One reader says that schools and teachers can lift children out of poverty. He says it is happening.
This reader dissents.
To be clear, and I think the writer of this post would agree, teachers and schools save children’s lives every day. Poor kids can succeed. Poor kids can make it into Harvard, thanks to their grit and the support of family and teachers.
But that is not the norm, and it never will be. Teachers alone, no matter how great they are, can’t overcome poverty. Thinking that it is so doesn’t make it so. Saying that it is so doesn’t make it so. As this reader says, tests always produce results correlated with income.
The irony of reform today is that it relies on the one measure guaranteed to reflect family income: standardized tests.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Children raised in poverty are often behind their age cohorts from more affluent homes where parents are more engaged in the intellectual nurturance of their children. Because standardized test results are given to age cohorts (i.e.”grade levels”), children raised in poverty lag. If we used a mastery model for testing and administered the tests when children were academically prepared, children raised in poverty would perform much better. One of the biggest problems with our standardized testing regimen is that it reinforces the factory model of education where every child is supposed to learn every subject at the same rate and if they fall short of the mark it is the child’s fault…. or now the teacher’s fault. We need to re-form the “efficient” age-based grade organization of schools.
Aren’t the deformers always speaking disparagingly about the factory model? Yet, their testing program is geared toward a factory model of measurement!
With great concentrated wealth comes great concentrated poverty. Impoverished children penned into segregated, underfunded public schools are 100% at risk for all the social calamities affecting the poor: malnutrition, teen pregnancy, high school dropout, random violence, police brutality, etc. But, 100% DO NOT get demolished by these hostile social conditions. Some poor kids will rise no matter how much bad is done to them or how little good is done for them. For various reasons, a percentage of poor kids do rise in class status to stable working-class jobs, middle-class occupations, or even professional adult lives. Most will not rise according to data on class mobility. Up the class ladder, affluent kids are exposed to less risk and more investment at school and at home in their development, which we already know. This starts them in life at 2nd or 3rd base. For sure, an ethical democracy is obliged to invest the same in all its children, not merely the already-privileged ones. It is simple decency and social justice to provide all children with what they need, especially in a society like ours which is drowning in vast wealth at the top. Poverty is destiny, yes, because it puts all poor kids at risk, but the very best schooling we know how to provide is a moral imperative we are obliged to provide to all kids, and it is a social asset which indeed improves the lives of poor kids.
To tell families or children that poverty is destiny is irresponsible at best. Of course it depends on what you mean by destiny. That typically means it is meant to be and there is no other option unless they are just plain lucky. However that just doesn’t make sense in my experience.
I understand the correlation of low test scores and poverty — completely get it. It’s terrible and unjust. We need to, as a nation, confront the realities of poverty. When we do our families and children will be better off.
However just because poverty is predictive doesn’t mean that schools and teachers can’t have a significant effect — one that actually takes a large number of low-income children and gets them through college even though their parents may not have ever been. Isn’t it true that if a low-income child progresses through school and graduates from college they are very likely to have broken the cycle of poverty? Standardized test scores are simply one way to see how on track our children are to college.
I know it is happening. I see the transformation every day.
Instead of calling poverty destiny, why don’t we just try to take the effective practices of teachers and schools and replicate them?
We have to make changes so that poverty is not destiny.
Under present status quo, it is.
That sounds suspiciously like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Get with it people, according to new Gates Foundation research project, uber teachers can completely erase poverty.
Uber Teachers Are Uber Powerful: New Study Finds, #satire #edreform http://goo.gl/DDkJh