The new wave of school reform now underway rejects the idea that the failure of a huge proportion of poor children in the inner cities is inevitable. School officials usually explain the dismal results by referring to the large concentrations of poor and non-English-speaking students in cities and to the fact that poverty is highly correlated with low academic achievement.Īt a conference on urban education at Brookings last May, sponsored by the Brown Center on Education Policy, scholars and school superintendents agreed that urban schools are due for a massive overhaul. While almost every urban district has some exceptionally effective schools, outcomes for most students and most schools compare unfavorably to those in non-urban districts. In urban schools that enroll high proportions of poor students, performance is appallingly low. POLICY BRIEF #35īy any measure, student performance in the nation’s urban schools is low. The rescue of urban schools entails dismantling entrenched and patronage-driven school board bureaucracies, holding schools accountable for their performance, and encouraging well-planned experimentation with charter and contract schools, and vouchers. To write off these districts’ dismal achievement levels as inevitable is to consign a generation of city youth to lives without prospects or hope. Many educators have come to realize that poverty and language barriers in urban schools are unacceptable excuses for appallingly low student performance.
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