Question 4: How Can We Close The Achievement Gap?

This is the big question. The selections here emphasize policies supported by evidence. Be forewarned: No One has closed the achievement gap, not one school district. Some have made progress, and some have realized they need to get started. Warning: Taking any of this seriously would mean commitment of energy and resources at levels perhaps several orders of magnitude larger than at present in Tacoma schools.

· A Simple Answer: It is possible that half of the achievement gap can be closed by a massive commitment to early childhood education. Read about it here, in a Harvard Education Letter from July/August 2006. Note this involves families, so it is a piece of complementary learning.

Here are three summaries of broad approaches. All of these summaries include what some call “complementary learning.” They differ in degree of emphasis only.

A Summary (#1) Richard Rothstein, one of the authors assigned to Tacoma school people who attended the Nov. 1-3 program, offers a short (12-page) summary of “Reforms that could help Narrow the Achievement Gap.” They are:

· support the incomes of low-income parents, as the strains of poverty dramatically affect education

· support stable and adequate housing for low-income parents

· support health clinics associated with schools that serve disadvantaged students

· support early childhood education, starting two years before Head Start, in high quality classrooms staffed by teachers and a nurse.

· support after school programs that provide a wide variety of activities.

· there are school-centered changes that help work on the achievement gap, but they contribute a small amount compared to the previously mentioned reforms.

A less comprehensive summary of issues facing at-risk children, focusing on programs more traditionally associated with schools, is available in this report. It was part of the reading packet of the Tacoma group that went to the Harvard program on the achievement gap.

A Summary (#2) Robert Balfanz wrote What your community can do to end its Dropout Crisis for a National Summit on America’s Silent Epidemic, in May of 2007. The policy advice is:

· conduct a thorough inventory of the current pattern of dropouts and the community resources currently devoted to the problem. (The article describes methods for doing each of these steps.)

· develop a dropout prevention, intervention and recovery plan.

· gather the human and financial resources needed to develop, conduct, evaluate and improve the programs aimed at getting kids all the way through graduation.

A Summary (#3) One of the main emphases of the November 2007 workshop was Complementary Learning, which means getting families and communities more involved in education. They have a FINE Network (family involvement network of educators) you can join for free, and they will send you newsletters with toolkit information about making programs happen.

· In brief, schools, families, and community resources (including not-for-profit groups, social service providers, city government, the health department, universities, churches, and more) need to be coordinated and organized to specifically address the needs of students, particularly those who are at-risk.

· We need comprehensive early childhood education programs.

· We need to keep in close contact among all parties during elementary and secondary schools.

· We need to make sure that all families have what they need.

· This goes especially for families with poor single parents or both parents working.

· We need to keep families engaged in out-of-school-time projects.

· This will not be inexpensive. A San Diego school district that has begun to do this is spending $413 per student in its initial efforts (in addition to non-district funders). Some summaries of services needed under complementary learning for children similar to those served by Head Start run into the many thousands of dollars. Some provide estimates of $5,000 per student, at least one more than $12,000 per student. (By comparison, a recent contract with an agency providing Tacoma schools with Head Start services was for about $21 per student in district costs—and the District stopped providing Head Start transportation last year.)

The center of complementary learning is building relationships between parents and schools. Here is a report in the Harvard program participants’ materials, probably the most fact-based report on policy options they were provided—from October of 2007, “A new study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Policy Studies Associates, Inc. It found that regular participation in high-quality afterschool programs is linked to significant gains in standardized test scores and work habits as well as reductions in behavior problems among disadvantaged students. These gains help offset the negative impact of a lack of supervision after school. The two-year study followed almost 3,000 low-income, ethnically diverse elementary and middle school students from eight states in six major metropolitan centers and six smaller urban and rural locations. About half of the young people attended high-quality afterschool programs at their schools or in their communities.” The math achievement measures for students in the afterschool programs for 2 years were 20 percentiles higher for elementary school kinds, and 12 percentiles higher for middle school kids. Other measures of outcomes were reported as well.

President Bush has used the phrase, “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” He used it as part of an argument in support of tests that inform parents of their kids’ progress, and to put pressure on teachers—the underlying assumption is that by rewarding schools (and perhaps teachers) that meet standards, and punishing schools that do not meet standards, we can set up something like a market of incentives regarding education. Another underlying assumption is that we do not have to spend more money to educate our children. You can see where the blame will fall if the achievement gap does not close. Will we call all of those teachers bigots? If all of this research on closing the achievement gap is right, we can predict that NCLB and other schools-based approaches will fail to CAG. Those assumptions about market-like incentives and adequate budgets will turn out to be destructive errors. Mr. President, if that happens, who had the low expectations? Are you sure we want to start accusing such people of bigotry?

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