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Published: January 4, 2007
Improving Children's Chances
Bolstering young people's prospects for success requires stronger links in education from infancy to adulthood.
For the past decade, Quality Counts has focused on the policy efforts states have undertaken to improve K-12 education. But that schooling is just part of a larger continuum of learning opportunities that starts in infancy and progresses into adulthood. And if Americans are to make the most of those opportunities—both as individuals and as a nation—their learning should build on itself at every step along the way. As Isabel V. Sawhill, a co-director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, puts it: “Skill begets skill, and each stage of education builds on skills acquired at an earlier stage.”
Yet in the United States, the historical separation between various levels of education, and the consequent lack of communication and coherence across sectors, means that children and older students are lost at every juncture. Just consider:
• Even before kindergarten, the average cognitive scores of children from the highest socioeconomic group are 60 percent above those of children from the lowest socioeconomic one.
• Fewer than one-third of 4th graders read at the “proficient” level or higher on national tests, and fewer than a third of 8th graders reach that benchmark in reading or mathematics.
• The gaps in reading and math performance between poor, African-American, and Hispanic students and their better-off, white, and Asian peers are roughly two grade levels—or at least 20 points on a 500-point scale.
• Fewer than eight in 10 white teenagers graduate from high school on time with a regular diploma. That figure drops to 52 percent for black students and 56 percent for Hispanic students.
• While some 33 percent of white Americans ages 25 to 64 have at least a four-year college degree, that’s true for only 18 percent of black Americans and 13 percent of Hispanic Americans.
Young children from low-income families perform significantly lower on assessments of literacy and mathematics achievement even before they start kindergarten, based on an analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Cohort. Rather than closing, those differences persist as students progress through school.
*Click image to see the full chart.
Note: Achievement is expressed in standard deviations above or below average
Such statistics cloud the future not only for individuals, but also for the country. That’s because a growing portion of the future U.S. workforce will come from low-income and minority groups that have been least well served by the education system at all levels.
Unless the nation improves the educational prospects of its young people generally, and of its poor and minority students in particular, the United States’ place in the global economy and the strength of a democracy based on an informed, participating citizenry are seriously threatened, prominent Americans warn.
Click on links to view charts.
“Suddenly, Americans find themselves in competition for their jobs not just with their neighbors, but with individuals around the world,” Norman R. Augustine, the retired chairman and chief executive officer of the Lockheed Martin Corp., said in 2005 testimony before Congress.
“How will America compete in this rough-and-tumble global environment that is approaching faster than many had expected?” he asked. “The answer appears to be ‘not very well’—unless we do a number of things differently from the way we have been doing them in the past.”
To do so will require building bridges across the diverse and fragmented system of education and training in the United States—bringing together institutions that traditionally have operated apart.
For that reason, beginning with this edition, Education Week’s annual Quality Counts report will focus on the connections between K-12 education and the other systems with which it intersects: early-childhood education, postsecondary education and training, teacher preparation, and workforce and economic development.
After all, while states tend to treat those policy areas in separate silos, young people themselves experience the system as a continuous—or discontinuous—whole.
Vol. 26, Issue 17, Pages 10-14
Quality Counts is produced with support from the Pew Center on the States.Viewed
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