What poor children need in school

By Valerie Strauss. Yesterday I wrote a post about how public education’s biggest problem — poverty — keeps getting worse, with the news from a new report that a majority of students in public schools in the American South and West are low-income for the first time in at least four decades. Here’s a related piece  which argues that policy makers own life circumstances affect the way they make school reform decisions for the poor. Jack  Schneider (@Edu_Historian) is an assistant professor of education at the College of the Holy Cross and the author of the forthcoming book From the Ivory Tower to the Schoolhouse: How Scholarship Becomes Common Knowledge in Education.  Heather Curl is a lecturer at Bryn Mawr College.  Both authors are former classroom teachers. Schneider also founded University Paideia, a pre-college program for under-served students in the San Francisco Bay Area. His research focuses on educational policy-making and school reform. Read more...