A broader and bolder approach uses education to break the cycle of poverty

Posted by on November 13, 2011

Bold assertions don’t change the evidence

In Phi Delta Kappan magazine, Pedro Noguera writes that while it might seem encouraging to claim poverty isn’t an obstacle to higher student achievement, the evidence does not support this. Over 50 years, numerous studies — some of which Noguera cites and elaborates — have documented how poverty and related social conditions like lack of health care, early childhood education, or stable housing affect student achievement. Bold assertions that all children can achieve while ignoring outside-of-school challenges is a poor basis for public policy, in Noguera’s view. In contrast, the community schools movement demonstrates how service organizations have partnered with schools in high-poverty urban areas to address the social needs of children. Noguera highlights a program in Newark, N.J. called the Broader, Bolder Approach (BBA), now operating in seven schools with school-based interventions. Initiated two years before the arrival of Facebook money, the BBA combines research-based education strategies with school-based social services and after-school programs to increase schools’ capacity to respond to endemic issues in the social and environmental context. Clearly, Noguera says, it’s too early to hold up the BBA strategy as an unqualified success. But we must accept the obvious: School reform can’t ignore the effects of poverty on children’s lives or on the performance of schools.

Read more: http://www.kappanmagazine.org/content/93/3/8.full