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For decades, policy makers have treated those living in poverty as helpless and inept. The worse off the neighborhood, the less influence its residents have over their future. Rather than ask what would strengthen their communities, social services conduct “needs assessments” and agencies deliver solutions that seldom work. As the successes of Houston's Neighborhood Centers show, people who live in these communities must determine their own fate.

The conventional wisdom among social scientists is that there is little payoff in investing in troubled teenagers. As the University of Chicago economist James J. Heckman argued in 2011, “we over-invest in attempting to remediate the problems of disadvantaged adolescents and under-invest in the early years of disadvantaged children,” when the potential gains are supposedly the largest. But this consensus is wrong, as we now know from recent scholarship.

For more than a decade, Congress has not been able to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). In the current debate on standardized test scores, one important question is being missed: What kinds of assessments should be used when, how, and for what purposes if we want high-quality learning to occur that prepares students to be critical thinkers, problem solvers, collaborators, and lifelong learners?

By Linda Darling-Hammond and Paul T. Hill | Last month, a highly polarized debate waylaid a House vote on the federal government’s most important education legislation: the LBJ-era Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Known since 2002 as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), it provides more than $13 billion annually to support education for disadvantaged children. Last summer, we were part of two distinct groups of scholars and policy experts that met separately to rethink educational accountability—both motivated by concerns that NCLB’s approach has increasingly undermined school improvement and equity.

Our schools are among the most unequally funded in the industrialized world, with some states or districts spending more than double what others spend per pupil. Money properly spent on the right educational resources for students who need them the most — especially on well-qualified educators and keeping classes at reasonable sizes — can make a huge difference.

The Escuela Nueva (New School) model, introduced in Colombia 40 years ago, is almost unknown in the U.S., despite international accolades for its learning-by-doing approach. Teachers, parents, and students also have a say in how the school is run. While most of the students are poor and live in rural communities, they do as well on reading and math tests as their middle-class urban counterparts. A move is afoot to bring the model here.

On the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress, the average reading and math scores of 8th-grade black boys were barely higher than those of 4th-grade white girls, and Latino boys did only marginally better.  The male adolescents who participated in a program called Match, where teenage students work two-on-one with a math tutor, ended up as much as two years ahead of a control group. Here is why.