Equity Symposium 2008

Description

On Monday and Tuesday, November 17-18, 2008, the Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College, Columbia University, hosted its fourth annual Equity Symposium, “Comprehensive Educational Equity: Overcoming the Socioeconomic Barriers to School Success.” Purpose: The purpose of the symposium was to confront the reality that to overcome achievement gaps and promote academic proficiency for all children, we must tackle the full range of opportunity gaps faced by children from backgrounds of concentrated poverty, including health-, home-, and community-related barriers to learning, as well as inequities in academic opportunities. To meet the economic challenges of an increasingly “flat world,” to head off the disintegration of our polity by preparing all students to be capable civic participants in our democracy, to eliminate achievement gaps and fulfill the moral imperative of ensuring that a child’s racial, socioeconomic, or family background no longer predicts that child’s educational attainment, our nation must adopt a comprehensive, whole-child approach to educational equity and provide meaningful educational opportunities for all. At the symposium, current research on these issues was reviewed, the experiences of important demonstration projects like the Harlem Children’s Zone and the Rochester Surround Care Community Corporation, and the community schools movement were examined. Current conversations and public policy in this area were advanced by presenting a concrete analysis of the actual costs of providing a range of the most essential services to children from birth through age 18, mapping current federal, state and local spending in these areas, and making specific proposals for legislative action to better coordinate existing services and provide additional necessary services on a sustained basis to meet children’s comprehensive needs.