Daniel Akst writes editorials for Newsday, the Long Island, New York daily.
He just wrote an excellent editorial.
Long island has some great schools that are the heart of their community.
It also has pockets of poverty.
This wise editorial educates the public.
Are American schools the best in the world? The answer is a resounding maybe — which is good news indeed for this back-to-school season.
Beating up on public education is practically our national sport. I often do it myself. But overlooked in the ongoing assault is strong evidence that U.S. schools actually are worldbeaters — except for the problem of poverty.
When it comes to reading, in fact, our schools may well be the best in the world. As Stanford University education professor Linda Darling-Hammond points out, U.S. 15-year olds in schools with fewer than 10 percent of kids eligible for free or cut-rate lunch “score first in the world in reading, outperforming even the famously excellent Finns.”
This 10 percent threshold is significant because, in high achieving countries such as Finland, few schools have more poor kids than that. In other words, if you look at American schools that compare socioeconomically, we’re doing great.
But wait, it gets better. U.S. schools where fewer than 25 percent are impoverished (by the same lunch measure) beat all 34 of the relatively affluent countries studied except South Korea and Finland. U.S. schools where 25 to 50 percent of students were poor still beat most other countries.
These results are from the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment, a widely followed effort to compare educational outcomes. PISA scores inspire a good deal of hand-wringing in this country — overall, we were 14th in reading — but I suspect we’ve been taking away the wrong message by not adjusting for poverty.
That’s odd, because most people know there’s a connection between poor families and poor school performance. The link is reflected in various sources, including the SAT, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and the Trends in International Math and Science Study.
So the connection, which exists in most countries, is clear. But somehow the implications haven’t been, and now that school is again upon us, it’s worth thinking this through. If American kids who aren’t poor are doing so well, maybe our problem isn’t bad teachers or inadequate school spending or indifferent parents or screen-besotted children. Maybe the problem is simply poverty — and the shameful fact that we have so much more of it than any comparable country.
How much child poverty are we living with? A study this year by UNICEF found a U.S. child poverty rate of 23.1 percent — way beyond any other economically advanced nation except Romania. In Spain, which is in a depression, the figure was 17.1 percent. In Canada it was 13.3. In Finland, 5.3.
If poverty is the problem, families in middle-class school districts needn’t worry much about their kids’ schools. But they should be worried about the society in which they live, for even if we have hearts of stone, we do not have heads made of the same material. Economic growth — to say nothing of a healthy democracy — depends on an educated citizenry, and we cannot afford to let a large segment of the populace embark on adulthood seriously underschooled.
Some education reformers, such as Diane Ravitch, understand poverty’s effects on our schools. Geoffrey Canada has launched the Harlem Children’s Zone Project to provide poor children with a comprehensive set of programs addressing both poverty and education. It’s an effort well worth watching.
If the problem with education in this country really is poverty, it will not be easy to fix. Yet that is no reason for kidding ourselves about what’s actually wrong.
Here’s the link for that editorial.
http://www.newsday.com/opinion/columnists/daniel-akst/akst-poverty-not-bad-teachers-is-what-plagues-our-schools-1.3925727
Bravo, David.
As I have posted before, the UNICEF figures are relative poverty rates, so households that are not counted as poor in Finland or Canada might well be counted as poor in the US. For cautions about using these measures of poverty the UNICEF publication itself is an excellent reference. There is a telling quote from the study:
“Hungary, Slovakia and Estonia, for example, are seen to have a smaller proportion of children living in relative poverty than the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, or the United States. Clearly, this is not because a smaller proportion of their children are poor in an absolute sense; it is because the incomes of most poor households in these former centrallyplanned economies do not fall as far behind the median level of income for the nation as a whole.”
The UNICEF report card can be found here: http://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/rc10_eng.pdf
It hurts to be relatively poor in America. A poor person in America may have more than a poor person in Somalia, but so what? What point are you making. It is a disgrace that nearly one-quarter of our children live in poverty. Being poor is highly predictive of absenteeism, truancy, dropping out, failing courses, having asthma, vision problems, hearing problems, dental problems, and being subjected to other harmful conditions. But it’s only relative.
Of course it hurts to be relatively poor. My point is that relative measures of poverty are not especially useful when making international comparisons. The UNICEF publication that is the source for the figures in the editorial makes that clear, but still people like the author of the editorial use these numbers without understanding how they are constructed or what they mean.
You see numbers. We see the faces of tired, hungry, sad children.
There lies the difference. TE, spend a year teaching in a school with a high poverty rate and your mantra will change.
You really don’t get it.
Linda- I do think I get it, but I want to get it as accurately as possible.
Knowing how the numbers are constructed also allows you to understand that the problems might be worse than the numbers indicate. The UNICEF report points out that the recession in Ireland only increased the number of children living in poverty by about 1% using their relative poverty measure. The more complete absolute measure of childhood poverty used by the Irish government increased by 7%.
What is your point? People who live in poverty face obstacles that others do not. Are there people who experience even more dire conditions than the “average” poor person in the United States? Of course! There are more than a few reasons for being careful what conclusions are drawn when comparing test scores internationally. There are plenty of reasons to be careful about what conclusions can be drawn within our own country.
Amen!!! We need more writers to say the same thing.
I appreciated the reminder that apples to apples compaarisons about poverty cant be made. A
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Thia does not discount the effect that poverty has just that it is not an exact comparison. I have known kids who had paper wealth but no food on the table due to drugged out parents and extremely poor kids with food and home made lunch ever day. Numbers cannnot paint the full picture no matter how good the analysis. But critiquing the method reaching that data is absolutely important at reaching some undrstanding of what questions need to be examined. Relative ooverty is psychologically less harmful than extreme haves to have nots. Not saying poverty is good just saying that critique of methods is always important as well to help suss out greater meaning interpretations that could point more accurately at fixes that will help.
“. . . or inadequate school spending. . . ” Oh, that’s not a problem. Come to my district to see how far $8350 per ADA (average daily attendance-notice that by using ADA data it raises the apparent $/student because if they actually calculated the average dollars per student it would lower the dollars per student, nice little accounting trick, eh).
Wow, in looking up my district’s data something has drastically changed. Last year at this time I looked up the student/teacher ratio and we were last with a 21/1 ratio. Now all of a sudden the S/T data has changed for the prior years and we are listed as 15/1, and that would be with having less teachers this year as we didn’t rehire 3.5 positions at the high school. Something is up, gonna have to look further into this. These two “fudges” of data appear to make it look like the schools have more resources than they actually do. I mean the data shouldn’t change that much in such a short period unless the methodology changed with a mind to make things look better. Very suspicious to me, but then again I’m just a paranoid conspiracy theorist at heart.
I am shocked. As a public school teacher on Long Island, Newsday hasn’t been our friend in many years. I have said that all teachers and their families should boycott the paper. Let’s see how long this insightful press continues. Sorry if I am skeptical.