Providing Comprehensive Educational Opportunity to Low-Income Students

Posted by on March 05, 2012

What it would take

A recent report by the Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College at Columbia University establishes a legal framework for providing the country’s neediest children with both improved educational resources and other “wrap-around services” — including health care and after-school programs. The report details the cost of providing those services, and projects the long-term return on such an investment. The first white paper (one of five that make up the report) argues that NCLB  “implicitly establishes a statutory right to comprehensive educational opportunity through its stated goal of providing fair, equal, and substantial educational opportunities to all children, and its mandate that all children be proficient in meeting challenging state standards by 2014.” The second paper estimates the annual cost of public policies to narrow the achievement gap through comprehensive educational opportunity to be $11,800 per child in New York City and $10,400 per child in New York State. The authors assume a full program of 18-and-a-half years, offered to children currently eligible for federally subsidized free and reduced-price lunches. Authors of a third paper further estimate those costs would total approximately $4,750 more per child (in New York City) than what’s now being spent in supports for underprivileged children. A fourth paper calculates significant long-term return on this investment through increased high school graduation rates, and the final paper proposes essential standards and resources.

See the report: http://www.tc.edu/equitycampaign/article.asp?id=8219