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Archive for the ‘Achievement gap’ Category

Evidence Mounts of Lasting Benefits of Early Education

Posted in Achievement gap, Cognitive development, Head Start, K-12, Pre-K to 3, Pre-kindergarten, Research on June 26, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Photo: Alessandra Hartkopf for Strategies for Children

There’s yet more evidence of the long-term benefits of high-quality early education, this time from Michigan’s Great Start Readiness Program, a state-funded pre-kindergarten program for children at risk of school failure founded in 1985 as a limited pilot. It now serves about 30,000 children.

Researchers from the HighScope Educational Research Foundation have been following 338 children who attended Great Start (GSRP) in 1995-6 and a control group of 258 children from similar demographic backgrounds. The children have now graduated from high school, thus yielding valuable longitudinal data, which HighScope recently presented to Michigan’s board of education.

The findings include:

  • Kindergarten teachers consistently rated GSRP graduates as more advanced in imagination and creativity, demonstrating initiative, retaining learning, completing assignments and as having good attendance.
  • Second grade teachers rated GSRP graduates higher on being ready to learn, able to retain learning, maintaining good attendance and having an interest in school.
  • A higher percentage of 4th grade GSRP graduates passed the MEAP [Michigan Educational Assessment Program] compared to non-GSRP students.
  • Significantly fewer GSRP participants were retained in grade than non-GSRP students between 2nd and 12th grades (36.5% versus 49.2% in 12th grade).
  • Significantly fewer GSRP children of color were retained for two or more grades than their non-GSRP counterparts by the 12th grade (14.3% versus 28.1% in 12th grade).
  • More GSRP students graduated on time from high school than non-GSRP participants (58.3% versus 43.0%).
  • More GSRP children of color graduated on time from high school than non-GSRP participants (59.7% vs. 36.5%).

Researchers also estimated that 43.5% of Great Start’s cost was recouped through savings from the reduction in grade retention.

“This simple calculation does not quantify additional savings from reducing school failure and delayed high school graduation, as well as their lifetime effects on earnings and employment and crime reduction,” the report states. “This return could be increased by better targeting of children and better funding per child leading to higher-quality programming.”

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Preschool Helps Bridge School Readiness Gap

Posted in Achievement gap, Research on May 3, 2012 | 1 Comment »

Photo: Alessandra Hartkopf for Strategies for Children

A recent report from the Brookings Institution – “Starting School at a Disadvantage: The School Readiness of Poor Children” – concludes that high-quality early education has great potential for narrowing the school readiness gap between children from families with incomes below the poverty line and children from higher-income families. Of three interventions that researchers examined, preschool programs had the greatest positive effect on school readiness.

The gap researchers studied is large. “Poor children in the United States start school at a disadvantage in terms of their early skills, behaviors, and health,” the executive summary begins. “Fewer than half (48 percent) of poor children are ready for school at age 5, compared to 75 percent of children from families with moderate and high income, a 27 percentage point gap.”

Researchers used the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort to analyze school readiness. (more…)

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Early Warning Indicators Identify At-Risk Students

Posted in Achievement gap, College/career readiness on April 4, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Photo: Alessandra Hartkopf for Strategies for Children

Around the country, states and school districts are instituting early warning systems to identify students at risk of not graduating from high school or not being prepared for college-level work when they do. Although school districts begin collecting data on children in kindergarten, Education Week reports, often these early warning systems start in high school.

In North Carolina, the Charlotte-Mecklenberg district has an early warning system that begins in elementary school.

“Officials in the 141,000-student district are relying on a ‘risk-factor scorecard’ to help them spot children who are in jeopardy of becoming dropouts and then deploy resources to help them change course,” Ed Week reports. “Using high-tech data analytics to examine grades, attendance, course failures, declines in grade point average, and disciplinary incidents, Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s scorecard system, which was put in place during the 2010-11 school year, predicts even after the first few months of kindergarten which students are at risk. District leaders, principals, and classroom teachers are using the information to make decisions about how to deploy resources all across the district. ’This information is very powerful,’ says Scott Muri, the district’s chief information officer. ‘This helps to inform our decision-making process about children, budget processes, and human resources. Decisions at every level can be impacted by this.’”

Here in Massachusetts, (more…)

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The Income-Based Achievement Gap Widens

Posted in Achievement gap, Research on March 1, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Massachusetts snapshot: Achievement gap, by income, third grade reading (Click on image to enlarge)

Mention the achievement gap, and discussion often turns to a gap based on race. Yet the gap between white and black children in the United States has actually narrowed over the last several decades, The New York Times reports, while the gap based on income is widening.

“We have moved from a society in the 1950s and 1960s, in which race was more consequential than family income, to one today in which family income appears more determinative of educational success than race,” Sean F. Reardon, a Stanford University sociologist, tells the Times.

Reardon, in a recently published study, finds that the gap in standardized test scores between affluent and low-income students has grown about 40% since the 1960s. This is double the gaps between whites and blacks, the Times reports. (more…)

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In Quotes

Posted in Achievement gap, Quotes on November 11, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

“We need to deal with some hard truths.  In spite of all of our successes, many students are not enjoying the benefits of a high-quality education. There is still an inescapable correlation between socio-economic status and education achievement, between your childhood zip code and your future achievement.  And hardest of all, some of what we have done in the past isn’t working well enough now and won’t work at all in the future…..   Our current system, enviable as it may be due to your hard work, is still not broad or strong enough to successfully educate children stuck in these gaps. At our current pace, we won’t close the achievement gap until the start of the next century.”

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, Boston, November 9, 2011

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“The Bobble-Head Issue of Education”

Posted in Achievement gap, Cognitive development, Infants and toddlers, Pre-kindergarten, Reading proficiency, Social-emotional development on November 7, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

Photo: Alessandra Hartkopf for Strategies for Children

Cornelia Grumman, executive director of the First Five Years Fund, offered a “playful” way of thinking about early education on NBC’s Education Nation recent panel discussion on early learning. “I do call it the bobble head issue of education. A lot of people nod their heads and say, ‘Oh yes that’s important,’ but I don’t think they really fully understand that this is actually critical to meeting our education goals. If you want to meet third grade reading goals you need to start at birth, not just at pre-kindergarten, age 3 and 4,  but really at birth on for the most at-risk kids,” Grumman said. (View the video.)

“We want to see policymakers, administrators, and politicians actually make political tradeoffs and sacrifices to make sure early education is part of all these conversations.  Whether it’s high school graduation or college completion, early education has to be a piece of that.”

The panel offered a good complement to the Education Nation segment on neuroscience that I wrote about last month. In addition to Grumman, the panelists were: (more…)

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Laying the Foundation for Reading Success

Posted in Achievement gap, Reading proficiency on February 16, 2011 | 2 Comments »

Photo: Kate Samp for Strategies for Children

WBUR-FM’s Sacha Pfeiffer used the occasion of the filing of An Act Relative to Third Grade Reading Proficiency as an opportunity to talk with Strategies for Children board member Richard Weissbourd about laying the foundation for literacy in a state where 37% of third graders read below grade level. Among children from low-income families, 57% lag in reading.

Weissbourd and Pfeiffer talked about the importance of language development – through talk and reading aloud — as the precursor of literacy. They talked about the importance of strong teachers well versed in reading instruction (more…)

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Examining the Achievement Gap in MA

Posted in Achievement gap, Reading proficiency on February 15, 2011 | 1 Comment »

Gov. Patrick (Photo: MassINC)

WORCESTER — MassINC, the Nellie Mae Education Foundation and the Urban Initiative at UMass Dartmouth recently hosted a conference — Learning for Growth: The Gateway Cities Education Summit –   that explored education issues facing 11 mid-sized cities across the commonwealth. The mayors or city managers of 10 of the 11 cities were there, along with Secretary of Education Paul Reville, superintendents, other education leaders, legislators, funders, policymakers and advocates. Governor Patrick, in a keynote address, expressed concern about the state’s persistent achievement gap and directed Reville to work with the Gateway Cities.  “Being first in the nation is a good start,” Patrick said. “Being first in the world is where we need to go.”

One highlight of the conference was economist Andrew Sum’s presentation, “Educational Attainment and the American Dream in Massachusetts’ Gateway Cities.” Sum directs the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. (more…)

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Ready to Serve?

Posted in Achievement gap on February 7, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

Gen. Shalikashvili

Three-quarters of young Americans are not qualified to apply for the military, a Pentagon official told a congressional hearing in 2009 – because they are physically or mentally unfit, have a criminal record or lack a high school diploma. To General John M. Shalikashvili, US Army (Ret.), former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, poor education is the major culprit. And the solution lies in expanding children’s access to high-quality early education.

“The situation is so serious that nearly 200 retired generals and admirals are calling on Congress to consider major educational reform, with a special emphasis on increased investments in high-quality early education, Shalikashvili writes in a recent op-ed column in USA Today. “Why early education? Because research shows that these high-quality programs are the most cost-effective way to provide children with the skills they need to succeed in school and later in life. (more…)

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Smoothing the Path from Pre-K to Grade Three

Posted in Achievement gap, Pre-K to 3 on December 7, 2010 | 2 Comments »

Photo: Kate Samp for Strategies for Children

CAMBRIDGE — I spent a few hours one Sunday dropping in for a few jam-packed sessions of the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s four-day Pre-K-3rd Institute. I’ll give an overview and write about one session today and write about another in my next post.

Aligning early education with the primary grades is an idea that’s gaining an increasing number of adherents around the country. It means building a coherent continuum of learning that goes much farther than easing the transition between early education and kindergarten. It includes curriculum, assessments, family engagement, instruction and professional development.

One piece of evidence of the interest in the subject was the lecture hall at Harvard Law School, where the sessions I attended were held. It was filled with 105 people in 15 teams from 13 states. (more…)

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