Great set of links to research documenting how poverty correlates with low academic achievement. Disadvantaged children start school less prepared, attend schools that are chronically under-resourced, experience family vulnerability and instability due to economic factors, and suffer harsher discipline which tends to shunt them into the schools-to-prison pipeline. These are all out-of-school factors that stack the odds against children from low-income families. The point is to remove or mitigate as many of these as possible through enriching early childhood with stimulation, placing them with the most experienced teachers, fully-funding the schools, ensuring a safety net exists for families, and replacing "zero-tolerance" discipline rules that disproportionately target low-income and/or non-white children for suspension with "restorative justice" approaches to pro-social behavior.
Schools Matter: Krash Course #8: Putting Together the Poverty/Education Puzzle
www.schoolsmatter.info
This space explores issues in public education policy, and it advocates for a commitment to and a re-examination of the democratic purposes of schools. If there is some urgency in the message, it is due to the current reform efforts that are based on a radical re-invention of education, now spearh…
