The Missing Piece in Strategies for Turning Around Underperforming Schools?

A recent brief from Chapin Hall argues for a new understanding of improving academic achievement in underperforming schools. Using findings from several Chapin Hall studies, the authors describe the challenges faced by vulnerable children—those who have experience disruptions in home life and are more likely to come into contact with public service systems—and the academic and behavioral changes they face in school. Providing evidence that a disproportionate number of these children attend underperforming schools, the authors discuss the disruption in classroom and school environment that can occur when teachers are not trained to work with vulnerable children. Successful strategies for improving underperforming schools, they argue, must include training for teachers to work with these youth, organization that allows schools to respond to their needs, and recognition in the field of education that “social support is not an ‘extra,’ but essential to student achievement.”

Policies to improve early grade level reading through investments in education and support of vulnerable families.