Why Attention Will Return to Non-School Factors

Posted by on May 30, 2011

Where (we hope) it’s all leading

American schools won’t achieve their goal of “all students at proficiency” unless they attend to nonschool factors, write Jeffrey R. Henig and S. Paul Reville in an opinion piece in Education Week. The nation is in denial about this, but the authors project a shift as a result of the same hard-nosed, pragmatic, evidence-based orientation that supports the idea that schools can do it alone. The continuing focus on outcomes and evidence will reveal the limitations of the schools-only mentality, since the no-excuses accountability approach, born in the late 1980s, has now had a long time in the field and failed to raise achievement levels or substantially narrow achievement gaps. In addition, attention to the bottom line and return on investment will expand to critical spillovers among schools, social service agencies, health care, and other policy venues when public-health initiatives reduce community levels of diabetes, asthma, lead-paint exposure, and obesity; attendance rates increase; and evidence shows that school attendance has a strong relationship to student gains. If these cross-sector effects are left out of cost-benefit analyses, the bottom line easily underestimates the return on public investments. Finally, major shifts in information technology and education governance will facilitate a broader-base framing and analysis.

Read more: http://tinyurl.com/439rwml