Why is education the great equalizer

According to the report from the International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity if we continue with business as usual, in less than 1 in 10 children in low income countries will be on track to acquire basic secondary school level skills and more than 1.

Especially on this day honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Children from marginalized groups — girls, those living in poverty, and people with disabilities — continue to be excluded from school entirely, to drop out, or to receive a low quality education at much higher rates than their more advantaged peers. We can and must ensure all children get quality education.

Education is the great social equalizer and access to free, high quality schools can level the playing field for disadvantaged children.

Despite the impressive academic gains registered by some schools serving disadvantaged students, there is no evidence that school improvement strategies by themselves can close these gaps in a substantial, consistent, and sustainable manner. In order to provide an exceptional education, school boards must create adequate policies that address opportunities gaps; support a budget that provides the tools necessary to address the gaps; and work collaboratively with the superintendent and their administration team to create the best education system for students in their respective districts.

This work, in turn, will support the goal everyone wants — academic success for all children. In the pursuit of equity, school leaders must assess their actions locally to overcome institutional barriers and create opportunities so that each and every child has the tools and supports necessary to achieve his or her highest potential.

School leaders have an obligation to ensure that every child has access to a high-quality education by addressing the individual needs and concerns of students. It is difficult to come to some resolve about what equity means and how it will be addressed if there is not a working definition for it. This is a great place to start your equity journey. Leading for educational equity means filtering decisions through an equity lens.

Among last year's top students was Eric Marcoux, co-leader of the robotics team and member of the National Honor Society. He was accepted to Worcester Polytechnic Institute, a top private engineering university. Marcoux chose the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where he'll have to borrow only half as much. Trading down can carry a stiff cost: A Harvard study published this year found that students who go to Massachusetts state colleges are less likely to graduate than those who attend Massachusetts private colleges.

The state has tried to help poorer kids. In the early s, Massachusetts sharply increased state funding of local elementary and secondary schools and mandated comprehensive testing.

The overhaul was designed to improve student performance and eradicate the achievement gap. Children from lower income families have improved their scores on tests, but their results still lag, as a look at results from the Scholastic Aptitude Tests makes clear. In the state's five wealthiest school districts, students had average scores ranging from to on the point college-admissions test in In the five poorest districts for which data are available, the SAT scores averaged from to Reville, the education secretary, wants a redoubled push on childhood education: The s reforms were good but didn't go far enough.

Income depends on educational achievement, and the single best predictor of a child's likelihood of academic success remains in turn the socio-economic status of his or her mother, said Reville. The solution to erasing the achievement gap involves, in essence, providing low-income students with the advantages their wealthier peers enjoy: pre-school at the age of three, tutors, summer camps, and after-school activities like sports and music lessons.

Schools could contract with outside organizations to provide those activities, or lengthen their school day or school year by one-third. Asked how much such an initiative might cost, Reville responded, "How much would it cost to give every child an upper-middle-class life? Such talk makes Massachusetts Republicans blanch. They say they care about income disparities that harm people's ability to move up the income ladder. Americans are now less likely to move to a higher economic class in their lifetime than Western Europeans or Canadians, according to a number of recent studies.

Republicans argue that the problem is not resources in the public schools: Massachusetts already ranks No. Instead of spending more, Stergios said, give parents greater choice over which schools their children attend. Expand the use of charter schools, financed by the public but managed independently. Make cities strictly follow the course of study set out by the state.

Increase the accountability of teachers by linking pay to student test scores. Adding to the complexity of addressing the income and educational gaps is a widening geographical divide in the state. In Massachusetts, some , people were unemployed in October, Conference Board data show, and roughly , unfilled jobs were advertised online. Skilled professions, including software engineers and web developers, topped the list. Nearly seven out of 10 vacancies were in the Boston area.

Harvard economist Ed Glaeser calls this the new reality of a knowledge-based global economy. More than ever, innovation, growth and opportunity are clustered in large cities such as Boston. Let decaying factory towns become ghost towns. Instead of building better transportation links, Glaeser believes their inhabitants should be encouraged to move to the closest economic hub.

Weston, where Glaeser himself lives, is such a cluster. But it isn't for everyone. Its house prices and real estate taxes put it out of reach for most Massachusetts residents, which points up a conundrum.

As those who can afford to do so head for the clusters, inequality grows. Across the state, communities are becoming more homogenous by income group, said Ben Forman, research director at think tank MassInc. The Boston suburbs where Weston is located are home to the most-educated workforce in the nation's best-educated state, according to the Boston Federal Reserve.

A Reuters analysis of Census and American Community Survey data found that two-thirds of working-age adults in Weston and surrounding towns had at least a bachelor's degree in That's more than double the national average of 28 percent.

Just 23 percent of their peers in Gardner and its neighbors had a bachelor's or better. As earnings fell in Gardner they soared in Weston. In , Weston residents made 3. By , it was 12 to 1. On a summer Tuesday afternoon, a man was reading a copy of "Horseback Riding for Dummies" outside Bruegger's Bagels, the sole fast-food chain that Weston has allowed to open as it tries, with mixed success, to preserve its historic character.

One hedge-fund manager built a room mansion with a basketball court, pool and car garage. Another tore down two homes to build a private equestrian center for his wife and daughter with an indoor riding ring.

Town leaders say they are struggling to keep the town from becoming even wealthier. One area where development is warmly welcome is education. Weston High is one of the finest public schools in the country. In , 96 percent of its graduates planned to go on to four-year degree programs. In Gardner, only about half did. Nationally, a University of Michigan study found that the gap in college-completion rates between rich and poor students has grown by about half since the late s.