To answer this question, Reaching Higher NH set out on a two-year project to explore how family, community, and statewide factors impact learning, and begin to unpack how we can best support our students.
The project, called “The Whole Picture of Public Education,” aims to widen the aperture of our understanding of public education in our state. There is considerable power in family and community factors on student outcomes in school, specifically a family’s income/economic status, and the overall educational attainment of a community in which the student lives. When students walk through their school door every day, they carry with them all their experiences – small and great: a nutritious breakfast, a sleepless night, a chronic illness, excitement over an after-school activity, anxiety over their family situation, and so much more.
Education is more comprehensive and nuanced than a school building, a teacher, or even a student in an academic setting – it reflects and involves the entire community and context in which a student is learning and growing up. Our schools serve as hubs of learning – but they also have unique and unparalleled opportunities to address systemic barriers, helping to ensure that children arrive to class positioned and able to learn.
The project explores the factors that influence learning with several tools:
- A comprehensive report, which uses five stories of New Hampshire families to guide readers through the project’s core findings and encourages them to consider their real-life implications;
- Interactive data visualizations, which allow users to explore and ask questions of the data; and,
- Community and school district profiles, which help individuals build a better understanding of their own communities (to be released soon).
A question we often hear is: why should we care about our schools and the broader context in which our students are learning – especially if we no longer have, or never had, children in NH’s public schools? The reality is, income and educational attainment are increasingly inextricably linked. Today, two out of three jobs demand a minimum of some education beyond high school – compared to the reverse, just fifty years ago. Educational attainment is now critical to career and, therefore, income advancement. The combination of overall income and educational attainment levels in a community play critical roles in that community’s economic trajectory – and, the overall long-term economic vitality of our state.
This means that New Hampshire public schools are the builders of our state’s future. Supporting our public schools is one of the most important ways to ensure that our students become contributing, productive members of society. It is also one of the most important ways to ensure that the economic future of New Hampshire is strong. The students of today will drive the future vitality of our state, and thriving schools will help to build the essential knowledge and skills so critical to success in the 21st century.
Our New Hampshire
Throughout the project, we guide readers through the findings using five profiles of New Hampshire families — segments called Our New Hampshire. We invite you to consider the following:
What do you picture when you think of “education”? Perhaps it is a classroom you were once in and the decorations on the wall, a teacher you had, an assignment you completed, or some other direct experience from your own time in school. Or maybe it’s an indirect experience – if you’re a parent, you might think about your child’s teacher or school building, the drop off line, or the last parent teacher conference you attended. We think of these images because they are familiar, and most of us have, or have had at one point in our lives, these types of educational experiences. Throughout this report, we draw on these experiences to paint a portrait of how public education affects us all, using five snapshots of families across New Hampshire. These snapshots portray our many hopes and challenges, and demonstrate how these families impact, and are impacted by, public education.
To that end, representing every family scenario would not be possible. Instead, we have woven together these snapshots by drawing upon the real experiences of a diversity of Granite Staters with whom we have met. While the stories reflect actual experiences, the names included in this report are fictional. The family profiles do not mention specific towns because we hope that you can connect with at least one of these stories, either through personal experience or through fellow community members, regardless of where you live in the state.
Click on the images below to learn more about our families. When you read through the findings, click the “Examining Our Findings with an Our NH Snapshot” boxes to read the story associated with each finding.
This is the first part of our comprehensive analysis on student learning in New Hampshire, called The Whole Picture of Public Education. Check out more of our series:
- Part two: How economic security affects our youngest learners
- Part three: Harnessing the power of our communities for the benefit of our students
- Part four: How do our teachers, classrooms, and other factors influence student learning?
Check out our other resources and tools:
- A comprehensive report, which uses five stories of New Hampshire families to guide readers through the project’s core findings and encourages them to consider their real-life implications;
- Interactive data visualizations, which allow users to explore and ask questions of the data;
- Community and school district profiles, which help individuals build a better understanding of their own communities (to be released soon); and,
- The methodology of the study, including appendices for our statistical models.
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