Document 6505116

THE CENTRAL OHIO BUSINESS AUTHORITY
30
Publisher: Don DePerro | [email protected]
| OPINION |
DECEMBER 3, 2010
Editorial Board: Don DePerro, Publisher; Dominic Cappa, Editor; Doug Buchanan, Managing Editor
Editor: Dominic Cappa | 614-220-5446 | [email protected]
Advertising director: Donna Kanoski | 614-220-5416 | [email protected]
Marketing director: Melissa Price | 614-220-5436 | [email protected]
Business manager: SuEllen Gabel | 614-220-5502 | [email protected]
Production manager: Rudy Melchor | 614-220-5478 | [email protected]
columbusbusinessfirst.com
| EDITORIAL |
| UPS AND DOWNS |
Our take on the news.
Ohio State President
GORDON GEE fires from
the hip on the prowess
of some college football
programs. What’s next
for Gordo? A spot on
ESPN’s Pardon the
Interruption?
The COLUMBUS BLUE
JACKETS take the retro
path in the design of their
third sweater – a novel
reach for the old-time
hockey look by a franchise
that is a tender
10 years old.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “We have
started an adult conversation that
will dominate the debate until the
elected leadership in Washington
does something real.”
– Erskine Bowles, co-chairman of
the bipartisan commission looking
for ways to reverse the nation’s
deepening debt woes.
columbusbusinessfirst.com
| BUSINESS PULSE |
QUESTION OF THE WEEK: Do you think passenger
pat-downs and revealing body scans are appropriate
airport safety procedures?
Yes, take the
train if you
don’t like it.
55%
No, they’re an
intrusion on
privacy.
45%
Survey response: 299 Results come from an unscientific poll
Business First conducts. This poll was taken Nov. 23-Dec. 1.
Results may not equal 100 percent due to rounding.
NEXT WEEK’S QUESTION: How will you handle
your Christmas gift buying this year?
Register your opinion at columbusbusinessfirst.com
This week’s most-viewed online stories:
fans already making Sugar Bowl arrangements
• Buckeye
hope for slots, another Ohio horse track acquired
• Amid
steps into controversy with BCS comments
• Gee
• Cup O’ Joe, Huntington set for Lazarus building
Answers still sought on how to narrow achievement gap
M
ore than half a century
ago, Chief Justice Earl
Warren observed on
behalf of a unanimous Supreme
Court in Brown v. Board of
Education, “it is doubtful that
any child may reasonably be
expected to succeed in life if he
is denied the opportunity of an
education.”
Yet there continues to be a
widening achievement gap in
America. A 2009 study by McKinsey
& Co. pointed to large achievement
disparities between black and Hispanic children and white youngsters; between poor and wealthy
students; between Americans and
students abroad; and between
students of similar backgrounds
educated in different parts of the
country.
Experts view the disparity
through a broader lens. Linda Darling-Hammond points to an “opportunity gap” in her book, The Flat
World and Education, and defines it
as “the accumulated difference in
access to key educational resources
– expert teachers, personalized
attention, high-quality curriculum
opportunities, good educational
materials and plentiful information
resources – that support learning
at home and at school.”
Opportunity gaps lead to
achievement gaps. They begin at
birth and can last a lifetime. One
in five American children lives in
poverty, and that ratio holds for
children in Franklin County. Failing
schools lie in the poorest neighborhoods. A child in a failing school
has a greater chance to go to jail
than to college. There are more
than 1,700 “dropout factories” nationally – schools where more than
40 percent of the students fail to
graduate. They lack resources and
effective teachers, parent involvement and community attention.
While there are individual model
schools, urban systems of excellence are rare.
Within an urban setting, there is
a web of interconnected structures
that affect and shape the quality
of life, says John Powell, director of
the Kirwan Institute for the Study
of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State
University. He points to “opportunity structures,” which include education, health care, employment,
transportation and civic engage-
viewpoint
LINDA KASS
ment, as essential to an individual’s
success. For children and families
living in poverty, these opportunity
structures are too often inaccessible.
“It is what the system is doing,”
Powell says, “not what people
intend.”
Despite 40 years of reform efforts, America has not succeeded
in raising or changing the trajectory of its poor and disadvantaged
children. “Raising achievement for
children who have had a life of opportunity gaps is like putting them
on (an upward) moving escalator at
the fourth floor and telling them to
go down,” Powell says. “The effort is
just too much.”
A new study of low-income
students in Montgomery County,
Maryland, suggests economic integration is a powerful but neglected
reform tool – more effective than
directing extra resources at higherpoverty schools.
“Today, 95 percent of education
reform is about trying to make
high-poverty schools work,” says
Richard Kahlenberg, senior fellow
at the Century Foundation, the
New York think tank that published
the report. “This research suggests
there is a much more effective way
to help close the achievement gap.
And that is to give low-income students a chance to attend middleclass schools.”
The Century Foundation finding
is consistent with research dating to 1966, when Congress asked
Johns Hopkins University sociologist James Coleman to report on
why the achievement of black students lagged that of white students.
Coleman found that when high
concentrations of poor kids went
to school together, all the students
at the school tended to learn less.
The powerful effect of socioeconomic makeup of a student body
on academic achievement has been
a consistent finding.
Take Champion Middle School
on Columbus’ Near East side.
Rated the worst middle school
in Ohio, it is surrounded by a
neighborhood where students
face gangs, drugs, despair and
failure despite efforts to fix the
school. Federal dollars are in
play to offer change, but the
open question is whether a
school like Champion can overcome the challenges coming
from its streets and homes.
That isn’t to suggest select
schools filled with poor and minority students cannot succeed. A
number of Columbus City alternative and traditional schools are
highly ranked and have waiting
lists. And the Knowledge Is Power
Program, a network of college
preparatory public schools, has a
record of readying students in underserved communities for success
in college and in life. There are 99
KIPP schools in 20 states and the
District of Columbia serving more
than 26,000 students, including
KIPP Journey Academy, a middle
school program in the Near East
side.
The new film Waiting for Superman follows five youngsters and
their parents as they try to escape
neighborhood public schools for
higher-performing public charter
schools. The documentary draws
attention to the failure to improve
education over many decades,
but it doesn’t answer how reforms
that work in some small schools
with challenged populations and
committed parents can work in
enormous urban systems with
many more kids living complicated,
fragile lives.
The key, Powell says, is determining if a model works and if it can
be taken to scale. Clearly, wrestling
with issues of poverty and its consequences is complicated.
“To fix the system to scale
requires disturbing everyone, because isolating these kids and using our few resources to help them
is not economically effective,” he
says. “And while solutions may be
academically sound, they must be
accepted at a cultural and political
level as well.”
This is the first of a three-part series by LINDA
KASS, chairwoman of Champion of Children,
an initiative of United Way of Central Ohio.
SEE GAP, PAGE 30