The Broader Bolder Approach to Education is a national campaign that acknowledges the impact of social and economic disadvantage on schools and students and proposes evidence-based policies to improve schools and remedy conditions that limit many children’s readiness to learn.

Read the BBA Mission Statement and Accountability Statement to learn more. Use the BBA short video and infographic to spread the word. Access the new BBA report, Market-Oriented Reforms' Rhetoric Trumps Reality, and executive summary, here.

  • Quality early childhood education prepares children for kindergarten and establishes a strong, rich foundation for later development and learning.

  • Health and nutrition supports ensure that children come to school immunized, well fed, and without toothaches or acute asthma attacks that prevent them from focusing and learning.

    After- and summer-school enrichment provides space to do and help with homework, adult support and mentoring, and the academic, cultural, and recreational activities that are needed to develop creative thinkers, informed voters, and civic leaders.

  • Accountability systems support and enhance good teaching and leadership and offer effective ways of identifying excellent teachers to mentor peers and weak teachers who should switch jobs.

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BBA's Research Base

The BBA Bibliography provides synopses of seminal research works that demonstrate how living in poverty impedes educational attainment and the efficacy of a broader, bolder approach to education.

Current policy initiatives are misguided because they either deny or set to the side a basic body of evidence documenting that students from disadvantaged households on average perform less well in school than those from more advantaged families.

From Education and Poverty: Confronting the Evidence by Helen Ladd

View the full BBA Bibliography


News Feature

Become a Signatory

In addition to the high-profile original signatories, many of whom helped to draft BBA's mission statement, hundreds of people from across the country who agree with BBA’s mission continue to sign on. Join them!


Broader, BOLDER Approach to Education

Contact us at info@boldapproach.org

Press inquires should be directed to:
Economic Policy Institute, Media Relations Department
(202) 775-8810 or news@epi.org.