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If many so-called education reformers really want to close the student achievement gap, they should direct their fire away from public school educators and take aim at the real issue-poverty. This was the consensus of a panel of policy advocates and academics that convened recently on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. to discuss the impact of poverty on student learning over the past 40 years. The panelists presented data that showed the current state of student achievement and discussed what changes needed to be made to address the needs of students and schools in low socio-economic areas.

Last week's Capitol Hill briefing by three national experts -- Sean Reardon from Stanford University, Peter Edelman of the Georgetown Law Center, and David Sciarra from the Education Law Center in Newark -- brought the realities of poverty's impact on education into stark relief. Mr. Reardon cited findings from his chapter in the recent Russell Sage compendium Whither Opportunity to demonstrate that our record and growing income gaps, combined with a tattered social safety net, fundamentally threaten the American Dream. Current U.S. education policies compound, rather than alleviate, these massive income disparities, putting equality of opportunity even further out of reach for large numbers of low-income American students.

Is educational innovation the way to close the achievement gap? A lot of smart people are hoping it will solve the problem. In the past few months I've been around a lot of innovations. I have watched the Khan Academy (and Sal Khan himself) in action, dug into 'blended learning,' Rocketship and KIPP, and looked at some Early College High School programs. I've been reading about new iPad applications and commercial ventures like Learning.com, and teachers have been writing me about how they are using blogs to encourage kids to write, and Twitter for professional development. In many schools kids are working in team to build robots, while other schools are using Skype to connect with students across the state or nation. I've even watched two jazz groups - one in Rhode Island, the other in Connecticut - practice together on Skype! 'Innovation' per se is not sufficient, of course. We need innovations that level the playing field and give all kids - regardless of their parents' income - the opportunity to excel.

Speaking at a panel on big-city school reform in Washington, D.C. on March 2nd, Mayor Bloomberg repeated a claim he's made before: "We have closed the gap between black and Latino kids and white and Asian kids," he said. "We have cut it in half." It's a claim that has never held up to serious scrutiny.

This paper examines whether teachers in schools serving students from high-poverty backgrounds are as effective as teachers in schools with more advantaged students. The question is important. Teachers are recognized as te most important school factor affecting student achievement, and the achievement gap between disadvantaged students and their better off peers is large and persistent.

The new breed of paternalistic schools appears to be the single most effective way of closing the achievement gap. No other school model or policy reform in urban secondary schools seems to come close to having such a dramatic impact on the performance of inner-city students. Done right, paternalistic schooling provides a novel way to remake inner-city education in the years ahead.

If the past decade was defined by a remarkable expansion of charter schools in Chicago, the next 10 years might ultimately be about accountability. The state last week released detailed performance data for city charter schools for the first time, revealing that many schools from even the most prominent charter networks struggle to close the achievement gap for low-income students.

We describe changes over time in inequality in postsecondary education using nearly seventy years of data from the U.S. Census and the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth. We find growing gaps between children from high- and low-income families in college entry, persistence, and graduation. Rates of college completion increased by only four percentage points for low-income cohorts born around 1980 relative to cohorts born in the early 1960s, but by 18 percentage points for corresponding cohorts who grew up in high-income families. Among men, inequality in educational attainment has increased slightly since the early 1980s. But among women, inequality in educational attainment has risen sharply, driven by increases in the education of the daughters of high-income parents. Sex differences in educational attainment, which were small or nonexistent thirty years ago, are now substantial, with women outpacing men in every demographic group. The female advantage in educational attainment is largest in the top quartile of the income distribution. These sex differences present a formidable challenge to standard explanations for rising inequality in educational attainment.

Focusing on NJ's student achievement gaps misses the broader -- and better -- picture

In today's Washington Post and then on Fordham's site here, Fordham's Mike Petrilli and AEI's Rick Hess write that we are "defining excellence down" by not sufficiently challenging high-achievers. They are concerned that the nation's focus-federal education efforts in particular-will "compromise opportunities for our highest-achieving students." Petrilli and Hess seem to think the federal government is wrong to force schools to have equitable numbers of poor kids in advanced classes because, let's be realistic, the "unseemly reality" that poor kids are way behind and can't hang in tough classes is just a fact. Putting them in tough classes isn't fair to anyone (including our kids who could really reach the moon if these other kids weren't dragging them down).

President Obama's remarks on inequality, stoking populist anger at "the rich," suggest that the theme for his reelection bid will be not hope and change but focus on reducing class disparity with government help. But this effort isn't limited to economics; it is playing out in our nation's schools as well. The issue is whether federal education efforts will compromise opportunities for our highest-achieving students. One might assume that a president determined to "win the future" would make a priority of ensuring that our ablest kids have the chance to excel.

The problem with education in Connecticut is income inequality, not teacher quality. Unfortunately, the plans Gov. Dannel P. Malloy has outlined for education reform - for the most part - take us in entirely the wrong direction. Education in Connecticut is a paradox. Though the National Assessment of Educational Progress consistently ranks the state among the highest scoring for student achievement, we also suffer from the highest black/white and poor/non-poor achievement gaps in the country.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is the gold standard of education testing, shows that D.C. has the biggest achievement gap between black and white students in the nation, double the size of Alabama's. Alabama should not take lessons from one of the nation's lowest performing districts. Charter schools haven't helped other states and they won't help Alabama. Here are the reasons why.

For a short while yesterday - more than I would have liked to - I followed the circus of testimony and tweets about proposed education reform legislation in Connecticut. The reform legislation - SB 24 - includes the usual reformy elements of teacher tenure reform, ending seniority preferences, expanding and promoting charter schooling, etc. etc. etc. And the reformy circus had twitpics of of eager undergrads (SFER) & charter school students (as young as Kindergarten?) shipped in and carrying signs saying CHARTER=PUBLIC (despite a body of case law to the contrary, and repeated arguments, some lost in state courts [oh], by charter operators that they need not comply with open records/meetings laws or disclose employee contracts), and tweeting reformy platitudes and links to stuff they called research supporting the reformy platform (Much of it tweeted as "fact checking" by the ever-so-credible ConnCAN). Ignored in all of this theatre-of-the-absurd was any actual substantive, knowledgeable conversation about the state of public education in Connecticut, the nature of the CT achievement gap and the more likely causes of it, and other problems/failures of Connecticut education policy.

"When looking at changes in testing results between years, many people are (justifiably) interested in comparing those changes for different student subgroups, such as those defined by race/ethnicity or income (subsidized lunch eligibility). The basic idea is to see whether increases are shared between traditionally advantaged and disadvantaged groups (and, often, to monitor achievement gaps)."

More charter schools are outperforming the city's struggling school system than ever before, but huge achievement gaps persist among the top- and lowest-achieving charters, according to 2011 Missouri test score data.

Last week, RiShawn Biddle penned an energetic critique of "Our Achievement Gap Mania" for his e-newsletter Dropout Nation. The impassioned attack echoed some of the more visceral reactions that the article has generated. I'm a fan of robust debate, but I do want to make sure that critics understand what I'm arguing and why I'm arguing it. In that light, it seemed useful to elaborate on three particular counts.

The person who has had the greatest influence on my career in education was not a professor, policymaker or a fellow educator. It was an eleven-year-old girl named Tiffany Lopez, a fifth grader in my class during my second year of teaching in the South Bronx.

Chicago has long been seen as a leader in education reform, and the apparent progress here even helped elevate Arne Duncan from district CEO to U.S. Secretary of Education. But a study released today by the Consortium on Chicago School Research claims there's been no significant improvement in the key area of elementary school reading, and that the racial achievement gap has worsened over the past two decades since the advent of the first phase of school reform.

It's not like we didn't say this would happen. FairTest takes a look at what to anticipate from next week's release of ACT scores.