Educational Leadership

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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.