| According to AP, the US Department of Education has "found that the percent of high poverty schools rose from 12 to 17 percent between the 1999-2000 and 2007-2008 school years, even before the current recession was fully felt."
There are now 16,122 schools in America classified as "high poverty."
Attending a high-poverty school presents a number of statistical disadvantages. Kids in high-poverty schools are much less apt to graduate high school and attend college. And as the Center for American Progress reported this week, kids in high-poverty schools are much less apt to be taught by experienced teachers with advanced degrees.
The fact that there is a strong correlation between high rates of poverty and low performance on standardized tests is widely known.
And while the bad news about the state of schools in cities like Detroit, Kansas City, and Chicago continues to pile up, much less has been said about the fact that schools in rural America may be in even worse shape.
One would think that concerns over this inequality between schools of the affluent and the increasing numbers of high-poverty schools would be the emphasis of the discussion among our leaders in DC. But instead, all the rhetoric this week continued to be about how failing schools need to be forced into "turnaround" mode.
In Arne Duncan's proposal to turn around the nation's struggling schools, never once does he mention the need to address poverty's effects on schools and academic achievement. And his four turnaround models won't work in impoverished rural areas or inner cities where the schools are already scarce and experienced staff have all fled to higher paying districts.
At last, some skepticism on Capitol Hill about the direction of the Obama administration's education policy has started to surface. And in Representative Judy Chu there is at least one prominent challenge from Democratic legislators.
But as more and more of the discussion about education policy in America gravitates around "turnaround," it's looking more and more like what's really going on is "turning our backs."
What's making that easier for some people is evident in a new report from the Brookings Institution showing that the gap between how well white kids perform in school compared to minorities continues to be a canyon, and America is heading for an increasingly sharp "demographic conflict."
"Said Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at Brookings, 'The population of people who bear the primary burden of paying for education but with no other stake in it ... is growing.'
The report notes an increased segment of the population is made up of older adults without school-age children, who tend to be wealthier, and white, in contrast to the growth of poor and immigrant children from nonwhite families.
'The paying and voting public," he said, 'won't have the same emotional connection to schools as the public attending them.'"
So what will it be America? As we all head off to Memorial Day festivities. Will we continue to shove schools into the gladiator ring of "race to the top"? Or will we change the policy direction to a "race to equity" that brings "some of the most impoverished schools up to the material and pedagogical conditions of the most effective public schools?" (h/t The Frustrated Teacher)
Editorial Note: My Weekly Duncehat Award for the stupidest commentary on education is taking a holiday off today. Watch for it to return with avengence next Sunday. |
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