Key points:
- Relationships are critical to students’ future success
- Schools play an integral role in facilitating relationship-building
- See related article: 10 things schools need to do to build students’ networks
The research is clear: Connections are game changers in helping young people from low-income households achieve upward economic mobility later in life.
The critical role that relationships play in the opportunity equation was well-documented in political scientist Robert Putnam’s 2015 book, Our Kids. Putnam’s argument was further confirmed in recent, large-scale research by Harvard economist Raj Chetty and his team at Opportunity Insights, who mined 21 billion data points from de-identified Facebook data to discover that cross-class connections were a leading predictor of upward mobility in adulthood. The analysis also offered school-level data charting “economic connectedness”–or lack thereof–within individual high schools and colleges across the country.…Read More