Futures of School Reform!

"A working group at Harvard called 'Futures of School Reform', concluded that the next frontier of education reform will acknowledge that our system can't "achieve their goal of ‘all students at proficiency’ unless they attend to non-school factors."

The group said this shift would happen "as an outgrowth of the same hard-nosed, pragmatic, evidence-based orientation that for the moment is supporting the unlikely claim that schools can do it alone." Masses of other data provides evidence that the group's conclusion was spot-on. It's time to step up and tackle child poverty and the systemic problems in neighborhoods at the same time we're working to improve teaching and learning. If we address the root causes of the achievement gap while fully funding our schools, just imagine how those scores would skyrocket. But in the absence of that type of concerted approach, chances are we'll see a similar data set years from now—one that tells the same disappointing story."
Chris