Education gap: The root of inequality

[Music] educational inequality is probably more than anything else the fundamental root of broader inequality if we look at inequality in access to particular careers inequality in income and wealth inequality in the nature of political participation all those things are mitigated by equalizing the skills that education produces not only the academic skills but the dispositions the the frames of Minds The conscientiousness the diligence the sense of agency and so I think there is nothing more important we could do to produce the type of society we want than to raise outcomes in the field of education so

that knowing somebody's race or ethnicity tells you nothing at all about what their test scores or grades or occupation might be Boston is a place where I think we are a national leader on many educational fronts but the the story is really that we're not doing everything that we want to be doing we aren't delivering on all of the outcomes that we want to deliver and it's really an educational equity issue so we do see the disparities by gender and by race and educational outcomes in Boston and if we're really going to get to four

all results which is where Boston wants to get we've got to dig in on educational Equity issues there's not just one challenge to face when we talk about achievement gaps even if we just talk about racial achievement gaps we have students of color in high income Suburban districts that are lagging they're white classmates we have inner city school districts that are high poverty um have a difficult time attracting teachers so the work that needs to happen is to figure out how in each of these contexts we can make the changes that are necessary to produce

the Excellence to which we Aspire there are needs that kids in inner cities have that people in Upper income suburbs never even imagine but the most effective schools and teachers in the inner city adapt to those needs they meet the kids where they are they establish person environment fit for these kids as they pass through the school and if we can do that at some greater scale it truly is plausible that we can have much less poverty in the next Generations and that we can have the society with regard to race that we want in

the future achievement gaps by race gender and socioeconomic status are Stark in the National Data by the age of two so we can't wait till school starts there's an initiative we've just launched in Boston called the Boston Basics where we've got five basic ideas about Early Childhood parenting five propositions that we want everybody in the city to know we're saturating the city with what uh young parents of young children need to know in order that their kids don't fall behind by the age of two it's not just about giving information it's about building that niche

of social support around them so that they know that that the grandparents and the relatives and the minister and the barber all know this is important and that they are being supported to do these things you can do it with materials that are already in the house and there's nothing in here that is particular any particular racial ethnic or socioeconomic group this is human stuff this is stuff that that that everybody in the community can can benefit from second thing that excites me these days is the youth culture piece of IT schools have two curricula

they have the curricular the teachers teach and the ones the kids teach part of what we're picking up is a lot of the misbehavior is instances where kids are doing things they don't even want to do they're just trying to fit in and so the idea of intervening into the youth culture and helping kids to develop the culture they really want in their school they've already got the right values they don't have the social opportunities to live out those values you just have to like help students want to help each other it takes student leadership

to give people permission even to say what they would think is cool so are you a student leader I tried you try to be well how plausible is it that you could organize a project at the school where you would get students to talk honestly about the way they really want it to be if you could we can tell you a story you can help other people at other places there's no choice but to try to make the things happen that we know need to happen CU it's too scary what would happen if they don't

happen these days are so reminiscent of the 60s and early 70s all those issues are coming back there was a period where you thought we we' gotten over that but there are enough instances where people have produced lots of progress in City Schools to think that if we really want to do it if we really have the political will to make it happen we can it's our generational responsibility to work on it no matter whether we're optimistic or pessimistic