Look Beyond the Classroom To Narrow the Achievement Gap
A new report prepared by the Economic Policy Institute’s Leila Morsey and Richard Rothstein was released last week explaining how poverty in all its forms impacts the achievement gap.
“That students’ social and economic characteristics shape their cognitive and behavioral outcomes is well established, yet policymakers typically resist accepting that non-school disadvantages necessarily depress outcomes. Rather, they look to better schools and teachers to close achievement gaps, and consistently come up short.
“This report describes how social class characteristics plausibly depress achievement and suggests policies to address them. It focuses on five characteristics for purposes of illustration:
- parenting practices that impede children’s intellectual and behavioral development,
- single parenthood,
- parents’ irregular work schedules,
- inadequate access to primary and preventive health care,
- exposure to and absorption of lead in the blood.
“These are not the only characteristics that depress outcomes, nor are they necessarily the most important. This report makes no judgment about the relative importance of the many adverse influences on child and youth development. Parental unemployment and low wages, housing instability, concentration of disadvantage in segregated neighborhoods, stress, malnutrition, and health problems like asthma are among other harmful characteristics…”