Steve Cohen: From Closing the Achievement Gap to Closing the Opportunity Gap
Guest post by Steve Cohen.
On Monday, when teachers headed back to classrooms, 15,000 other educators descended on San Francisco's upscale Union Square hotels for the American Educational Research Association (AERA) annual meeting.
Feeling a tad overwhelmed by 2,400 sessions, I braved my way to the Westin St. Francis where an audience of about 250 gathered for a session based on the just-released book Closing the Opportunity Gap: What America Must Do to Give Every Child an Even Chance in School It proved to be a wise choice. Judging from the audience's response to the session, it seemed to reasonably represent a direction that most other AERA meeting goers would like to follow to improve American education.
Here's the SparkNotes version: The kids who come to school with less get less from school. Closing the achievement gap with high-stakes, test-centric teaching combined with low resources, few opportunities and a lack of support has failed. The best way out is to close the mushrooming opportunity gap, create more equitable opportunities and gauge how well states and districts are doing to create those opportunities. Achievement follows from opportunities to learn.
The book's editors, Kevin Welner and Prudence Carter, plus five of the 17 Opportunity Gap chapter authors -- Christopher Tienken, Harvey Kantor, Linda Darling-Hammond, Bob Lowe and Patricia Gandara -- were on hand with mounds of evidence on how we need to reboot: how to go from the proverbial Education 1.0 with a focus on
On Monday, when teachers headed back to classrooms, 15,000 other educators descended on San Francisco's upscale Union Square hotels for the American Educational Research Association (AERA) annual meeting.
Feeling a tad overwhelmed by 2,400 sessions, I braved my way to the Westin St. Francis where an audience of about 250 gathered for a session based on the just-released book Closing the Opportunity Gap: What America Must Do to Give Every Child an Even Chance in School It proved to be a wise choice. Judging from the audience's response to the session, it seemed to reasonably represent a direction that most other AERA meeting goers would like to follow to improve American education.
Here's the SparkNotes version: The kids who come to school with less get less from school. Closing the achievement gap with high-stakes, test-centric teaching combined with low resources, few opportunities and a lack of support has failed. The best way out is to close the mushrooming opportunity gap, create more equitable opportunities and gauge how well states and districts are doing to create those opportunities. Achievement follows from opportunities to learn.
The book's editors, Kevin Welner and Prudence Carter, plus five of the 17 Opportunity Gap chapter authors -- Christopher Tienken, Harvey Kantor, Linda Darling-Hammond, Bob Lowe and Patricia Gandara -- were on hand with mounds of evidence on how we need to reboot: how to go from the proverbial Education 1.0 with a focus on