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Over the past week, Public School Insights has been interviewing the distinguished co-chairs of the high-profile task force behind a new campaign calling for a "Broader, Bolder Approach to Education."  As we noted in an earlier post, the task force is advocating for a set of policies to reform schools while offsetting the social and economic disadvantages that contribute to academic achievement gaps.

I recently spoke with campaign co-chair Helen Ladd, a prominent professor of economics and public policy at Duke University.  Like co-chairs Pedro Noguera and Tom Payzant, Ladd argues that schools alone cannot close achievement gaps--The nation needs aggressive school reform strategies as well as policies to minimize the impact of poverty on student performance.

Ladd told me that her experience as a researcher compelled her to join the task force.  Reflecting on years of research into specific school reform strategies, she insists that "none...is a panacea"--though it remains essential to pursue the most promising reform efforts, such as efforts to ensure poor and minority students access to the most effective teachers and administrators,   Still, Ladd argues, the available evidence strongly supports the case for a more comprehensive approach to improving the lot of poor children and children of color.

You can listen to highlights from our interview here (5 minutes), or check out the transcript below:

You can also download the entire 18-minute interview here.

PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS:  What do you think is the general significance of the task force's statement?

LADD:  Schools can't do it alone.  We need to have schools-plus.  We need to have the schools getting better, but we also need to address some of these other social and health issues that have direct impacts on children's ability to learn from what we all want to be improved schools.

PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS:  Could people argue that you're, in a sense, letting schools off the hook?

LADD:  We actually want to keep schools on the hook.  It's just we want to make it possible for-or more possible for-them to do the job we need them to do.  And that's why we bring in these social and health-related and out-of-school sorts of considerations.  We need to push hard on both fronts and then link the two fronts in a coherent way.

I think it would be a disaster for us to push some of the things the task force is pushing, such as better support for families when kids are between zero and five, and pre-school...It'd be a disaster if we invested in that and then didn't have the schools ready for these kids-[if we didn't] improve the quality of teachers teaching kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, if we didn't keep pressure on schools through accountability to make sure that they're doing as well as they can with every child. 

I'm a researcher.  So I've looked at lots of different reform strategies.  I've looked a lot at accountability.  And what comes up, over and over again, is that none of these [reforms are] a panacea.  If you look at accountability as it's been practiced across states over the last ten years or so, at best you find small positive impacts on math achievement.  But very mixed impacts on black-white test score gaps.  Some slightly positive impacts on Hispanic-white [test score gaps].  The one area where I'm quite adamant about where I think we could make some real gains is the qualifications of teachers teaching low-income kids. 

But I put that there as background.  So I look at the school reform efforts and they can have some positive impacts, and we need to keep working hard at trying to improve schools.  So let me just say a word or two about the other problems.

The situation for many low-income families today is quite different than it's been in the past.  If you go back 30 years ago, you'd find that two out of three children were growing up in a home where there was a stay-at-home parent.  Now, it's less than one out of four.  It's also the case that one out of four children is growing up in a single-parent family where the parent works.  So it's that type of data that pushes me toward these other policies.

I've been looking at some of the international data recently.  The Netherlands are interesting, because they do well above average on international tests.  But the striking thing about the Netherlands is, among a group of 21 rich countries, the Netherlands is top in terms of child well-being.  I can't tell you that it's the fact that they're top in terms of child well-being that makes them do so well academically.  But then you contrast that with the U.S.  The U.S. is 20 out of 21st in this UNICEF 2007 Study of Child Well-Being, and we also don't do particularly well on a lot of these international tests. 

PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS:  Do you think that the task force has a vision for coordination between in-school and out-of-school services?

LADD:  We have not done the design work, the hard work.  I'm not sure if we should do it, because how these things ought to be coordinated is going to have to vary across states and, in many cases, across districts. 

We'd love to have the federal government be involved in promoting different forms of collaboration and ways of proceeding, some of which are already going on in lots of states.  My state of North Carolina has already done lots of good things under the leadership of Governor Hunt and then, subsequently, Governor Easley; we think more of this should be happening, and the precise form of it will have to vary across states.

We hope leaders at all levels will understand this and take some leadership. We're hoping to start these conversations, and we hope some leaders at all levels will take note.