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The 1993 movie "Groundhog Day" has become an enduring classic partly because of an engaging plot line in which the protagonist has repeated opportunities to make better decisions. In early-childhood education, state and local stakeholders currently have a compelling "Groundhog Day" opportunity of their own. Versions of the controversial accountability reforms that have become commonplace in K-12 schools over the last 30 years have recently and quietly spread throughout the early-childhood sector. These recent reforms present a fresh new chance to get it right and to avoid the missteps that have ...

"Racial intolerance (and outright racism) seems on the rise, and white-black income and wealth disparities remain very large and have not narrowed in decades. So there is little reason to expect much decline in racial segregation in the near future, particularly given the lack of policy interest in addressing it. Economic segregation likewise shows no sign of declining. So I am currently pessimistic, given today’s political and economic winds, but am more hopeful about the long arc of the future, which I think will ultimately bend toward equality and fairness." Sean Reardon

Stanford’s Reardon points out that one reason that the racial and ethnic gaps in Berkeley are so high is that white students on average are doing exceptionally well, not that black and Latino students are doing exceptionally poorly, at least compared to their peers in other school districts.

In that sense, Berkeley is not that dissimilar to other communities which are also home to world-class universities, like Palo Alto, Chapel Hill and Evanston, IL, where achievement gaps are also very large.

“Some of it is that white families in those places tend to have higher incomes and education levels than black and Hispanic families, who have fewer socioeconomic resources to use to provide educational opportunities for their children such as high-quality preschool,” Reardon said.

Culturally relevant curriculum can increase motivation and engagement, says Thomas Dee, a Stanford education professor. When San Francisco piloted a ninth-grade ethnic-studies course, students had better attendance, scored 1.4 points higher in their GPAs, and went on to earn 23 more credits in high school than a comparison group of academically similar students who took traditional social studies, Professor Dee and Emily Penner of the University of California, Irvine, found in a study. California is now considering taking the ethnic studies class statewide.

Thomas Dee, a Barnett Family professor of education at Stanford University, argued it’s equally beneficial to lower class sizes in the later grades, because it improves certain skills, such as students’ motivation to learn and their engagement in lessons, all of which leads to graduation.

Prof. Dee and his colleague researched the effects of class sizes in the middle-school years, and found that exposure to smaller classes in Grade 8 led to improvements in student engagement that were still detectable, though smaller, two years later. He acknowledged it was an expensive venture, but he said his research found “there’s still quite a reasonable and positive return on those investments.”