Education in the Best Interests of the Child: A Children’s Rights Perspective on Closing the Achievement Gap (2013) by R. Brian Howe and Katherine Covell

In 1914, Ernest Hoag and Lewis Terman claimed that the provision of medical services in schools was "less a question of parental responsibility than of children's rights" (p.120).Theirs was one of many arguments for the primacy of children's welfare in education policy, but as Howe and Covell demonstrate, education in the developed world still is not based on this principle.Indeed, they argue that "underachievement, disengagement, and inequality of opportunity" are extensive problems precisely because education does not occur in the best interests of the child, an approach that is central to the laws and policies governing custody, child labor, health care, and other areas affecting children's well-being.This argument for educational improvement through social justice provides a thorough refutation of the "heroic action" policies advocated recently (and perhaps most visibly) in the documentary, Waiting for 'Superman ' (2010).According to Howe and Covell, the process of education reform is not a pitched battle between plucky crusaders and the bad teachers, implacable unions, and indifferent administrators who oppose them, but neither is it based on impassioned teachers who can inspire even the most disadvantaged kids under any circumstances dramatized in such films as Freedom Writers (2007) and Dangerous Minds (1995).Such portrayals make for compelling stories but poor policies, and films like Entre les Murs (2008) remind us that the complex interactions of children, teachers, and administrators too often take place in a school environment defined by deep socio-economic inequities and substantial cultural divides.Education in the Best Interests of the Child is an argument not for heroic efforts but for socio-political change, for structural reform rather than individual action.Like others who see the achievement gap as a problem of political economy, Howe and Covell do not suggest that education reform alone is sufficient to close it.But neither do they conclude, as some education scholars have, that "the adversities associated with being reared in poverty are simply too great for schools to overcome" (p.192).Rather, they suggest that "it perhaps is not a question of whether schools can close the achievement gap, but one of how families and communities can support schools in closing the achievement gap" (p.193), something that requires both education reform and improved social and economic support for disadvantaged families and communities.The challenge is not in effecting ideological change but in building the political will to enact the equality of opportunity that most societies in the developed world already embrace in principle.

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