Raising Student Achievement in a High Need School

To me, the major issue that people consistently fail to adequately address when discussing raising achievement in a high need school is the generational impact of educational disparity. For many people, providing equal educational facilities and equal quality of education is the only remedy to solving educational disparity. However, that ignores the critical role that parents play in a child's education. This role goes far beyond parents and the PTA; in fact, while those parents may help to contribute to the overall quality of a school, they do not necessarily impact individual student education in the necessary manner. Instead, I am talking about the critical role that parents play in education and learning-readiness, if only in an ancillary manner in their children's lives.

For example, I grew up with a father who had a graduate-school level professional education and a mother who...
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