Some schools much better than others at closing achievement gaps between their advantaged and disadvantaged students

Education and Poverty: Confronting the Evidence

Current U.S. policy initiatives to improve the U.S. education system, including No Child Left Behind, test-based evaluation of teachers and the promotion of competition, are misguided because they either deny or set to the side a basic body of evidence documenting that students from disadvantaged households on average perform less well in school than those from more advantaged families. Because...

Racial Segregation and Test - Score Gaps :

Introduction Among the most vexing and persistent issues in American education are the racial segregation of students and the achievement gap between black and white students. With the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954, de jure segregation of schools was prohibited. Nonetheless de facto segregation remains, and recent growth in the nonwhite student population has exacerbated the proble...

Presidential Address: Education and Poverty: Confronting the Evidence

Current U.S. policy initiatives to improve the U.S. education system, including No Child Left Behind, test-based evaluation of teachers, and the promotion of competition are misguided because they either deny or set to the side a basic body of evidence documenting that students from disadvantaged households on average perform less well in school than those from more advantaged families. Because...

Context factors and student achievement in the IEA studies: evidence from TIMSS

Background A review of the literature on how school-level factors were, and still are, used to predict and interpret student performance in some of the IEA studies—i.e., PIRLS, TIMSS, and ICCS—showed that it is quite difficult to find strong associations between school-level Abstract Background: The present study investigates what factors related to the school context influence student achievem...

Do Schools Reinforce or Reduce Learning Gaps between Advantaged and Disadvantaged Students ?