Bright but poor' pupils years behind better-off peers

[James Curran]

'Bright but poor' pupils years behind better-off peers, study claims

Research suggests large gaps in educational achievement between the brightest students from poor and more wealthy backgrounds

file:///C:/Users/Anne/Desktop/Guardian%20Education/'Bright%20but%20poor'%20pupils%20years%20behind%20better-off%20peers,%20study%20claims%20_%20Education%20_%20The%20Guardian.html

[James Curran]

Apologises, the first link I gave for this article is faulty. Here's the appropriate link.It's great to be back on the Discussion Forum again,a big thank you to Dave and all concerned.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2 ... udy-claims

[geraldinecarter]

"In reading, the gap in performance between pupils from advantaged and disadvantaged households in England was the equivalent of two years and nine months’ worth of schooling"

There is much inequality and it is difficult to be motivated when a whole area is devastated by lack of opportunities to work. Equally, the deep antagonism towards a knowledge- based education causes many problems. This is not the case in London where there are schools in poor areas doing exceptionally well and there are notable exceptions outside the Capital.

[geraldinecarter]

A timely post from regular blogger on Twitter, The Quirky Teacher:

https://thequirkyteacher.wordpress.com/ ... l-matters/

[James Curran]

Thanks Geraldine for this excellent piece from Quirky Teacher. Here's an article from William Poundstone ,'Head in the Cloud- The Power of Knowledge in the Age of Google', which appeared in the Guardian last year.

Does knowledge matter in the age of Google?

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyl ... -of-google

[James Curran]

A piece by David Berliner on Inequality,Poverty and the widening Education gap which is worth a read.


The PISA data were also looked at for the percent of children in a nation that came from disadvantaged backgrounds and still managed to score quite well on the test. That percent is over 80% in Hong Kong, over 50% in Korea, over 40% in Finland, but not even 30% in the USA. Somehow other nations have designed policies affecting lower social class children and their families that result in a better chance for those youth to excel in school. The USA appears to have social and educational polices and practices that end up limiting the numbers of poor youth who can excel on tests of academic ability.

How does this relation between poverty and achievement play out? If we broke up American public schools into five categories based on the percent of poor children in a school, as in Table 1, it is quite clear that America’s youth score remarkably high if they are in schools where less than 10% of the children are eligible for free and reduced lunch. These data are from the international study of math and science trends completed in 2007. The data presented are fourth-grade mathematics data, but eighth- grade mathematics, and science data at both the fourth and eighth grades,, provide the same pattern (Gonzales, Williams, Jocelyn, Roey, Kastberg, & Brenwa, 2008). If this group of a few million students were a nation, it would have scored the highest in the world on these tests of mathematics and science. Our youth also score quite high if they are in schools where between 10 and 24.9% of the children are poor. These two groups of youth, attending schools where fewer than 25% percent of the students come from impoverished families, total about 12 million students, and their scores are exceeded by only four nations in the world (Aud, Hussar, Johnson, Kena, Roth, Manning, Wang, & Zhang, J., 2012).

Our youth perform well even if they attend schools where poverty rates of youth are between 25 and 49.9%. And these three groups of students total about 26 million students, over half the U.S. elementary and secondary public school population. It is quite clear that America’s public school students achieve at high levels when they attend schools that are middle- or upper-middle-class in composition. The staff and cultures of those schools, as well as the funding for those schools, appears adequate, overall, to give America all the academic talent it can use.
http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2012/10/d ... verty.html

[James Curran]

Dear Justine Greening, homework widens the gap between rich and poor children

Homework is now part of the school curriculum but you forget many children have parents who just can’t help

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2 ... hael-rosen

[James Curran]

School holidays leave 3 million children at risk of hunger, report says

Cross-party group of MPs and peers cites evidence of children existing on diets of crisps when school canteens are shut

https://www.theguardian.com/society/201 ... eport-says

[James Curran]

Poverty blighting health of many UK children, paediatricians warn


Report paints bleak picture of poor growth, respiratory illnesses in damp housing and mental health problems, and urges urgent action on inequality

https://www.theguardian.com/society/201 ... cians-warn