Time to Act: Closing the Racial Achievement Gap
The Silicon Valley Education and Silicon Valley Community foundations have issued a policy brief based on a series of forums the foundations hosted earlier this year to examine what separates low-income students and students of color from their peers when it comes to educational achievement. The brief, Time to Act: Closing the Racial Achievement Gap (8 pages, PDF), cites the California Department of Education's recently released 2009 Base Academic Performance Index, which found that low-income students and students of color are overwhelmingly concentrated in the state's lowest-performing schools, and which argues that action is needed to improve the quality of teachers and instruction for high-need students and to increase access to "gatekeeper" courses such as Algebra I.
