The 74:
Walk into almost any classroom in America, and you’ll find at least some students who’ve fallen behind the academic standards for their grade — meaning they’re at risk of not learning everything they’ll need to be ready for college and the lives they want to lead. Helping these students get back on the path to grade-level proficiency is one of the most urgent challenges teachers face every day.
But as our organizations revealed in separate reports over the past year, it’s a challenge few schools and school systems have a real strategy to meet. By examining the quality and rigor of the work students are asked to do in class each day, our reports reached two conclusions — contradictory, at first glance — about the ways schools let struggling students down.