New From The Century Foundation’s Security and Opportunity Agenda

New York City, June 15, 2006 — A new brief from The Century Foundation proposes that the federal No Child Left Behind Act should be revised to enable more low-income students to attend good middle-class public schools—a strategy that has already been successful in raising achievement in a number of local school districts.

“Helping Children Move from Bad Schools to Good Ones” is the first brief in The Century Foundation’s (TCF) Security and Opportunity Agenda series. Written by TCF Senior Fellow Richard D. Kahlenberg, the brief summarizes the challenges related to educating students in schools with high concentrations of poverty; reviews local efforts to address these challenges; and offers a guide for specific changes to the No Child Left Behind Act that would provide the opportunity for more children to attend economically integrated middle-class public schools.

Highlights from the brief include:

• No Child Left Behind sets out the lofty goal of making all public school children—poor and wealthy, black and white—“proficient” in reading and math by 2014. But given a four-year gap in achievement between income and racial groups, many teachers and administrators are at a loss as to how the achievement gap can be narrowed, much less eliminated.

• Middle-class schools are twenty-two times more likely to be consistently high-performing than are high-poverty schools.

• Today, a small but growing number of school districts—from Wake County (Raleigh), North Carolina, to San Francisco, California; from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to LaCrosse, Wisconsin—are pushing a new experiment based on an old-fashioned value: integrating students by socioeconomic status.

• In Wake County , low-income students are doing substantially better than low-income students in other large urban North Carolina districts with concentrated poverty.

• With a few critical changes, No Child Left Behind could provide support for socioeconomic school integration of the type taking place in communities such as Wake County.

• Steps should be taken to change the incentives so that it is easier for students to transfer out of failing schools and into succeeding ones.

• Where individual school districts lack the capacity to offer room at better-performing public schools, NCLB should provide a requirement that interdistrict public school choice options be made available.

The Security and Opportunity Agenda is an initiative that consists of a series of short, engaging publications putting forward policy ideas for addressing the most serious challenges facing the United States . Each brief provides an overview of the nature of the problem to be confronted, a summary of public opinion data about the issue, an explanation of the proposed solutions and evidence that they will work, and an estimate of the costs involved. The series is intended to offer journalists, congressional staffers, and others concerned with current policy debates a concise guide to the problem and a clearly stated idea for a solution. Other briefs in series will include:

• Getting More Bang for Each Health Care Dollar
• Improving Voter Participation
• Strengthening the Economic Security of Americans
• Making the Tax System Fair and Simple
• Fixing the Federal Budget
• Extending Pre-School to Everyone
• Restoring America’s International Credibility
• Preventing the Spread of Weapons of Mass Destruction
• Renewing the Middle East Peace Process
• Reducing America’s Oil Dependence

“Helping Children Move from Bad Schools to Good Ones” and other briefs in the Security and Opportunity Agenda series are available online at www.tcf.org and at TCF’s education policy site, www.equaleducation.org. Richard Kahlenberg is available for interviews. For more information, contact Christy Hicks at hicks@tcf.org or (212) 452-7723.

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