“Left Behind” Kids “Made Incredible Progress from 90s to Great Recession”
September 9, 2019
This summer, the Fordham Institute’s Michael Petrilli has been “trying to make sense of the sizable gains made by America’s lowest-performing students and kids of color that coincided with the peak of the modern education reform movement.” He wraps up his series on this topic in Education Next by “offering some personal reflections on what we’ve learned” as well as recapping “the facts” and acknowledging “the vast amount of ground yet to cover.” He also cautions that we “have spent the past decade overhauling standards, tests, and accountability systems, and finally committing real resources to capacity-building, especially in the form of curriculum implementation.” These disparate pieces have only really begun to come together in the last couple of years “with the release of the first school ratings under the Every Student Succeeds Act.” So, now that “Accountability 2.0 is finally in place and we have a booming economy once more, let’s see if we can drive real improvements in achievement once again, and not just at the low end of the distribution this time.”