Monday, December 12, 2011

Poverty matters

Excellent op-ed today in the New York Times, pointing out what we've heard before and studies have confirmed again: poverty matters:
The correlation has been abundantly documented, notably by the famous Coleman Report in 1966. New research by Sean F. Reardon of Stanford University traces the achievement gap between children from high- and low-income families over the last 50 years and finds that it now far exceeds the gap between white and black students.
The author lays out the variety of reasons why this continues to be brushed aside (in some cases, by the very people one would hope would be fighting hardest to overcome it), and lays out some things that can, even with the current push to deny the realities of anything outside the school building, be done for children who need the support most.

UPDATE: Deb Meier's latest letter to Diane Ravitch discusses Professor Ladd's paper on this issue (of which her editorial is a summary).

1 comment:

Jim Gonyea said...

The reason poverty is not addressed as a root cause of kids falling behind in education is because with few exceptions our state and national politicians don't care about poor people. Poor people don't contribute to campaigns.