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The passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) represents an opportunity for states, districts, and schools to equitably design education systems to ensure that historically underserved students are prepared for the demands of the 21st century. This report details the equity implications of ESSA and provides recommendations for ways in which states, districts, and schools can leverage the new law to enhance equitable educational opportunities and close persistent achievement gaps.
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Community schools serve as a neighborhood hub, where both students and their families can receive medical, dental, and psychological services and other supports in partnership with local organizations. Research shows that such schools can have an outsized impact, including cutting the achievement gap and absentee rates.
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Renewing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was once considered a long shot, but in December 2015, the bipartisan Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) was signed into law. Will federal regulators encourage states to take advantage of the new flexibility provided by ESSA to move teaching and learning purposefully into the 21st century? And will states assure these opportunities are made available to all students, rather than an elite few?
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While more than two-thirds of high school graduates enroll in college, nearly two-thirds of these students arrive on campus unprepared for college-level rigor. Instead of trying to solve this problem together, high schools and colleges typically operate in silos. The situation is entirely different in Long Beach, CA, where collaboration, from pre-k through college, is the watchword.
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By Linda Darling-Hammond and Patricia Gandara | How we can create 21st century learning opportunities for all students? In this op-ed, authors argue that a wide range of structural inequalities contribute to ongoing learning and achievement gaps. They identify three high-leverage policy areas to promote equity and deeper learning: adequate and flexible K-12 funding based on pupil needs, educator standards that focus preparation programs on deeper learning, and more supports and fewer constraints to enable innovative instruction and assessment.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Community schools are an evidence-based strategy to advance equity and reduce barriers to learning by providing the services needed to support student and family well-being.
