Random links related to my thoughts on poverty and access to opportunity in education. This is completely random, and I collected studies along the way. I will attempt to produce a cogent thought at some other point. For now, here are some notes.

Do you believe that every human being deserves an opportunity to learn, to become an informed citizen of the world?

Do we treat the symptoms of the issue or the issues at the root of the problem?

“To critics of the reliance on standardized testing, the problem is a matter of emphasizing the wrong metrics. Equal access to high quality education, they argue, is the key to improving student learning.’We’ve been focused on test-based accountability, but testing does not equal accountability,’ Linda Darling Hammond, a professor of education at Stanford University, said at an event on the results in Washington on Tuesday. ‘Accountability is when you have a system that works for each and every child.'”

– Maya Rhodan (Read the article at this Link) on PISA results in Time, December 2013.

Teachers College Article

October 2013 Washington Post Article on SAT scores and socio-economic status

2009 NY Times Article on SAT and socio-economic status

In her dissertation Linda Ruth Williams Sorhaindo (2003) examined a sample of 9,000 4th and 8th grade student achievement scores in the Miami-Dade Public School system. She compared student scores and tested to see if there was a relationship between degree of poverty and academic achievement test scores. Read more here.

Check out Jeremy Allan Moore’s (2011) dissertation correlating poverty and student achievement scores in Florida here. Hint from his abstract-

“This study was successful in quantifying correlations between poverty and student achievement in Florida by utilizing FRPL as a proxy for poverty and FCAT as an indicator of student achievement. Correlation results ranging from -0.761 to -0.855 demonstrated strong associations between these variables. Over the span of years observed, as poverty levels increased in Florida schools, 76 percent to 86 percent of the corresponding student achievement scores decreased. These connections provided measured relationships between poverty and student achievement.”

Moore (2011)