Dr. Fred Bonner II, Endowed Chair in Educational Leadership and Counseling in the Whitlowe R. Green College of Education, has been invited to join the faculty of the Achievement Gap Institute (AGI) at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College. AGI offers an intensive weeklong program comprised of interactive lectures and discussions. Dr. Bonner, along with leading researchers from across the nation, will gather at Peabody to guide discussions related to closing the achievement gap nationally and internationally.
About the AGI
Disparity in academic success is not a new phenomenon. In the mid-1960s, the Achievement Gap was named in a report commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education. The “Equality of Educational Opportunity” shined an ‘official’ light on what had been occurring in America’s schools before and since the landmark decision of Brown v. the Board of Education in 1954.
In a 2009 address to the National Action Network Convention, Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan recognized that “we have a crisis” in our educational system. And yet, there has never been more support allocated for our nation’s educational system as a whole in the tangible form of $100 billion. With half of the monies dedicated to pre-school, and the other half to K-16, the “education debt,” as researcher Gloria Ladson-Billings has reframed the notion of the achievement gap, can truly be affected. The Achievement Gap Institute is specifically focused on assisting educators and administrators in understanding and closing the achievement gap in their classrooms and school districts. Theoretical and practical in its design and delivery, the Achievement Gap Institute’s curriculum will probe the multifaceted roadblocks to achievement as well as generate solutions.
Institute faculty are nationally recognized scholars and researchers in the areas of giftedness and special education, diversity and multiculturalism, educational policy, access and equity, health and society, and teaching and learning.