- Details
-
Category: Education (Equality)
-
Created: Tuesday, 30 October 2007
-
Written by Amity Bacon
The roots of school underachievement are a complicated network of poverty, language barriers, unstable student homes and imbalanced public policies.
“Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men — the balance-wheel of the social machinery.”
--Horace Mann, “Father of the common school,” report no.12 of the Massachusetts School Board, 1848.
This fall, nearly 50 million elementary and high school students across America geared up for a school year which, collectively, will cost state and local governments $489 billion, or roughly $10,000 per pupil. The federal government has taken an interest in the inflating price tag with the pending reauthorization of No Child Left Behind. But even federal legislators are hard-pressed to agree upon just why the “great equalizer” is foundering even as dollars pour into the system. The question on everyone’s lips? “Why does the achievement gap persist, and what can be done about it?”
Read more ...
- Details
-
Category: Education (Equality)
-
Created: Wednesday, 21 February 2007
-
Written by PT Editors
Indiana State Representative Gregory Porter on education, poverty and equality.
On the poverty/education link…
Poverty is on the rise in the United States—people are getting poorer. And if people are growing poorer, what does that mean for education? Education is supposed to be the way people lift themselves up out of poverty, but if people are going the other direction, that means we've got a problem. There is a definite disconnect.
Read more ...