Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Campaign For Educational Equity Wants $4,230 More Per Student To Close Achievement Gap

Campaign For Educational Equity Wants $4,230 More Per Student To Close Achievement Gap:

Campaign For Educational Equity Wants $4,230 More Per Student To Close Achievement Gap

Campaign For Educational Equity Achievement Gap Ob
Michael Rebell argues that it would take $4,230 more in annual per-student spending to equitably fund services both inside and outside of schools.

Posted: 10/12/11 06:11 PM ET


NEW YORK -- It's been more than a decade since Michael Rebell filed a lawsuit that led to increased school funding in New York. Now, the lawyer and Columbia University Teachers College professor is on to his next crusade: closing the achievement gap by providing services both inside and outside schools.

The achievement gap refers to performance disparities between groups of students from different backgrounds. Rebell's Campaign For Educational Equity recently released five new white papers that offer legal and financial analyses of broad-based educational equity.

The first paper finds:

Current federal and state policies, however, largely ignore the fact that the childhood poverty rate in the United States is 21%, the highest in the industrialized world, and that poverty substantially impedes these children’s ability to learn and to succeed in school.

[...]

In addition to important school-based educational resources like effective teaching,