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Home/ T531 Summer 2012/ Contents contributed and discussions participated by Jenn Renner

Contents contributed and discussions participated by Jenn Renner

Jenn Renner

The Limits of School Reform - NYTimes.com - 10 views

  • Going back to the famous Coleman report in the 1960s, social scientists have contended — and unquestionably proved — that students’ socioeconomic backgrounds vastly outweigh what goes on in the school as factors in determining how much they learn.
  • Yet the reformers act as if a student’s home life is irrelevant. “There is no question that family engagement can matter,” said Klein when I spoke to him. “But they seem to be saying that poverty is destiny, so let’s go home.
  • Demonizing teachers for the failures of poor students, and pretending that reforming the schools is all that is needed, as the reformers tend to do, is both misguided and counterproductive.
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    The article, by Jonathan Mahler, was about the heroic efforts of Ramón González, the principal of M.S. 223, a public middle school in the South Bronx, to make his school a place where his young charges can get a decent education and thus, perhaps, a better life.
Jenn Renner

Education Reform Consensus Grows on Fixing Urban Schools - US News and World Report - 4 views

  • In a land where education opportunity is supposed to be the great equalizer, the average black or Hispanic 12th grader in the United States today has the reading and math skills of a white eighth grader. White parents would be up in arms if their 17-yearold sons and daughters had the cognitive skills of 13-year-olds
  • Spellings and Duncan affirmed that they, too, believed closing the achievement gap was the nation's enduring civil rights challenge. Even in the face of poverty, great schools matter, Duncan suggested.
  • None of the speakers at the rally fell back on tired nostrums to excuse the poor performance of minority students or to justify the need for new spending. Not a single civil rights leader said that disadvantaged students are too burdened by poverty to perform well in school.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • They did not say that the solution to the achievement gap was to shower new money on urban schools.
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    This article makes a great point about an achievement gap statistic. A black or Hispanic 12th grader has reading and math skills comparable to a white 8th grader. I appreciate this article because there are no excuses, just a desire to fix what is broken.
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