PLURAL NOUN have big, clear PLURAL NOUN . They want to be PLURAL NOUN and PLURAL NOUN , PLURAL NOUN , artists, and athletes. NUMBER BETWEEN 1 100 percent of students we surveyed aspire to attend college, and NUMBER BETWEEN 1 100 percent of high schoolers have career goals that require at least a college degree. Most students VERB in school— but are still not ready to succeed after school. In the nearly 1,000 lessons we observed, students were working on activities related to class NUMBER BETWEEN 1 100 percent of the time. They met the demands of their assignments NUMBER BETWEEN 1 100 percent of the time, and more than half brought home "A"s and "B"s. Yet students only demonstrated mastery of grade-level standards on their assignments NUMBER BETWEEN 1 100 percent of the time.
Students spend most of their time in school without access to four key resources:
grade-appropriate assignments,
strong instruction,
deep engagement,
and teachers who hold high expectations.
Students spent more than 500 hours per school year on that weren’t appropriate for their grade and with NOUN that didn’t ask enough of them—the equivalent of six months of wasted class time in each core subject. And students reported that their school experiences were engaging just NUMBER BETWEEN 1 100 percent of the time overall. Students of color, those from low-income families, English language learners, and students with mild to moderate disabilities have even less access to these resources than their peers.
For example, classrooms that served predominantly students from ADJECTIVE backgrounds spent twice as much time on grade-appropriate assignments and five times as much time with strong instruction, compared to classrooms with predominantly students from ADJECTIVE backgrounds. When students who started the year behind grade level had access to stronger instruction, they closed gaps with their peers by six months. Classrooms with higher levels of engagement gained about NUMBER BETWEEN 1 12 months of learning. In classrooms where teachers held higher expectations, students gained more than four months. The relationships between the resources and student outcomes were even stronger in classrooms where students started the year off behind. When students who started the year behind grade level had access to stronger instruction, for example, they closed gaps with their peers by NUMBER BETWEEN 1 12 months; in classrooms with more grade-appropriate assignments, those gaps closed by more than NUMBER BETWEEN 1 12 months.
In short, students and their families have been deeply misled. We talk about school as a series of small opportunities for students—to show up, work hard, earn good grades—that add up to much bigger ones later in life. When students don’t find the opportunities they were promised on the other side of the graduation stage, we assume they or their families must have done something to blow their big chance, or that they were simply reaching too high. Yet we found NOUN after NOUN filled with "A" and "B" students whose big goals for their lives were slipping further away each day, unbeknownst to them and their families—not because they couldn’t learn what they needed to reach them, but because they were rarely given a real chance to try. That’s the opportunity myth. It means that at every grade level, in every district, for students of every demographic background, school is not honoring their aspirations or setting them up for NOUN. Let’s be clear: Teachers alone are not responsible for this myth—either GERUND (VERB ENDING IN it or GERUND (VERB ENDING IN it. At every level of the education sector, from classrooms to statehouses, from schools of education to nonprofit offices, adults make daily choices that perpetuate a cycle of inequity and mediocrity in our schools. ADVERB or not, we choose to let many students do NOUN that’s far below their grade level. We could make different choices—choices that could make a real difference in the short term, without an infusion of new funding, as well as those that will lay the groundwork for deeper structural change. These are the kinds of choices that could make the difference between students becoming a nurse, or leaving that dream unfulfilled. We must choose, in other words, to VERB the opportunity myth.
