The goal of public education in the US is to provide quality education for all students, but the reality is often something else. (this link has pix that the pdf doesn’t have).
[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/In-Connecticut-a-Wealth-Gap-Divides-Neighboring-Schools-The-New-York-Times-1.pdf”]
There are many reasons why this is “the right thing” to do…including maximizing the economic productivity of our citizens. We can’t afford to perpetuate cycles of poverty and lives of dysfunction. In addition, our US ideals of democracy, and equality, require something like a level playing field for educational opportunity.
In practice, most of the time school districts with higher incomes perform better in that task than school districts in areas of lower incomes. Studies suggest there are two components to this disparity…one that higher income demographics correlates to more parental support and greater presence of educational resources of all types.
The other component sometimes, but not always noted, is that children in poverty areas start out in families with low educational achievement, and this is reflected in poor language skills and other “left behind” traits that put these children far behind when they arrive at school. That gap is often huge and seemingly intractable.
Which is why we are always in the midst of hopeful programs that attempt to bridge that “gap” with early childhood learning support. Such as the Children’s Reading Alliance here in Las Cruces, and Head Start, among others. And which is why at PSA we have great hopes for eventual affordable access to the best cloud learning tools for rich and poor kids alike.