August 17, 2004

Profits & Poverty


Ruth's informative diary on the Long Range Planning Committee's inclusiveness goals provides context for C.K. Prahalad's interesting new book: The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. Eradicating Poverty Through Profits

He is a fierce critic of traditional top-down thinking on aid, by governments and non-governmental organisations alike. They tend to see the poor as victims to be helped, he says, not as people who can be part of the solution—and so their help often creates dependency. Nor does he pin much hope on the “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) programmes of many large companies. If you want serious commitment from a firm, he says, its involvement with the poor “can't be based on philanthropy or CSR”. The involvement of big business is crucial to eradicating poverty, he believes, but BOP markets must “become integral to the success of the firm in order to command senior management attention and sustained resource allocation.”
Learn more about the book here.

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Immersion better for kids than bilingual classes, study says

Louie Villalobos summarizes a recent study by the Arizona Department of Education:

The Arizona results showed students in immersion classes outperformed bilingual education students in every grade level between second and eighth grade in reading, language and math, based on Stanford 9 scores.

There starts to be a significant difference at the sixth-grade level, at which immersion students were more than one year ahead of the bilingual students in math.

By the eighth grade, there was at least a one-year difference in all three subjects.

"There is not a single exception," Horne said. "It tells us that the students in English immersion do substantially better."

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California State Test Scores Released

Nanette Asimov, Tanya Schevitz and Carrie Sturrock summarize the Golden State's latest 4th and 10th grade results:

Last spring, nearly 4.8 million students in grades 2 through 11 took the exam, which is considered tough because it measures the students' knowledge of what the state says they need to know about English, math, science and history.

Statewide, 36 percent of students scored "proficient" or "advanced" on the English portion, up from 35 percent last year. The remaining students scored below par, at "basic," "below basic" or "far below basic."

In math, proficiency inched up from 40.5 to 41.6 percent of students in grades 2 through 7 since last year. Older students, tested in a variety of math subjects, slipped in algebra and geometry.

Only 20 percent of low-income students were proficient in English, while among wealthier students, 50 percent were proficient. The rates were identical last year.

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Charter Schools Test Scores/Commentary

Barb Williams forwarded this article by Diana Jean Schemo:

The data shows fourth graders attending charter schools performing about half a year behind students in other public schools in both reading and math. Put another way, only 25 percent of the fourth graders attending charters were proficient in reading and math, against 30 percent who were proficient in reading, and 32 percent in math, at traditional public schools.

Because charter schools are concentrated in cities, often in poor neighborhoods, the researchers also compared urban charters to traditional schools in cities. They looked at low-income children in both settings, and broke down the results by race and ethnicity as well. In virtually all instances, the charter students did worse than their counterparts in regular public schools.

Additional Coverage:

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