THE CENTRAL OHIO BUSINESS AUTHORITY 30 Publisher: Don DePerro | [email protected] | OPINION | DECEMBER 3, 2010 Editorial Board: Don DePerro, Publisher; Dominic Cappa, Editor; Doug Buchanan, Managing Editor Editor: Dominic Cappa | 614-220-5446 | [email protected] Advertising director: Donna Kanoski | 614-220-5416 | [email protected] Marketing director: Melissa Price | 614-220-5436 | [email protected] Business manager: SuEllen Gabel | 614-220-5502 | [email protected] Production manager: Rudy Melchor | 614-220-5478 | [email protected] columbusbusinessfirst.com | EDITORIAL | | UPS AND DOWNS | Our take on the news. Ohio State President GORDON GEE fires from the hip on the prowess of some college football programs. What’s next for Gordo? A spot on ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption? The COLUMBUS BLUE JACKETS take the retro path in the design of their third sweater – a novel reach for the old-time hockey look by a franchise that is a tender 10 years old. QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “We have started an adult conversation that will dominate the debate until the elected leadership in Washington does something real.” – Erskine Bowles, co-chairman of the bipartisan commission looking for ways to reverse the nation’s deepening debt woes. columbusbusinessfirst.com | BUSINESS PULSE | QUESTION OF THE WEEK: Do you think passenger pat-downs and revealing body scans are appropriate airport safety procedures? Yes, take the train if you don’t like it. 55% No, they’re an intrusion on privacy. 45% Survey response: 299 Results come from an unscientific poll Business First conducts. This poll was taken Nov. 23-Dec. 1. Results may not equal 100 percent due to rounding. NEXT WEEK’S QUESTION: How will you handle your Christmas gift buying this year? Register your opinion at columbusbusinessfirst.com This week’s most-viewed online stories: fans already making Sugar Bowl arrangements • Buckeye hope for slots, another Ohio horse track acquired • Amid steps into controversy with BCS comments • Gee • Cup O’ Joe, Huntington set for Lazarus building Answers still sought on how to narrow achievement gap M ore than half a century ago, Chief Justice Earl Warren observed on behalf of a unanimous Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education, “it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education.” Yet there continues to be a widening achievement gap in America. A 2009 study by McKinsey & Co. pointed to large achievement disparities between black and Hispanic children and white youngsters; between poor and wealthy students; between Americans and students abroad; and between students of similar backgrounds educated in different parts of the country. Experts view the disparity through a broader lens. Linda Darling-Hammond points to an “opportunity gap” in her book, The Flat World and Education, and defines it as “the accumulated difference in access to key educational resources – expert teachers, personalized attention, high-quality curriculum opportunities, good educational materials and plentiful information resources – that support learning at home and at school.” Opportunity gaps lead to achievement gaps. They begin at birth and can last a lifetime. One in five American children lives in poverty, and that ratio holds for children in Franklin County. Failing schools lie in the poorest neighborhoods. A child in a failing school has a greater chance to go to jail than to college. There are more than 1,700 “dropout factories” nationally – schools where more than 40 percent of the students fail to graduate. They lack resources and effective teachers, parent involvement and community attention. While there are individual model schools, urban systems of excellence are rare. Within an urban setting, there is a web of interconnected structures that affect and shape the quality of life, says John Powell, director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University. He points to “opportunity structures,” which include education, health care, employment, transportation and civic engage- viewpoint LINDA KASS ment, as essential to an individual’s success. For children and families living in poverty, these opportunity structures are too often inaccessible. “It is what the system is doing,” Powell says, “not what people intend.” Despite 40 years of reform efforts, America has not succeeded in raising or changing the trajectory of its poor and disadvantaged children. “Raising achievement for children who have had a life of opportunity gaps is like putting them on (an upward) moving escalator at the fourth floor and telling them to go down,” Powell says. “The effort is just too much.” A new study of low-income students in Montgomery County, Maryland, suggests economic integration is a powerful but neglected reform tool – more effective than directing extra resources at higherpoverty schools. “Today, 95 percent of education reform is about trying to make high-poverty schools work,” says Richard Kahlenberg, senior fellow at the Century Foundation, the New York think tank that published the report. “This research suggests there is a much more effective way to help close the achievement gap. And that is to give low-income students a chance to attend middleclass schools.” The Century Foundation finding is consistent with research dating to 1966, when Congress asked Johns Hopkins University sociologist James Coleman to report on why the achievement of black students lagged that of white students. Coleman found that when high concentrations of poor kids went to school together, all the students at the school tended to learn less. The powerful effect of socioeconomic makeup of a student body on academic achievement has been a consistent finding. Take Champion Middle School on Columbus’ Near East side. Rated the worst middle school in Ohio, it is surrounded by a neighborhood where students face gangs, drugs, despair and failure despite efforts to fix the school. Federal dollars are in play to offer change, but the open question is whether a school like Champion can overcome the challenges coming from its streets and homes. That isn’t to suggest select schools filled with poor and minority students cannot succeed. A number of Columbus City alternative and traditional schools are highly ranked and have waiting lists. And the Knowledge Is Power Program, a network of college preparatory public schools, has a record of readying students in underserved communities for success in college and in life. There are 99 KIPP schools in 20 states and the District of Columbia serving more than 26,000 students, including KIPP Journey Academy, a middle school program in the Near East side. The new film Waiting for Superman follows five youngsters and their parents as they try to escape neighborhood public schools for higher-performing public charter schools. The documentary draws attention to the failure to improve education over many decades, but it doesn’t answer how reforms that work in some small schools with challenged populations and committed parents can work in enormous urban systems with many more kids living complicated, fragile lives. The key, Powell says, is determining if a model works and if it can be taken to scale. Clearly, wrestling with issues of poverty and its consequences is complicated. “To fix the system to scale requires disturbing everyone, because isolating these kids and using our few resources to help them is not economically effective,” he says. “And while solutions may be academically sound, they must be accepted at a cultural and political level as well.” This is the first of a three-part series by LINDA KASS, chairwoman of Champion of Children, an initiative of United Way of Central Ohio. SEE GAP, PAGE 30