Odds are stacked against so many children, but it's not all the schools' fault or responsibility.
========================================== >From tomorrow's NYT, NJ section Excerpt (228 words out of 1215): The federal No Child Left Behind law of 2002 rates schools based on how students perform on state standardized tests, and if too many children score poorly, the school is judged as failing. But how much is really the school's fault? A new study by the Educational Testing Service which develops and administers more than 50 million standardized tests annually, including the SAT concludes that an awful lot of those low scores can be explained by factors that have nothing to do with schools. The study, "The Family: America's Smallest School," suggests that a lot of the failure has to do with what takes place in the home . The E.T.S. researchers took four variables that are beyond the control of schools: The percentage of children living with one parent; the percentage of eighth graders absent from school at least three times a month; the percentage of children 5 or younger whose parents read to them daily, and the percentage of eighth graders who watch five or more hours of TV a day. What's interesting about the report which combines E.T.S. studies with research on families from myriad sources, including the Census Bureau and Child Trends research center is how much we know, how often government policy and parental behavior does not reflect that knowledge, and how stacked the odds are against so many children. The full article is here: In Gaps at School, Weighing Family Life - New York Times <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/09Rparentin\ g.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all&adxnnlx=1197126649-rQ6Ys\ 8MBLw9j2xRbSZU/rg> The primary source is at www.ets.org/familyreport <http://www.ets.org/familyreport> . ===================================================
