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Can Cross-Sector Collaboration Make Education More Equitable?
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It’s well-established 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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This newsletter is made possible in part by support provided by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice: http://www.greatlakescenter.org
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The National Education Policy Center (NEPC), a university research center housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education, sponsors research, produces policy briefs, and publishes expert third-party reviews of think tank reports. NEPC publications are written in accessible language and are intended for a broad audience that includes academic experts, policymakers, the media, and the general public. Our mission is to provide high-quality information in support of democratic deliberation about education policy. We are guided by the belief that the democratic governance of public education is strengthened when policies are based on sound evidence and support a multiracial society that is inclusive, kind, and just. Visit us at: http://nepc.colorado.edu/
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Copyright 2023 National Education Policy Center. All rights reserved.
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