We have worked with some educators whose eyes were opened to the misalignment of services and needs, and they learned to use data, to identify appropriate interventions, and keep records to make accountability possible. We’ve seen these innovators close their achievement gaps while raising achievement of the top. But, those around them didn’t see this as replicable.
Do you mean substantially reduced, or actually closed? All of the other claims are familiar and have citations, but this one doesn’t, and a data-driven process to fully close achievement gaps would be a major advance, and yet one that has gone unreported (or very underreported) in the academic literature.
You could email good academics studying achievement gaps, e.g. economist Roland Fryer at Harvard has a number of studies on randomized trials of gap-closing interventions, and hasn’t yet found something so effective. He also has demonstrated he can get large studies done and funded. Regardless of what local schools think, if you can show good data (or work with them to help them get such data without violating NDAs) confirming this to such academics then you will get a significant response and national attention from wonks and foundations to help scale up better practices.
Fryer would be able to get much more done than we can here.
Do you mean substantially reduced, or actually closed? All of the other claims are familiar and have citations, but this one doesn’t, and a data-driven process to fully close achievement gaps would be a major advance, and yet one that has gone unreported (or very underreported) in the academic literature.
You could email good academics studying achievement gaps, e.g. economist Roland Fryer at Harvard has a number of studies on randomized trials of gap-closing interventions, and hasn’t yet found something so effective. He also has demonstrated he can get large studies done and funded. Regardless of what local schools think, if you can show good data (or work with them to help them get such data without violating NDAs) confirming this to such academics then you will get a significant response and national attention from wonks and foundations to help scale up better practices.
Fryer would be able to get much more done than we can here.