In this landmark volume, Greg J. Duncan and Richard J. Murnane lay out a meticulously researched case showing how—in a time of spiraling inequality—strategically targeted interventions and supports can help schools significantly improve the life chances of low-income children.
The authors offer a brilliant synthesis of recent research on inequality and its effects on families, children, and schools. They describe the interplay of social and economic factors that has made it increasingly hard for schools to counteract the effects of inequality and that has created a widening wedge between low- and high-income students.
Restoring Opportunity provides detailed portraits of proven initiatives that are transforming the lives of low-income children from prekindergarten through high school. All of these programs are research-tested and have demonstrated sustained effectiveness over time and at significant scale. Together, they offer a powerful vision of what good instruction in effective schools can look like. The authors conclude by outlining the elements of a new agenda for education reform.
Restoring Opportunity is a crowning contribution from these two leading economists in the field of education and a passionate call to action on behalf of the young people on whom our nation’s future depends.
Copublished with the Russell Sage Foundation
Table of Content
CONTENTS
1
A Fading Dream 1
2
Diverging
Destinies 7
3
Family Income and School Success 23
4
Challenges in the Classroom 35
5
Promising Prekindergarten Programs 53
6
Elementary Schools That Work 71
7
High Schools That Improve Life Chances 85
8
Programs That Support Families 109
9
Restoring Opportunity 123
Notes 145
Acknowledgments 173
About the Authors 177
Index 179
About the author
Greg J. Duncan is Distinguished Professor in the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine. With a 1974 Ph D in economics, Duncan spent the first two decades of his career at the University of Michigan working on, and ultimately directing, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data collection project, which, in 2001, was named by the National Science Foundation to be one of the fifty most significant NSF-funded projects in the organization’s history. Beginning in the late 1980s, Duncan engaged in a number of interdisciplinary research networks and began to focus on the impacts of family and neighborhood conditions on children’s cognitive and behavioral development. During his 1995–2008 tenure at Northwestern University, he was the Edwina S. Tarry Professor in the School of Education and Social Policy. He coauthored
Higher Ground: New Hope for the Working Poor and Their Children (2007) and coedited
Neighborhood Poverty (1997),
Consequences of Growing Up Poor (1997) and, most recently,
Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances (2011). He was president of the Midwest Economics Association in 2004, the Population Association of America in 2008, and the Society for Research in Child Development (2009–2011). Duncan was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2010.
Richard J. Murnane, an economist, is the Thompson Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Before earning his Ph D in economics from Yale University, Murnane taught high school mathematics for three years. In recent years he has pursued three lines of research. With MIT professors Frank Levy and David Autor, he has examined how computer-based technological change has affected skill demands in the U.S. economy, and the effectiveness of educational policies in responding to changing skill demands. Murnane and Levy have written two books on this topic. The second line of research examines the sources of the growing gap in educational outcomes between children from low-income and higher-income families and the effectiveness of alternative strategies for improving the life chances low-income children. Murnane coedited (with Greg Duncan) the 2011 volume
Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances. The third line of research focuses on examining trends and patterns in U.S. high school graduation rates and their explanations. Murnane’s summary of the evidence on this topic was published in the June 2013 issue of the
Journal of Economic Literature. In 2011 Murnane and his colleague John Willett published the book
Methods Matter: Improving Causal Inference in Educational and Social Science Research.
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