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RESOURCE ORGANIZATIONS

The Minority Student Achievement Network
The Minority Student Achievement Network is a national coalition of 22 multiracial and relatively affluent suburban school districts that have come together to study the disparity in achievement between white students and students of color through intensive research. The Network was established to discover, develop, and implement the means to ensure high academic achievement of minority students.

National Equity Assistance Centers
This is a group of 10 regional centers around the country that investigate and provide technical assistance dealing with issues of equity in education. Regional Centers provide a variety of services including workshops, seminars, conferences, technical assistance, information dissemination and professional development.

Metro Center for Urban Education
The Metro Center in the Steinhardt School of Education at New York University has pioneered programs that bring equality of opportunity to all youth. The Center has developed projects that succeed in raising performance and achievement levels of both students and educators. It has established initiatives to help students cope with the pressures caused by a rapidly changing society and expanding technologies. Pedro Noguera is the Center’s Executive Director.

Education Trust
The Education Trust works for the high academic achievement of all students at all levels, kindergarten through college, and forever closing the achievement gaps that separate low-income students and students of color from other youth. Their basic tenet is that all children will learn at high levels when they are taught to high levels. The Education Trust advances its mission along several fronts, from raising its voice in national and state policy debates to helping teachers improve instruction in their classrooms. Their work maintains a relentless focus on improving the education of all students, and particularly those students whom the system has traditionally left behind.

Council of the Great City Schools (CGCS)
Great City Schools is a coalition of 64 of the nation's largest urban public school systems. Founded in 1956 and incorporated in 1961, the Council is located in Washington D.C., where it works to promote urban education through legislation, research, media relations, instruction, management, technology, and other special projects designed to improve the quality of urban education. The Council serves as the national voice for urban educators, providing ways to share promising practices and address common concerns for closing the achievement gaps.

The Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium (MAEC)
The mission of the MAEC, a not-for-profit corporation, is to create learning environments free of race, gender, class, ethnic and cultural biases so that students of all backgrounds will have equal opportunities to flourish. MAEC provides technical assistance to superintendents, principals, teachers and parents in the Mid-Atlantic region related to school improvement.

Learning Point Associates
Learning Point Associates provides a great reference tool for articles on the achievement gap in the United States.

ARTICLES AND PUBLICATIONS

Ed Week Research
In the No Child Left Behind section of the EdWeek website you can link to a number of brief but thorough, research-based background essays on relevant education issues in America today, including closing the achievement gap. Each page includes links to research citations, to definitions of related education terms, and to relevant stories from the Education Week and Teacher Magazine archives.

In Motion Magazine
The Education Rights section of In Motion Magazine, which is edited by Pedro Noguera, is dedicated to providing a forum for activists, educators, parents and students who are searching for alternative ideas to the challenges confronting education today. Many articles by Dr. Noguera are featured.

Sonia Nieto
Dr. Sonia Nieto’s website at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, contains many of her insightful articles on multiculturalism and diversity in education. Her site also has a resource list, with information on organizations around the country working to create curriculum to help address the diversity challenges in schools.

Parsing the Achievement Gap: Baselines for Tracking Progress This 2003 study from the Policy Information Center of the Education Testing Service presents the links between student achievement and core factors often related to students’ racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic status.

Learning from Poor and Minority Students Who Succeed in School
This article from the Ed Letter at Harvard Graduate School of Education addresses children's views on success and failure having a big impact on their learning. This study gives us a clear glimpse into the ways in which high and low achievers think about the causes of their successes and failures in school. The most important implication for teachers in their day-to-day work is that all lower achievers, regardless of ethnicity, are at risk for believing that their poor performance results from lack of ability. This belief is potentially very debilitating, for if students do not think they have at least some ability, it makes little sense to them to invest effort in their learning. The challenge for teachers is to help their students maintain a healthy balance between believing that they have the ability necessary to learn, and knowing that effort will help them maximize their ability.

The Civil Rights Project at Harvard
The Civil Rights Project (CRP) is a leading organization devoted to civil rights research. It has found eager collaborators among researchers nationwide, and wide open doors among advocacy organizations, policymakers and journalists. Current research interests related to K-12 education include the impacts and benefits of racial and ethnic diversity in education, racial disparities in policies and practices related to special education and school discipline, and resegregation trends and remedies in our nation's public schools

It Takes More Than Testing: Closing the Achievement Gap
This 2001 report from the Center on Education Policy reviews and summarizes the research on the achievement gap between white students and black and Hispanic students; highlights possible remedies for the gap; and suggests an approach that policymakers can use to weigh the various proposals for closing the gap.

Time To Move On: African-American and White Parents Set an Agenda for Public Schools

Teachers College Record
A rich collective of relevant papers regarding race and schooling.

Frame Work for a Race Equality Policy for Schools
This framework sets out the main parts of a race equality policy.