What impact can poverty have on student achievement? What influence does the home environment have on academic achievement?
When children bring significant educational deficits to the classroom, they’re going to be much more difficult to educate. That’s one of the messages of the book, that this country has a choice: it can either provide education or it can be serious about educating—they’re two very different things. If we’re serious about educating, we’re going to have to figure out a way to compensate for the educational enrichment these children are not receiving in the home. That doesn’t just mean providing education to a mother or a father, because these kids bounce from residence to residence and there could be any number of people involved in raising these children. We have to be very creative and consider some of the, for lack of a better term, “more expensive” alternatives once they begin school if we’re going to really compensate for the educational background children are not getting in the home. Q: Why did you use Horatio Alger’s popular rags-to-riches narratives as a frame for the ideas and r
