Top-down pressure from federal education policies such as Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind, bolstered by organized advocacy efforts, is making a popular set of market-oriented education “reforms” look more like the new status quo than real reform. Reformers assert that test-based teacher evaluation, increased access to charter schools, and the closure of “failing” and under-enrolled schools will boost at-risk students’ achievement and narrow longstanding race- and income-based achievement gaps. This new report from the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education examines these assertions by comparing the impacts of these reforms in three large urban school districts – Washington, D.C., New York City, and Chicago – with student and school outcomes over the same period in other large, high-poverty urban districts. The report finds that the reforms deliver few benefits, often harm the students they purport to help, and divert attention from a set of other, less visible policies with more promise to weaken the link between poverty and low educational attainment.

Despite the research showing that early learning and after-school programs help close the achievement gap by ensuring children are prepared to start school and continue to achieve once they're there, this report from NY OTL ally Campaign for Children shows how funding instability for these programs could lead to their collapse. Thousands of students from low-income families stand to lose these vital opportunities that represent a key resource in a support-based education reform model. 

Black students in Arkansas schools are more likely to be suspended and receive corporal punishment than their white counterparts, according to this new state-level analysis from Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families (AACF). School disciplinary policies that disproportionately keep students of color out of school reduce their opportunities to learn and increase gaps in educational achievement. This report is evidence that Arkansas schools rely far too often on disciplinary approaches that bar students from the classroom.

New York City's Community School District 16 (CSD16), in the heart of Central Brooklyn, is the center of a bold new approach to grassroots, community-based reform. A new report from the Brooklyn Community Foundation, Brooklyn Movement Center and the Black Male Donor Collaborative lays out a blueprint for collaboration between school leadership, community stakeholders and philanthropic parters to support local schools and ensure access to educational opportunities for all students. "Raising the Stakes: Investing in a Community School Model to Lift Student Achievement in CSD16" aims to produce a community school model that can be replicated in other districts across the city, the state and the country.