The Rand Corporation has released a study concluding that SES and not ethnicity or immigration status is most associated with differences in achievement.
Among other factors the study points to the significance of school readiness. ???School readiness??? means that children have acquired the social, mental, and physical skills that prepare them for classroom learning before they start school.
I can’t help thinking about No Child Left Behind and some of the assumptions about who or what is responsible for underachieving students. The Rand study reminds me of the Coleman study from the ’60s. Readiness, resources, and out of school factors account for performance differences. While accountability is always important, it might be relevant to recognize that lots of folks must be held accountable. I do not mean to sound insensitive, but there is a difference between recognizing cause and assigning blame. Parents are a major cause of differences in school performance. Perhaps a better way of recognizing this reality would be to suggest that life circumstances that are associated with parents have a great deal to do with student achievement. Parents often have little control over such life circumstances. However, schools and teachers also have little control over the life circumstances of the students the they teach.
It may be a great idea not to have a high proportion of underachieving students in any given school, but there are many reasons such inequities develop. A voucher system may encourage some of these students to attend other schools and this may be a great solution for the students who leave, but it does little to attract students with high motivation and good academic backgrounds TO these schools. “Recent policy initiatives of some states and school districts to balance school funding across all schools as well as to balance the racial composition of the schools are likely to be worthwhile.”
