April 19, 2010

School of Ed hosts event on ‘Closing the Achievement Gap’

The Johns Hopkins School of Education will host a discussion on “Closing the Achievement Gap” at 6:45 p.m. on Tuesday, April 27, in Gilchrist Hall on the Montgomery County Campus. Panelists will examine ways to improve educational opportunities for all students by identifying programs and strategies for raising achievement and closing gaps between white and minority students.

This is the second discussion in the school’s Shaping the Future series addressing the most challenging issues in public education.

A Q&A will follow remarks by panel members Robert Balfanz, a Johns Hopkins research scientist specializing in dropout prevention strategies and co-director of the university’s Everyone Graduates Center; Andy Smarick, a distinguished visiting fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute; Andrea Foggy-Paxton, a program officer for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; and Kalman “Buzzy” Hettleman, a former member of the Baltimore City School Board and author of It’s the Classroom Stupid: A Plan to Save America’s Schoolchildren. Mavis Sanders, a researcher and associate professor at Johns Hopkins, will serve as moderator.

More than 300 people attended the series’ first panel discussion, on the future of No Child Left Behind, held in December.

RSVPs for the April 27 event are encouraged and can be submitted online at education.jhu.edu/shaping-future.