Schools for Tomorrow Blog

The new Profiles of Success study that got some good ink today is notable in a couple of respects.

First, it reinforces what we already know about what makes schools work for low-income kids. I suppose a less charitable way of saying this is that the report offers nothing new, but there’s great value in hammering home these points time and again until they begin to sink in where it matters.

Second, the study demonstrates just how hard it is to close achievement gaps. Only 39 of the roughly 1,750 public schools in Colorado have demonstrably closed achievement gaps in some grades for three consecutive years. That’s just over 2 percent –  pretty lousy odds.

The study finds that schools closing the gap are engaging in a common set of practices, or have common attributes. Among them are a culture of high expectations and accountability, targeted assessments and intensive use of data to guide instruction, individualized support for struggling students, stable and consistent leadership, small learning communities, and so forth.

We’ve heard all these before, and for good reason: They work. But it takes exceptional leadership, in place for many years, to make these things happen.

I was happy to see that one of the common attributes of these schools was an economically integrated student body. In fact, the study

found that no elementary or K-8 school qualified that had more than 70% of their enrollment made up of free or reduced lunch students. For middle and high schools, no school with more than 45% free or reduced lunch enrollment qualified for our study…

…the fact that no schools qualified for our study that had higher concentrations of economically disadvantaged students, indicate the difficulty involved with closing the achievement gap when there is no enrollment balance in terms of student economic background. Instead, our work indicates that having a more balanced mix of students is more desirable.

And one of the study’s recommendations echoes what I have been advocating for many years now:

Districts can create enrollment policies that encourage economic integration through
choice. For example, in places where school choice exists and the number of applicants
exceeds available slots, schools can weight the admissions lottery process in order to ensure that a mix of students from various socio-economic backgrounds can attend. Districts can also purposefully target locations or create programs for new schools that will draw a mix of students from different socioeconomic backgrounds. APA’s data demonstrates that students who are eligible for free or reduced lunch do well in such settings and other studies have come to similar conclusions.

 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 at 11:50 am and is filed under Achievement gaps, Integration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.