So when you hear politicians and pundits blaming teachers for the fact that so few inner city kids graduate from high school and so many of them end up in prisons, what you're hearing is a great, big, fat denial from the elite of our society to take any responsibility whatsoever for the welfare of the least-served in our society. As Richard Rothstein from the Economic Policy Institute explained earlier this week, "Making teacher quality the focus distracts us from the biggest threat to student achievement in the current age: our unprecedented economic catastrophe and its effect on parents and their children's ability to gain from higher-quality schools." (h/t: Keneth Libbey, Schools Matter)
" Consider the implications of this catastrophe for our aspirations to close the black-white achievement gap. The national unemployment rate remains close to an unacceptably high 10%. But 15% of all black children now have an unemployed parent compared to 8.5% of white children. If we also include children whose parents have become so discouraged that they have given up looking for work, and children whose parents are working part-time because they can't find full-time work, we find that 37% of black children have an unemployed or underemployed parent compared to 23% of white children. Over half of all black children have a parent who has either been unemployed or underemployed during the past year. Thirty-six percent of black children now live in poverty.
The consequences of this social disaster for schools are apparent, and include:
Greater geographic disruption: Families become more mobile because they can no longer afford to keep up with rent or mortgage payments. They are in overcrowded housing; they often have to double up with relatives in apartments that were already too small. Children have no quiet place to study or do homework. They switch schools more often, fall behind in the curriculum, and lose the connection with teachers who know them well enough to adapt instruction to their individual strengths and weaknesses. Inner-city schools themselves are thrown into turmoil because classes must frequently be reconstituted as enrollment rises and falls with family mobility. Even the highest-quality teachers cannot fully insulate their students from the effects of this disruption.
Greater hunger and malnutrition: When more parents lose employment, their income plummets and food insecurity grows. More children come to school hungry and/or inadequately nourished and are less able to focus on schoolwork. Attentive teachers realize that one of the best predictors of how their students will perform is what they had for breakfast, if anything at all.
Greater stress: Families where parents are unemployed are under greater psychological stress. Such parents, no matter how well-intentioned, often become more arbitrary in their discipline and less supportive of their children. Children from families in such stress are more likely to act out in school and are less able to progress academically. The ability to comfort and support such students may be a more important indicator of a teacher's quality than her students' test scores, which may still be lower than the scores of students coming from stable and secure homes.
Poorer health: Families where parents lose employment are also more likely to lose health insurance. Their children are less likely to get routine and preventive health care and more likely to miss school days because of illness. They are less likely to get symptomatic treatment for illnesses like asthma, the most common cause of chronic school absenteeism. Children with asthma, even when they attend school, are more likely to come to school irritable, having been up at night with breathing difficulty.
All these consequences of unacceptably high unemployment rates for disadvantaged parents contribute to depressing student achievement for their children. It is obtuse to expect to narrow the achievement gap in such circumstances. It is fanciful for national policy makers to pick this moment to raise their expectations for academic achievement from children of families in such stress and to single out teacher quality as the culprit most deserving of their public attention."
So, while the education community alerts our society to the disastrous effects of poverty, effects that they are apt to see firsthand, more so than anyone else because of their work on the frontlines of one of our society's grandest collaborative endeavors, what's the response from Beltway crowd leading the finger-pointing at educators?
Also this week, edu-busybody Joanne Jacobs did us the favor of rounding up all the reform enthusiasts who reject any attempts to address poverty. While those intimately involved in running schools want to point to the effects of poverty, the corporate side of education reform desperately wants to look the other way. Their contention is that "poverty, moreover, isn't getting solved by Monday morning. But students will be in school Monday morning. And as all reasonable people acknowledge, both poverty and schools matter. So this leads to the more specific question of what should we do about poverty in terms of education." (emphasis original)
Around the corner from where these thinktank operatives opine from their comfy chairs what really works to address poverty "in terms of education" was revealed in the affluent neighborhood of Montgomery County Maryland. And what really works is that low-income kids do better when they attend affluent schools.
"The debate over reforming public education has focused mostly on improving individual schools through better teaching and expanded accountability efforts. But the study, to be released Friday, addresses the potential impact of policies that mix income levels across several schools or an entire district. And it suggests that such policies could be more effective than directing extra resources at higher-poverty schools."
So "in terms of education" why isn't our DC-based leadership eschewing the band-aid on cancer crowd and doing more to ensure that poor kids come to school with the same levels of nutrition, support, and background as their more affluent peers have? As Richard Kahlenberg from the Century Foundation, put it "Shouldn't an administration focused on 'what works' spend less time thinking about charter school lotteries and more time considering the kinds of lotteries that let children in public housing live in a middle-class neighborhood, attend superb middle-class schools, and make very large achievement gains?" (h/t: Laura Varlas, ASCD Inservice)
For instance, even the conservative US Chamber of Commerce supports early childhood education , something that research proves has long-term positive effects on student achievement. So why not start the policy discussion there?
Instead, the Washington Consensus wants to bring back the "culture of poverty myth" which insists that poor people deserve their circumstances because of behavioral attitudes. As this week's New York Times article reported, the ruling class in politics and business want to bring back "the notion of a monolithic and unchanging culture of poverty," despite the reality that "growing up in areas where violence limits socializing outside the family and where parents haven't attended college stunts verbal ability, lowering I.Q. scores by as much as six points, the equivalent of missing more than a year in school."
As Alyssa Battistoni questioned at Salon.com "Culture . . . doesn't exist in a vacuum, and we often conflate structural forces with values. If parents aren't reading to their children at a young age, for example, is it because they don't value education or because they never learned to read well themselves? When an estimated 15% of the population is functionally illiterate, and around 30% of functionally illiterate adults are poor, does a lack of books in the household still count as a cultural factor?"
So yes, higher education attainment matters. But poverty matters more. And efforts to obtain the former are going to continue to be flummoxed by the latter. Until the Washington Consensus changes.
This Week's Duncehat Award: Joel Klein
Oh no, not again. Now NYC mayor Joel Klein wants to publically humiliate school teachers by revealing student test score data. Didn't he read about how this worked the first time around? |
