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Closing the Opportunity Gap

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Closing the Opportunity Gap

What America Must Do to Give Every Child an Even Chance

Closing the Opportunity Gap brings together top experts who offer evidence-based essays that paint a powerful picture of denied opportunities. They also describe sensible, research-based policy approaches to enhance opportunities.

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Meet the authors & experts

  • Author photo of W. Steven Barnett

    W. Steven Barnett

  • Author photo of Clive Belfield

    Clive Belfield

  • Author photo of Barnett Berry

    Barnett Berry

  • Author photo of Prudence L. Carter

    Prudence L. Carter

  • Author photo of Linda Darling-Hammond

    Linda Darling-Hammond

  • Author photo of Patricia Gándara

    Patricia Gándara

  • Author photo of Harvey Kantor

    Harvey Kantor

  • Author photo of Gloria Ladson-Billings

    Gloria Ladson-Billings

  • Author photo of Cynthia Esposito Lamy

    Cynthia Esposito Lamy

  • Author photo of Henry M. Levin

    Henry M. Levin

  • Authorphoto of Daniel J. Losen

    Daniel J. Losen

  • Author photo of Robert Lowe

    Robert Lowe

  • Author photo of Michele S. Moses

    Michele S. Moses

  • Author photo of Gary Orfield

    Gary Orfield

  • Author photo of John Rogers

    John Rogers

  • Author photo of Richard Rothstein

    Richard Rothstein

  • Author photo of Janelle Scott

    Janelle Scott

  • Author photo of Christopher H. Tienken

    Christopher H. Tienken

  • Author photo of Karolyn Tyson

    Karolyn Tyson

  • Author photo of Amy Stuart Wells

    Amy Stuart Wells

  • Author photo of Keven G. Welner

    Kevin G. Welner

  • Author photo of Yong Zhao

    Yong Zhao

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Policy Recommendations

Our authors and experts put together this list of policies to help policy makers and their staffs get started on closing the Opportunity Gap.

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Latest Press Release

On the 30th Anniversary of the Report “A Nation at Risk” New Book and Campaign on Closing the Opportunity Gap Announced in Remarks to the National Press Club (4/25)

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Success Stories

Here are several examples of how communities around the country are making progress closing the Opportunity Gap.

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Publisher's Toolkit

Access more information about “Opportunity Gap: What America Must Do to Give Every Child an Even Chance” published by Oxford University Press here.

What people are saying

Kris D. Gutiérrez

Inaugural Provost's Chair and Professor of Learning Sciences

University of Colorado Boulder

Schooling, at its best, is about creating new futures for our children. Closing the Opportunity Gap describes education as it is and provides a vision of education as it should be. The book provides a powerful critique of the educational and social policies and practices that exacerbate the widening economic disparity between rich and poor and the growing opportunity gap for too many of our nation's youth. The authors' analyses of educational inequity and their focus on opportunity to learn offer a much needed blueprint and a new social imagination about schooling in the U.S.

Jeannie Oakes

Director of Education and Scholarship

Ford Foundation

As policymakers and education leaders seek to pick up the pieces of a public education system tattered by No-Child-Left-Behind style reform, Carter and Welner's book brings clear-eyed analyses of failure and of future possibilities. In one highly readable volume, the nation's leading scholars provide evidence-based accounts of the root causes, everyday realities, and long-term consequences of the nation's weightiest educational problem-profound inequality in and out of school. And, most important, they offer comprehensive, insightful, and useful remedies. Those seeking new concepts and strategies for creating the public schools our diverse nation desperately needs and deserves need look no further than this astonishing book.