Evidence demonstrates, however, that achievement gaps based on socioeconomic status are present before children even begin formal schooling. Improving our schools, therefore, continues to be a vitally important strategy for promoting upward mobility and for working toward equal opportunity and overall educational excellence. Schools can-and have-ameliorated some of the impact of social and economic disadvantage on achievement. “Education policy in this nation has typically been crafted around the expectation that schools alone can offset the full impact of low socioeconomic status on learning. According to a study by Emma García and Elaine Weiss, extensive research has conclusively demonstrated that children’s social class is one of the most significant predictors - if not the single most significant predictor - of their educational success. The report was produced as part of the initiative, A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, that states on its homepage: There are predictors that currently contribute to gaps in opportunity and achievement. School board members have a choice to make - will you allow education to be a wedge that widens inequality or will you use its power as Horace Mann envisioned it, to create opportunity for all? ![]() Too often, the difference between a life of promise and a life in peril hinges not on a student’s potential but on the quality of the local public school. Students who receive a poor education, or who drop out of school before graduating, can end up on the wrong side of a lifelong gap in employment, earnings, even life expectancy. ![]() ![]() Horace Mann, a pioneer of American public schools in the 19th century, famously called education the “great equalizer of the conditions of men.” But the reverse is also true.
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