Special Resource Material Developed by the Center
Title: Balancing Cut-backs at Schools is Essential to Ensuring Equity of Opportunity (Policy Notes)
Description: Lay-offs, cut-backs, increased class size, austerity measures. Each day there is another story about how the troubled economy is hurting education. Chief state school officers, district superintendent, principals, education associations, and unions have detailed the impending crisis that can?t be offset by the replacement dollars from the federal stimulus bill.
As has always been the case when education budgets tighten, the tendency is to trim student support efforts more severely than other budget items. This reflects the long-standing marginalization in policy and practice of efforts to address barriers to learning and teaching.
Given the pressing need for learning supports to ensure all students have an equal opportunity to succeed at school, it is time for everyone to recognize that current cut-backs are so unbalanced that essential efforts to address factors that interfere with learning at school will be subverted. While all cuts are harmful, the extreme cuts related to student and learning supports will undermine the hope of ensuring equity of opportunity.
Lessons learned from efforts to improve schools underscore that high quality teaching, enhanced instruction aligned with assessment, collaborative staff development, and home involvement are necessary but insufficient. At the same time, research has made it clear that prevailing school improvement designs remain too limited in nature and scope to counter barriers to learning and teaching. Access at: http://smhp.psych.ucla.edu/pdfdocs/cut-backs.pdf 3pp; 34kb
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