Solution #5:
Create the Right
Community Conditions
Boosting teacher and
principal performance in
high-needs schools is a
solution to the achievement
gap that’s hard to fault. But
many urge a broader view
and more resources to
attack the stresses that
contribute to unequal
education, and not
incidentally make it harder to
recruit and retain educators.
dollars has been allocated
to serve 40 schools. At each
location, there will be a
resource coordinator.
Support will span a variety
of services that include early
childhood education, health
care, free meals, and truancy
prevention.
In gentrifying Park Slope,
lessening racial and
economic segregation is the
There are at least two
explicit goal at one district
approaches. One is to make
school. Nearly 75 percent of
sure that high-needs schools Brooklyn Academy of Arts &
and their high-needs
Letters students came from
students get more of their
low-income families seven
needs met with a wraparound years ago, but that
array of services. Or one can percentage has shrunk to
break up the kind of
below 40 percent today.
concentrated poverty that
makes it so much harder to
According to Richard
educate in a building.
Kahlenberg, who has been
researching the issue of
Both methods are being tried. high-poverty schools for over
20 years, student success is
New funding has just been
simply too compromised in
announced for community
“apartheid” environments.
schools in New York City that He was an early proponent of
will tackle a host of issues
teasing out race from class,
closely associated with
and he urges that education
poverty. Fifty-two million
policy move forward by
28
assuring that no students
attend schools with a more
than 40 percent
impoverished population.
He said, “The major problem
with American schools is not
teachers or their unions – but
poverty and economic
segregation. That’s what the
research suggests. It’s what
80 school districts [around
the country] have come to
realize.”
In jurisdictions where a
direct assault has been made
on economic isolation,
student performance has
risen dramatically. For
example, in Wake County,
North Carolina, efforts to
disrupt segregation by wealth
yielded even better results
than the positive results
found in CharlotteMecklenberg after their
school-based programs.
Montgomery County,
Maryland, offers another
example, where students
who were sent to schools
with peers from higherincome families substantially