William Julius Wilson is the Lewis P and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard University. Robert B. Schwartz is the academic dean of the Harvard School of Education. The are both members of the task force that drafted the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education.
Re-authorization of the No Child Left Behind law (NCLB) has been stalled now for almost two years. Despite its welcome focus on minority and low-income youth, its supporters have been unable to overcome its flawed assumption that ineffective schools are the major reason for low student achievement. Frequent testing and accountability without adequate support for improvement have alienated students, parents, and teachers, while making little or no progress in eliminating achievement gaps between disadvantaged and advantaged schoolchildren.
Eleven years ago one of us – Robert Schwartz – was founding president of Achieve, an organization established by a bi-partisan group of governors and leading corporate chief executives to help states raise academic standards and strengthen their assessment and accountability systems. While high standards and strong accountability remain necessary pillars of education reform, it is now clear that they are by no means sufficient to close the achievement gap. We need both a much greater investment in building the capacity of educators to teach all students to higher standards, and a recognition that school improvement strategies by themselves will not get this job done.
In 1989, the other one of us – William Julius Wilson – published a widely-read book: The Truly Disadvantaged. It argued that the flight of stable working and middle class families, along with employment opportunities, from our inner cities had resulted in such concentration of urban poverty that children in these communities had little chance to succeed.
Unfortunately, that analysis has been confirmed by experience. School reform strategies, culminating in No Child Left Behind, have resulted in only incremental improvements in academic proficiency.
The good news is that a growing number of national experts from very diverse backgrounds now understand the need for a new approach. Over the past 18 months, we have been working with an esteemed group of policy experts with widely varied religious and political affiliations, in fields including education, social welfare, health, housing, and civil rights. We have developed a proposal for education reform that we believe can break the pattern of the last 25 years and have a realistic chance of success. We call it "A Broader, Bolder Approach," and invite all Americans to join us at www.BoldApproach.org.
Although each of us might design a reform program somewhat differently, we all believe strongly that the nation must continue to pursue an aggressive school improvement strategy. However, the changes within K-12 classrooms must be organically linked to programs outside them. For example, we must increase investment in developmentally appropriate and high-quality early childhood, pre-school and kindergarten care and education. Recent research has demonstrated that disadvantaged children have already fallen behind by age 3. No matter how much our elementary and secondary schools improve, they necessarily get children when it is already too late to fully overcome the achievement gap.
In addition, bitter experience has shown that health problems impede school success. A broader, bolder approach to education should include routine pediatric, dental, hearing and vision care for all infants, toddlers and schoolchildren. In particular, full-service school clinics can fill the health gaps created by the absence of primary care physicians in low-income areas.
And the nation needs to improve the quality of disadvantaged students’ out-of-school time. Low-income students learn rapidly in school but often lose ground after school and during summers. We should increase investments in after-school and summer programs that not only focus on remediation but also provide cultural, organizational, athletic, and academic enrichment that middle-class children routinely enjoy. Service learning programs, for example, give young people the opportunity to develop the citizenship skills and community responsibility that are as critical to youth development as academic achievement.
The nation’s education system can embody the American dream, providing opportunity for any child to succeed, but only if it joins forces with our other social and economic institutions that contribute to the academic and personal growth of our youth.
A new Congress and President can put that dream within every child’s grasp if they embrace a broader, bolder approach to education. So too can state and local policymakers, because this is not solely a federal challenge. But clinging to the narrow, limited, schools-only approach to reform that we have pursued for the past two decades will only ensure that the dream remains a mirage.