Linda Darling-Hammond, “Inequality and School Resources: What It Will Take to Close the Opportunity Gap”
1.What was the Williams v. California case about?
2.How are public schools funded in the U.S.? What is the primary form of funding?
3.In most states what is the ratio between per pupil spending in the richest and poorest districts?
4.What is Title I and why does it reinforce funding inequalities?
5.In California how much do high-poverty and low-poverty districts spend per pupil?
6.In California how much do high-minority and low-minority districts spend per pupil?
7.In the U.S. how many children live in poverty? How does that compare to most European nations?
8.What are U.S. schools asked to do that those in European countries do not?
9.In Finland what percent of children are enrolled in government-subsidized day care programs until they go to school at seven years?attend tuition-free preschool at the age of six?
10. In the U.S. in 2000 what percent of Black students attended predominantly minority schools? When was the low point in that measure?
11. What percent of African American and Latino students attend schools with a minority enrollment of 90 to 100 percent?
12. What did the 1966 Coleman Report find?
13. What does the phrase “concentrated poverty” refer to?
14. What is an “apartheid school”?
15. What was the core principle in the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson ruling?
16. What did the experimental study of African American high school youth who attended suburban and city schools reveal?
17. What role do upper-class parents play in securing quality education for their kids?
18. What is the most unequally distributed school resource in the U.S.?
19. In California in 2001 students in the most intensely minority schools were how much more likely to have uncertified teachers than those in predominantly White schools?
20. In California what percent of schools serving almost exclusively students of color had more than one-fifth of teachers who were uncertified?
21. At Oakland High School the students had not spent the entire year without a certified teacher in which subject? (Take a moment to think about the impact of that in today’s world.)
22. In Massachusetts in 2002 students in predominantly minority neighborhoods were how much more likely to have uncertified teachers than those who attended schools in the bottom quartile of schools with students of color?
23. In the study of high school students in North Carolina what did researchers find out about the effects of highly qualified teachers relative to students’ race and parental education level on achievement levels?
24. Why did parents of low-income, minority students sue the Department of Education after No Child Left Behind was passed?
25. What did Robert Dreeben find out about the causes of differences in reading achievement among Black and White first graders in Chicago?
26. What does it mean to say that schools serving large numbers of African American, Latino, and Native American students are “bottom heavy".
27. In California in 2005 what percent of highly segregated schools serving African American and Latino had a sufficient enough number of college prep classes for their population?
28. What is “tracking”? How is tracking racialized?
29. From your perspective, what are the 3 most effective changes that Massachusetts implemented to reduce the opportunity gap?
30. From your perspective, what are the 3 most effective changes that New Jersey implemented to reduce the opportunity gap?