten and do not go away. 4. Robert Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015); Diane Schanzenbach, Megan Mumford, Ryan Nunn, and Lauren Bauer, Money Lightens the Load, The Hamilton Project, Brookings Institution, 2016; Silvia Stringhini et al., “Socioeconomic Status and the 25×25 Risk Factors as Determinants of Premature Mortality: A Multicohort Study and Meta-Analysis of 1.7 Million Men and Women,” The Lancet, March 25, 2017 (published online January 31, 2017).