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Kan tvärsektoriellt samarbete göra utbildning mer rättvis?
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Det är väletablerad that schools can be credited—or blamed—for only a portion of the variation in student outcomes. In fact, so many other factors make a difference that it is difficult to move the needle on any measure of student performance without taking them into account.
Yet many education policies do just that, mandating “solutions” focused on the limited set of factors that schools can and do control, and then shaming educators or the students themselves when the changes fail to make a major difference.
That’s the conundrum tackled by Our Children Can’t Wait: The Urgency of Reinventing Education Policy in America, a book published in December by Teachers College Press. The book’s scholar-authors, including NEPC Fellow Erica Frankenberg of Pennsylvania State University, take a different approach. Its 17 chapters, edited by Joseph B. Bishop of UCLA, focus on the full range of factors that explain why educational outcomes vary, with White and more affluent students generally experiencing more and better opportunities to learn than their Black, Hispanic, and lower-income peers.
“We expect young people to leave their challenges neatly outside the schoolhouse door,” Bishop writes. Yet those challenges, implicating “policy areas outside of education that often haven’t been linked to an education agenda,” must be addressed in order to close opportunity gaps. He continues:
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This includes health services that can be made more readily available to families in schools and school systems, city transportation planning that prioritizes school routes, preventing student exposure to environmental pollutants and affordable housing strategies that seek to dismantle heavily segregated, under-resourced neighborhoods.
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For example, in the chapter she coauthored with Jennifer B. Asycue of North Carolina State University, Frankenberg suggests integrating schools with a combination of regional, state-level, and federal reforms. Cross-sector collaboration between housing agencies and educators can help low-income families afford economically diverse communities, and encourage the construction of schools in neighborhoods convenient to students from families with different races/ethnicities and incomes.
“Schools and communities are interrelated,” they write. “[T]herefore, a comprehensive and collaborative plan for sustaining integration in both communities and schools is needed.”
Bishop sets forth a proposal to implement the policies featured in the book. He proposes a cycle that includes establishing clear policy goals with input from the stakeholders who will be most impacted, monitoring their adoption, and evaluating the outcomes with an eye toward ongoing improvement.
“An education policy playbook that looks both within and outside the school walls for solutions that begin to dismantle the entrenched forces of systemic racism in our country has never deserved greater attention or focus,” he concludes.
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National Education Policy Center (NEPC), ett universitetsforskningscenter inrymt vid University of Colorado Boulder School of Education, sponsrar forskning, producerar policyrapporter och publicerar expertgranskning från tredje part av tankesmedjors rapporter. NEPC-publikationer är skrivna på ett tillgängligt språk och är avsedda för en bred publik som inkluderar akademiska experter, beslutsfattare, media och allmänheten. Vårt uppdrag är att tillhandahålla högkvalitativ information till stöd för demokratiska överläggningar om utbildningspolitik. Vi styrs av tron att den demokratiska styrningen av folkbildningen stärks när politiken baseras på solida bevis och stödjer ett mångrasligt samhälle som är inkluderande, vänligt och rättvist. Besök oss på: http://nepc.colorado.edu/
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Copyright 2023 National Education Policy Center. Alla rättigheter förbehållna.
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