Sunday, April 22, 2012

How zoning policies affect student achievement - The Answer Sheet - The Washington Post

How zoning policies affect student achievement - The Answer Sheet - The Washington Post:


How zoning policies affect student achievement

This was written by Richard D. Kahlenberg, senior fellow at The Century Foundation. It first appeared on the foundation’s website.

By Richard D. Kahlenberg
Americans value equal educational opportunity, but our system has always undercut that goal with housing, zoning, and school assignment policies that consign low-income students to high-poverty schools where they tend to perform worse.  A fascinating new study by Jonathan Rothwell of the Brookings Institution outlines how zoning policies that limit opportunities for inexpensive housing in more affluent neighborhoods, and school policies that mandatorily assign students to schools largely based on what sort of neighborhoods their parents can afford to live in, conspire to reduce educational opportunity for low-income students.
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Does Congress know reading is fundamental?

This was written by Carol H. Rasco, president and chief executive officer for the non-profit Reading Is Fundamental, the nation’s largest nonprofit children’s literacy organization.


By Carol H. Rasco
Currently there are 16 million children in our nation living in poverty, the highest number in two decades, and in low-income neighborhoods, there is only one book for every 300 children. The most recently reported National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) show that students in the United States continue to struggle with the most fundamental educational skill — reading.
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