Gene Bottoms and Kathleen Carpenter, Southern Regional Education Board
May 2003
Last month, the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) came out with a research brief that seeks to explain the factors affecting math achievement in rural schools. Unsurprisingly, the authors found significant gaps today - urban/rural, black/white, etc. But they also found that both black and white students performed better when exposed to a more rigorous college prep curriculum and when teachers held the students to high expectations, which currently teachers seem more apt to do more for whites than blacks. These findings lend support to the NCLB notion that holding all children to the same high standards improves the educational opportunities for even the most low-performing students. It's an interesting, if not earth-shattering, report, which you can find at http://www.sreb.org/programs/hstw/publications/briefs/03V04_ResearchBrief_Math.pdf.
