Great Lakes Center For Education Research And Practice…

out with a new report.

The report deals with out-of-school factors that need to be dealt with in order to help improve the achievement gap. Some of the factors they cite are:

• Reduce the rate of low birth weight children among African Americans
• Reduce drug and alcohol abuse
• Reduce the rates of family violence in low-income households
• Insure that no one suffers from food insecurity
• Provide summer programs for the poor to reduce summer losses in their academic achievement.

I do have to fully agree with them on this. You can talk about spending on schools all you want, but unless you tackle the out-of-school problems you will never fully close the academic gap.