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Help for Closing Achievement Gaps
The National Education Association’s Priority School Campaign (http://
neapriorityschools.org) offers resources schools can use to help close income-related achievement gaps. The campaign’s website links to free guides and
reports, activities to increase parent engagement, assessments of classroom
culture, suggestions for reaching specific minority groups, and more. (Go to the
Successful Student Resources section at http://neapriorityschools.org/successful-students/resources.)
Check out the downloadable 68-page guide, CARE: Strategies for Closing
the Achievement Gaps. The guide describes skills that teachers of low-income
students need to effectively teach their students and suggests activities teachers
can use to make classrooms culturally competent, promote student resilience,
and engage struggling learners.
Other helpful poverty-related freebies include a Pocket Guide to Preventing
Dropouts and a PDF titled Ten Key Strategies for Building Better Partnerships.
Relevant Reads
No Citizen Left Behind
by Meira Levinson (Harvard
University Press, 2012)
In 1998, Meira Levinson had an
epiphany. As a teacher at Walden
Middle School in Atlanta, Georgia,
whose student body was 100 percent
black and poor, her school’s rigorous curriculum was
centered on black culture, and her students were engaged
and inspired. When the school was trounced by one of
the district’s two majority-white schools in the National
Academic League Quiz Bowl, Levinson realized she was
doing her students a disservice by allowing them to “live
entirely in a black world in which their peers, relatives,
neighbors, ministers, radio stations, and even television
programs had identical cultural and historical referents.”
Levinson describes what transformations are needed
in schools and what those transformations look like in
practice.
“We can’t transform American society—which is what it would take truly to empower my students from Walden—
simply by transforming opportunities for one kid at a time.
Instead, I am convinced, schools need to teach young people
knowledge and skills to upend and reshape power relationships
directly, through public, political, and civic action, not just
private self-improvement.” (p. 13)
PageTurner
World Spin
Starting Early
In Quebec, Canada, the ministry of education
plans to allow 4-year-olds from underprivileged
families to attend school full-time. The initiative
is an attempt to curb the province’s high dropout
rate: 36 percent of its students leave school without
graduating, and most of these students come from
poor families. Starting in September, the program
will be offered on a voluntary basis to the parents of
1,200 preschool children, with the eventual objective
of reaching 8,000 preschoolers.
“The saddest are the children who cry when we get out early for a snow day
because they won’t get lunch.” —Christy Felling, p. 5