History of IDEA
Jeannie Oakes, Founder and Former Director
Youth Voice in School Finance
NEW REPORT: Los Angeles' road to A-G for all
Without Dollars and Sense Powerpoint
Past Educational Opportunity Reports
International rankings that reformers ignore: The Children Left Behind
- 08-26-2011
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Blog by Larry Cuban/Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
If there is one drumroll that most Americans recognize it is the familiar chord reformers have played for three decades: U.S. students score perform poorly compared to other countries in math, science, and other academic subjects. The familiar thrum drives the foot-tapping rhythm that reformers have used again and again to show that Shanghai, Seoul, Bangalore and Singapore graduates will out-innovate and out-compete U.S. ones. So the drumbeat over international rankings drumbeat gets played repeatedly. Largely ignored by many current reformers, however, is the 2010 United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) report: The Children Left Behind. Playing off the name of the law that President George W. Bush signed in 2002, the title refers to inequality among children in rich societies. The data in the UNICEF report (PDF CHILDREN LEFT BEHIND) challenge the assumptions President Bush and bipartisan policy elites believed were unassailable when passing the legislation. That is, public schools can reduce racial and economic inequality by extending opportunity to succeed in schools for those on the lower rungs of the social ladder. (more...)
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