Equity Symposium on Comprehensive Education Equity:
Overcoming the Socioeconomic Barriers to School Success
On Monday and Tuesday, November 17-18, the Campaign
for Educational Equity at Teachers College, Columbia
University, will host its fourth annual Equity Symposium,
“Comprehensive Education Equity: Overcoming the
Socioeconomic Barriers to School Success.”
The purpose of the symposium is to confront the reality
that to overcome achievement gaps and promote academic
proficiency for all children, measures must be taken
to 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.
The symposium intends to review current research on
these issues, examine the experiences of important demonstration
projects like the Harlem Children’s Zone and the
community schools movement. Then it intends to advance
current conversations and public policy in this area
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 establishing a legal right
to comprehensive educational equity and for legislative
action to better coordinate existing services and provide
additional necessary services on a sustained basis.
Panelists participating in the symposium will present
research papers related to comprehensive educational
equity and will discuss delivery models and strategies
for planning, financing, and implementing this approach
to quality education.
To register for the 2008 Equity Symposium, please visit
https://www.tc.columbia.edu/centers/EquitySymposium/symposium08/registration/registration1.asp
or contact Jessica Garcia, Symposium Coordinator, jgarcia@tc.edu,
212-678-8362.
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