This section lists articles and links which may be of interest. They're listed in order of submission, so an easy way to find one in your topic area is to select from the "Categories" list on the right side of the page. Click on the area of interest, and you will get a new list of just those articles in that category. Some of the articles are for the general public, often from newspaper or magazine orticles, while others come from journals or professional publications. A short summary at the top of each listing, as well as the first few paragraphs of the article should help you decide if you want to read it in its entirety. Some listings have links to the orignal article, and you can download some of the articles as well.
Summary Charter schools run by the Harlem Children's Zone in New York City show promising results in eliminating the black-white academic gap, according to a Harvard researcher.
Author David Brooks
Citation New York Times, May 7, 2009 Op-Ed
Link http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/08/opinion/08brooks.html
The fight against poverty produces great programs but disappointing results. You go visit an inner-city school, job-training program or community youth center and you meet incredible people doing wonderful things. Then you look at the results from the serious evaluations and you find that these inspiring places are only producing incremental gains.
That’s why I was startled when I received an e-mail message from Roland Fryer, a meticulous Harvard economist. It included this sentence: “The attached study has changed my life as a scientist.”
Fryer and his colleague Will Dobbie have just finished a rigorous assessment of the charter schools operated by the Harlem Children’s Zone. They compared students in these schools to students in New York City as a whole and to comparable students who entered the lottery to get into the Harlem Children’s Zone schools, but weren’t selected.
They found that the Harlem Children’s Zone schools produced “enormous” gains. The typical student entered the charter middle school, Promise Academy, in sixth grade and scored in the 39th percentile among New York City students in math. By the eighth grade, the typical student in the school was in the 74th percentile. The typical student entered the school scoring in the 39th percentile in English Language Arts (verbal ability). By eighth grade, the typical student was in the 53rd percentile.
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Summary Growing up poor isn't merely hard on kids. It might also be bad for their brains. A long-term study of cognitive development in lower- and middle-class students found strong links between childhood poverty, physiological stress and adult memory.
Author Brandon Keim
Citation Wired Magazine March 30, 2009
Link http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/poordevelopment.html
Growing up poor isn’t merely hard on kids. It might also be bad for their brains. A long-term study of cognitive development in lower- and middle-class students found strong links between childhood poverty, physiological stress and adult memory.
The findings support a neurobiological hypothesis for why impoverished children consistently fare worse than their middle-class counterparts in school, and eventually in life.
“Chronically elevated physiological stress is a plausible model for how poverty could get into the brain and eventually interfere with achievement,” wrote Cornell University child-development researchers Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg in a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Posted by Mr. Bilides on March 31, 2009.
Filed under:
Academic Performance •
Brain •
Poverty •
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