be more damaging than poverty experienced at later ages, particularly with respect to eventual academic attainment. The dual risk of poverty experienced simultaneously in the family and in the surrounding neighborhood, which affects minority children to a much greater extent than other children, increases young children‘s vulnerability to adverse consequences.‖ (Jack P. Shonkoff and Deborah A. Phillips, Eds., From
Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development, Committee on Integrating the Science of Early Childhood Development, Board on Children, Youth, and Families, Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 2000, p. 9.) http://www.uwbec.org/documents/school_readiness/Neurons%20to%20Neighb orhoods.pdf
Massachusetts secretary of education S. Paul Reville wrote about ―the Poverty Gap‖ in a recent post. As he related poverty to school reform: We readily recognize the consistent, ironclad law of association between poverty and educational achievement and attainment. However, we persist in school reform strategies that, despite success at the margins, regularly fail to address the factors associated with poverty that, on average, tend to impede student learning. While the past decade-plus of school reform has seen a necessary and laudable increase in emphasis on the need to improve curriculum and instruction for all students, we continue, for the most part, to look the other way when it comes to addressing out of school factors which get in the way of students benefitting from optimized curriculum and instruction. (Paul Reville, ―Closing the Poverty Gap: The Way Forward for Education Reform,‖ Education Week: The Futures of School Reform, May 23, 2011.) http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/futures_of_reform/2011/05/closing_the_pover ty_gap_the_way_forward_for_education_reform.html
Further, Reville linked himself to those advocating going beyond schoolbased factors to combat the effects of poverty, stating ―It is now blatantly apparent to me and other education activists, ranging from Geoffrey Canada to Richard Rothstein to Linda Darling-Hammond, that the strategy of instructional improvement will not, on average, enable us to overcome the barriers to student learning posed by the conditions of poverty.‖ Rather, Reville advocated a more comprehensive strategy; he stated: As others have argued, we need "a broader, bolder" approach, one that meets every child where he or she is and gives to each one the quality and quantity of support and instruction needed to attain the standards. Those of us who have the privileges of affluence know how to do this at scale with our children. We wrap services and supports around these children from the pre-natal period through their twenties. We know how to do it, but do we have the will to do it for "other people's children"? And do we know how to institutionalize the necessary services and supports that are best provided through families?‖ (Paul Reville, ―Closing the Poverty 61