In a terrific opinion piece that was prominently featured in the Sunday New York Times, Sean Reardon of Stanford University wrote that the gap between the children of the rich and the children of the poor has grown by 40% in the past 30 years.
Reardon puts to rest virtually every reformer myth: schools don’t cause inequality; schools don’t cure inequality: the achievement gap(s) begin before the first day of school. Stop blaming schools for conditions beyond their control. Poverty matters.
Reardon writes : “We are still talking about this despite decades of clucking about the crisis in American education and wave after wave of school reform.Whatever we’ve been doing in our schools, it hasn’t reduced educational inequality between children from upper- and lower-income families.”
What have we been doing for the past 30 years? Relying on standards and testing to close the gaps. It hasn’t worked.
Are schools to blame for the growing gap? Reardon says no: “It may seem counterintuitive, but schools don’t seem to produce much of the disparity in test scores between high- and low-income students. We know this because children from rich and poor families score very differently on school readiness tests when they enter kindergarten, and this gap grows by less than 10 percent between kindergarten and high school.”
If the schools are not to blame, what is: Reardon says that growing income inequality is an important cause of the growing education gap.
But that’s not all. Rich families invest heir income in cognitively enriching activities: “It’s not clear what we should do about all this. Partly that’s because much of our public conversation about education is focused on the wrong culprits: we blame failing schools and the behavior of the poor for trends that are really the result of deepening income inequality and the behavior of the rich.”
What can we do? Reardon says, parent education, early intervention, support for children before the GPS grow wide: “The more we do to ensure that all children have similar cognitively stimulating early childhood experiences, the less we will have to worry about failing schools. This in turn will enable us to let our schools focus on teaching the skills — how to solve complex problems, how to think critically and how to collaborate — essential to a growing economy and a lively democracy.”
Arne? Obama? Do you guys read or process other viewpoints? H e l l o !
LOL! LOVE your witty sarcasm Linda!
No, they are deaf on purpose. They have to ignore or their buddies won’t get rich. And we know that lobbyists and the companies they represent give a lot of money to campaigns so that laws are passed that benefit the wealthy few. We have a horrible system of voting for elections in this country; engenders a lot of corruption.
Yvonne,
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Upton Sinclair
Rose colored glasses and ear muffs!!!
A strong argument to reallocate government spending from K-12 education to poverty reduction.
No, the government doesn’t need to “reallocate spendig” away from children anywhere to reduce poverty. How about raising the minimum wage?
How about regulation of outsourcing? Our “free trade” agreements could include import regulations, requiring that the supply chain for commodities manufactured abroad, and then imported for the US market, must meet specific standards for worker safety and environmental protection.
Regulations opposed by Walmart and Apple would protect the workers at Chinese iPad factories, and in Bangladeshi garment factories, and also in the US.
Those are both possibilities. Of course you will give my youngest child a higher income with the increased minimum wage, which I would appreciate but perhaps you would lament. And restrictions on outsourcing would condemn people in the developing world to a life of making mud bricks, but you may not consider them as part of the all Dr. Ravitch refers to in the title of the blog.
Where is the like button? I’ve been saying this for years. If we charged some sort of “foreign tax” to make imported goods more expensive than local goods, we wouldn’t lose jobs. We could use that tax for healthcare or education.
I always buy local and organic whenever possible. The food is fresher and my neighbors have jobs. And it’s not poisioned (like china). Buying the cheapest junk from Walmart is a large part of what has destroyed our middle class.
chemtchr you make perfect sense. Right on.
chemtchr,
Thank you.
I have followed your posts on many blogs etc. for several years.
Good job always.
Obviously, a shallow taunt from a troll. Ok, what’s your plan for poverty reduction? A unionized Walmart work force would be a nice start, don’t you think?
No, just an interesting dilemma. If spending on education makes little difference, perhaps we would be better off spending the over $610,000,000,000 we spend annually on public schools somewhere that might have an impact on students lives. If education does make a difference, well perhaps we should pay some attention to how effective our spending has been.
Which horn would you like to take?
Where does it say education doesn’t make any difference? You always read with a filter and I find you tiring.
New moniker: Unabletolearneconomist
Let me rephrase it then: not as big a difference as spending over 610 thousand million dollars a year on education. Would you agree that a large fraction should be spent to reduce deprivation for poor students?
TE: why don’t we just skip the next war? Did you object to the cost of the war in Iraq or Afghanistan?
War is always a waste, except when it is not.
The question I am asking is if our society would be better off devoting an extra ten billion to K-12 education (I know this would be a very small increase In K-12 spending) or an extra 10 billion in the earned income tax credit (I know that this would not reduce the poverty rate at all, but it would reduce actual poverty).
Which would have a greater impact on the future lives of our children?
TE,
This probably more useful for talking about how much we spend on local, state, and national levels.
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_education_spending_20.html
I don’t think it matters who authorizes the resources to be used for education. The issue is the total amount of resources used.
If those resources could be put to better use, say through a child nutrition program that ensures all children have a good breakfast every morning rather than encouraging teachers to obtain a masters degree from an online program, I would not argue against that.
In other industrialized nations, reallocating is called redistribution of the nations wealth, a long time economic theory and practice, to keep from the vast disparity we see in the US. The Reps have made this a dirty word.
I will be teaching the first day of the new term on Wed. and will be starting out with the biblical admonitions from both old and new Testaments of the Abrahamic religions. Heilbroner in his book Teaching from the Worldly Philosophers makes the point repeatedly that the ancients who wrote biblical literature/history/philosophy, or the scriptures as another’s belief system may call it, money is indeed the root of evil. And when you read Galbraith, this is reinforced…so some major economists besides Krugman understood the problem.
And in education, we do indeed see poverty as the prime cause of lack of learning among poor children. How do we fix it?
Recognize that poverty, not teachers are the problem. Allocate more resources to schools of poverty. Restore the neighborhoods rather than tearing them down. Somehow when I think of this, I wonder if the closing of a neighborhood school means the decay of the community. Then property values won’t be worth much. People will sell and move elsewhere if they can. Others’ property will be deemed unsuitable to live and taken for a cheap price. Then these parcels of property can then be purchased very cheaply on the market and turned into neighborhood for the priviledged. Just saying….
Yvonne is correct in all her assertions.
Poverty is much of the problem , but getting people and their legislators to focus on that is a huge challenge. In California, where we passed Prop. 30 in the last election, raising funding for education, we now see the Guv, our great Jesuit Jerry Brown, doing exactly what Yvonne suggests…and with which I agree. He wants to allocate the preponderance of this new tax source to the inner city schools where it is desperately needed. The Legislature, including Reps and Dems, are shredding him for this…and it is because their well to do constituents in Malibu and similar cities are threatening to fire them. The greed of the wealthy is obscene.
I hope our old bull of a Guv out-toughs these worthless legislators and sticks with it. As I wrote the other day, the same dynamic is going on with Santa Monica where the PTOs, PTAs, and 501 c 3 Education Foundations in wealthy areas are collecting vast amounts of money. They do not want to share their loot, as suggested by their School Board, with the poorest area of Santa Monica where it could solve so many of the poverty students problems.
Event though all the Abrahamic religions address this sort of greed, and most of the inhabitants of these communities call themselves good Christians, Jews, and Muslims, still when it comes to the bottom line, self interest rules…to hell with the rest of the community.
I am a lifetime educator of public policy and am not naïve. But the US right now is corrupt and self serving, and without much caring about those in need. It bodes poorly for us as a democracy.
Here’s a link to the world bank’s data on education spending AND a fun fact: the percent of our GDP that we spend on education has declined since the introduction of NCLB!
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.XPD.TOTL.GD.ZS?page=2
I don’t think we have a zero sum game here: we just need to have better national priorities… Those socialists in Northern European countries who beat us in international scores seem to find a way to spend more on education than we do and they have universal health care to boot! Not as many billionaires, though…. oh… and not as many tests!
TE did you get mad when you found out how much of our tax money went to bribing people in Afghanistan? I wonder how many school children in America the money could have helped?
It is my understanding that bribing folks there saved lives, I am not sure when I would have said that this is too large a price to pay to save a life.
“It is my understanding that bribing folks there saved lives, I am not sure when I would have said that this is too large a price to pay to save a life.”
Do you think alleviating some of the issues associated with child poverty (lack of health care, poor nutrition, unsafe neighborhoods, domestic violence) could also save lives? I work with these children and families every day. I think it would.
Too large a price?
That is what makes these decisions difficult. Who to help, who not to help.
I am at a lost to understand why you would think we should reallocate the money spent on education to fight poverty. The job of education has never been to cure poverty. Education can and has certainly played a role in some people being able to escape, but education does not cure joblessness, homelessness, addiction, abuse, broken homes, poor medical care… Even if people honestly thought that education could make that difference, they certainly have not been putting their money where their mouths are.
I would argue in favor of that because a dollar spent fighting poverty would have a larger impact on education than a dollar spent on education, or so it would seem from this and other posts.
If I may correct your statement: “A strong argument to reallocate government spending from THE DEATH AND DESTRUCTION MACHINE THAT IS THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX to poverty reduction.
Honestly, I think it’s a positive sign that the NYTimes is printing something other than reform marketing.
Has any national newspaper been as thoroughly hoodwinked on this stuff as the NYTimes?
They’ve done a real disservice to their readers, promoting “reform”
Hope this is the start of better information.
I spent 5 years working in title one schools. Some of the parents saw education as their child’s way to a better life (usually new immigrants had this view), but most parents seemed hopeless in their own lives and didn’t seem to want and/or expect better for their kids. I don’t know how we can fix this as a culture, but I know the schools can’t do it alone.
We call it the “Pre-birth to Prison Pipeline.” It is a fact that the K-12 failures show up in about the same percentages in the criminal justice system. Every serious researcher finds out the same thing.
Prisions are big (private) business. Have you seen what a correcitonal officer makes with only a two-year degree? It’s more than I made, even if I had a master’s. And they get to retire early, get a much fatter pension than teachers (although my home state of FL is looking to get rid of pensions for every new employee, even police. I never thought I’d see that day!)
Stupid me, I became a teacher.
The correctional officers union has been a driving force behind the three sticks laws.
So has the private prisons industry. who have also opposed the legalization of pot as well. They call it the “prison-industrial-complex” just like Corporate Reformers are in the process of creating the much-larger Education-Industrial Complex.
Public employee unions have a hand in it as well.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/02/biggest-obstacle-prison-reform-labor-unions
what do we need to do? Stop paying the rich and increase funding for social programs.
It is amazing that in this age of enlightenment, when the facts are so I glaringly obvious, that America can’t focus well enough to see what is as plain as the nose on it’sthe face. The problem is poverty and the reform movement is just smoke and mirrors to hide the facts so that those that have stolen our American dream won’t have give it back. When people give up hope for a better life through education, no school can give it back to them alone.
It’s not rocket science. Just the art and gift of teaching, a little science, and common sense, of which the latter is forgotten.
The article hits head on. Parent, parents, parents & stop blaming schools.
Goals 2000: Every child ready for kindergarten.
Just think, if we’d delivered on the ONE GOAL, every one of this year’s seniors 13 years later would be on track to fulfill their dreams, there would not be dropouts, and no pipeline to prison.
Birth to five… literacy and play in the home. If you are not familiar with Parents As Teachers (national organization and model with best results superior to pre-school), read all about it (even conservative Governor / Senator Kit Bond was the lead supporter of the program). http://www.parentsasteachers.org/
I was trained in PATs back in 2000. Worked as a PK teacher in an Even Start GED program. Parents in the program had to spend mandatory hours in my PK classroom each week in addition to their GED hours. They learned how to support their child’s education by reading to them and spending quality time with them. We had parenting classes, offered childcare, took field trips together, taught job skills, etc. The parents had a great support system. Sadly the program was scrapped bc not enough of them actually got their GED. The benefits they received were immeasurable, though. Years later some of those parents would stop me and thank me for everything I did to help them become better patents. It is sad that we can find money for wars, but not for programs that support mothers in poverty.
From “Fixen to Die Rag” by Country Joe and the Fish:
“. . . Come on Wall Street, don’t be slow,
Why man, this is war au-go-go
There’s plenty good money to be made
By supplying the Army with the tools of it’s trade, . . . “
This is very honest. All along … since Ohio began the “proficiency” tests in the mid-90s, there has been a camouflage of the reason for these tests. They were too “afraid” to deal with the poverty issues because no one wanted to deal with blaming parents, so the movement began to test every district in order to treat everyone “the same”. The proficiency test was diagnostic in nature, but it quickly evolved into an “achievement” test, even though it was “testing” vocabulary and concepts that were not on the correct grade level. Schools struggled to figure out what the tests were “looking for” and as we figured that out, the powers that be changed things year after year, and then we began using the Ohio Achievement Assessment. On and on, we worked to accommodate every change and nuance and now we’ve joined the consortium as the “governor” takes money away from districts and the Ohio Dept of Education has fewer and fewer people to pull guidance together, we continue to shake our heads in Ohio.
We have to realize that there are so many reasons that students fall behind. Having someone who cares about the children from the beginning of their educational journey is as much or more important than the fast-paced driven changes that doom those who are already behind to failure. This “fix” doesn’t fix a thing.
This is Big Data arguing with Big Data, though. It points to a big flaw in the “data-based” arguments of the technocrats, but it can’t point the way out of human dilemmas.
The bigger statistics get, the more confounding variables are confounded, and the less useful statistics are to guide actions. Let’s be careful about attempts to extend Reardon’s arguments to our own roomful of individual children.
I spent the day immersed in sixteen-year-old kids’ attempts to perform and analyze a set of chemistry reactions. While there’s a large difference in the average “readiness” (and performance) between economic cohorts, it is still swamped by the within-group variations. The actual variations are subtle, multifactorial, and can be addressed and worked with to raise the power of individual children to act, think, and write with agency.
Then, later, I was in line at KMart to buy play-doh prizes for the periodic table bingo we played before spring break. There was a little family in line behind me, with a five or six year old girl talking a mile a minute to her tired but indulgent parents, who were dressed from work. She was explaining how and where they would toast the bag of marshmallows she’d just persuaded them to buy. Her father didn’t understand a word she was saying, but his eyes lit up when he smiled at her. So, all the grown-ups were smiling together, and thus I was included in the conversation. “That’s a good plan!” I just wish I could enjoy the toasted marshmallows with them.
teachingeconomist, I don’t know what would motivate you to suggest taking resources away from educating kids, but I know (and you know) that would hurt my sixteen-year-olds, and little girls like my marshmallow toaster. Please, everybody somehow looking to make a buck out of the mess our people are in … please don’t twist arguments to hurt them.
What motivated me was the observation that poverty in the home is far more important than anything that a school can do. If a billion dollars spent in the home has a larger impact on children’s lives than a billion dollars spent in schools, I say spend it in he home. Would you say otherwise?
How about taking a billion out of our war budget? Simplistic, juvenile thinking is what got us in this mess in the first place.
I think that would be a good idea, but it would only increase our spending on public education by less than 0.16%. Perhaps a larger increase would be more effective? Perhaps it would be more effective to devote the money to TANF or EITC.
Once again we see the cancer like effects of concentration of wealth into the hands of the few. Once we end our wars we will have the capital available, will we have the will to act? Will we have real leadership that realizes we need to address the issues of poverty? Will we quit beating up the schools and quit blaming them for things they can not change? I dream of a renaissance of cultural opportunities for the average citizen. I realize this may make us seem more like Europe, but it would likely be a more sane life for us all. Is there a Teddy Roosevelt or a Jefferson willing to muzzle the financial sector? It is time to find a leader.
Now that I am retired, I volunteer my time helping students who attend my church–St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Phoenix. I am in charge of the Youth at the church. My students are mostly Sudanese and one family from the Congo. They are all poverty level and have language, societal issues, etc, to overcome. The Sudanese came after the Lost Boys found their family members. I take students to the library to check-out books, take teens to our food bank (the only church in the state that I know of that has a neighborhood food bank twice a month) to assist and get food for their families, arrange field trips with other church members driving. This is a small church making a difference. My friend, who is the past president of the AZ Bar, is running a non-profit to assist these students. I was able to have her intercede when I was teaching to assist two fraternal twins from the Sudan. They were placed in 4th grade and should have been in 3rd grade. She became their advocate with signature from Grandma. She used funding from the non-profit to have them tested. One is special ed, has severe dyslexia, and the other has a severe stutter, ADHD and both have post traumatic stress from witnessing many atrocities in the Sudan. They are now flourishing. My friend and her husband are helping Grandma raise them. They travel, are in Boy Scouts, and both are doing tremendously better in school. I am now one of their Godparents. By the way, I was excessed to a different school, after my friend came on board for these boys. No regrets. I am extremely angry that my other students from Title I schools did not receive any of the help as these boys did. It comes down to money. No one can tell me that poverty is not a factor.
You are modeling what I hope to do in my retirement. One is always a teacher….my wife says I will retire at my funeral as I am getting ready to teach reading to new arrivals this summer. God bless you. This is education reform and change we can believe in.
I believe that we should devote a very large amount of resources to providing at-risk children with a rich experience base in their preschool and early grade years. Instead of formal academics, why not spend the money on field trips to the zoo, the farm, the factory, etc., in order to extend their cognitive schemata and give them the kinds of experiences that will help sow their academic soil, so to speak. In later years, summer trips to the beach, the mountains, the Capitol, and even overseas, students of all social groups can approximate the week-end and summer experiences of the middle- and upper-classes.
It’s no secret that many countries in Europe do this with their students, especially those whose parents don’t have the means to provide those experiences themselves. In France, for example, entire classes go to ski school in February for little or no cost to the parents. It is considered part of becoming a French citizen, as is experiencing the food and culture of the various regions of France and the neighboring countries. So perhaps diverting some of the money now spent on the classroom might indeed be better spent in giving the students something to write home about.
Why from k-12 and not military, given that much more is spent there? You’re an economist, right?
The spending on education and the spending on defense are pretty close. According to Wikapedia, the US spends about 683 billion on defense, including the war in Afghanistan (in 2010). According to NCES the us spent about 610 billion on education (in 2008-9). We do spend 10% more in the military than in defense, so it seems perfectly reasonable to take more from defense than education.
Does SES [socioeconomic status] matter at all? Or is it just an annoying excuse by lazy LIFOs and ivory tower professors and those who are hopelessly corrupted by the “soft bigotry of low expectations”? I don’t think so… Prof. Reardon’s piece is hardly a surprise, although I much appreciate his more nuanced look at how SES status affects people.
I am sure almost all of us have personal experiences that can refute the defenders of the education status quo who bleat on endlessly about in-school teaching being the only—or overwhelmingly important—factor in $tudent $ucce$$. For example, back in the depths of the [supposedly] non-innovaty twentieth century, as the second third of that time period was giving way to the last, I went to a highly regarded “all-city” [as it was called then] high school in a major American city. I knew a young woman my age who was taking French for her foreign language elective. Before the first week was out, the teacher [a well-educated native speaker and known for being very passionate and demanding about her course] had promised her an “A” in the class and assigned her to tutor and assist all the other students. This young woman spoke, read and wrote French at very close to the level of a well-educated French peer.
The discerning reader might inquire: was she the female Mario Pei [google, please] of her day? Was she perhaps one of those ‘unknown geniuses’ with an IQ off the charts that settled into obscurity, hence her lack of renown? Was she that mythical ‘striver’ that we hear so much about?
Sorry, TFA and KIPP and $tudent$ Fir$t and DFER and Mr. Petrilli, but there was another explanation…
Her family was very comfortably set [upper middle class] and Francophiles. From the time she was an infant she would spend 2-3 months every summer on the French Mediterranean. She grew up with French almost as much as she did with English. Being around French language and culture was as much of her life as being around American English language and US culture.
I want to make it clear that I—so many years later—slight her in no way. She was lively, modest, well read, good looking [hey, I was in HS, I noticed stuff like that!], caring—and she had a family environment that nurtured and developed all sorts of talents and abilities [I loved her stories about sailing on the Mediterranean].
So for all the defenders of the education establishment out there—just keepin’ it real.
¡NOT Rheeal!
🙂
Diane,
You have terrific insight into the matters that you deal with. However, you and the rest of the pundits on the educational reform scene, have blinders on when it comes to the perverse conditions that exist in the school system, as a consequence of corrupt practices by school managers who are stifling education, and the progress of young teachers. You are stuck in the process that gives little credence to the idea that the teachers are equal and perhaps superior in intellect to their overlords, the educational administrators. With all due respect, you were never a classroom teacher, and couldn’t possible understand the level of stamina and ability that it takes to master the art of teaching. It also appears that you are either unaware of the level of fraud and deceit that has permeated every school in the country among the administrative personnel, or are unwilling to face the possibility that the system is antiquated and self defeating. I was, if I do say so, one of the elite class of teachers who had an exemplary 28 year career. The level of intimidation of the teaching staff is beyond surreal, while administrators role play the part of educational leaders, when everyone on staff knows that they rule by intuition. They were “garden variety” teachers who jumped ship to get out of the classroom, receive more money, while acting as as a buffer between the community and the school. There’s much more to this story, but I don’t expect that you or any of your favorite commentators will ever comment on this insidious condition which has brought about the benign neglect of the minority communities in the country. It’s probably not even in your thoughts. Read my book, just out on Amazon “New Money for Old Rope.” It’s also available as an i-Book for the I-Pad, with audio excerpts of my work. I needed to validate my teaching years, in order to be recognized as one who knows what he talks about. I don’t mean to be rude, but this is never approached as an issue because teachers are in a constant state of intimidation, and have become risk adverse in the extreme. I, on the other hand have always been the rebellious sort, and only my favored position among the parents and the students in the district kept me from being tossed out. I led a charmed life as a teacher, and now it’s payback time for me. The truth will come out in this and the next several books. Will anyone take notice? Did anyone react when the little boy said “the emperor has no clothes?” Will you react, and make some comment? If I’m right, you will promote the activity of your administrative friends and their union cohorts. They have a symbiotic relationship. They need each other to continue this charade.
Ian Kay
I wish there was more money dedicated to public libraries so that they could develop even more programming for parents and children. Libraries can deliver a “lot of bang for the buck”.
Ian, Not sure why you would assume that administrators get a blanket accountability pass around here, but making such accusations is no way to sell “several books” with the disgruntled employee’s ax to grind theme. You have a lot to learn about PR.
Recently, the was a conference in Chicago–“Reframing Reform: Achieving Equity and Excellence in Public Education.” There is a group–The Equity & Excellence Commission–whose mission was “to provide advice to the scretary of the U.S. D.o.Ed. on the disparities in meaningful educational opportunities that give rise to the achievement gap, with a focus on systems of finance, and to recommend ways in which federal policies could address such disparities.” Linda Darling-Hammond was one of the commission members. The report came out this past February 2, 2013.
If anyone is interested in reading it, it is titled, “For Each and Every Child: a Strategy for Education Equity and Excellence.” You may order it at http://www.edpubs.gov or on the U.S.D.O.E. Commission website-http://www2.edgov/about/bdscomm/list/eec/index.html OR e-mail edpubs@edpubs.edgov OR call toll free 1(877) 433-7827 OR
1 (800) 872-5327 ALSO available in Braille, large print or CD at the Department’s Alternate Format Center at 1 (202) 260-0852 or 1 (202) 260-0818.
Will these recommendations be acted upon?
We can hope.
These days, you rarely have to write away for such reports anymore. This one is online here: http://www2.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/eec/equity-excellence-commission-report.pdf
True, thank you, Cosmic! (I’m so used to calling in & writing away for things as I’m always doing it for my husband–he HATES the Internet!)
I wonder why your recap doesn’t mention what’s new in Reardon’s observation: the growing gap between the rich and the middle class. Why does the middle class matter? Because movement to bolster public education is stirring in the middle class. That’s where the seeds of change are growing. Best to keep an eye on that shrinking ground. (For related thoughts, see this: http://editbarry.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/hyperactive-parenting-trends/)
I often wonder why these discussions wind up so convoluted. A suggestion isn’t necessarily an absolute or and either/or proposition. A suggestion is merely the introduction of an idea that might be useful to consider in conjunction with or in addition to other ideas. That is how arguments occur. It is simply awkward when discussions become accusatory or uncomfortable.
I don’t think anyone is implying that money should be taken away from education and put into poverty programs. However, it seems to me to that the point is that, in the current climate of income inequality and increasing poverty, focus needs to be made on how poverty can contribute to students’ difficulties with learning and with classroom behavior. A child who is hungry, tired, abused, or unsupervised at home will not be in prime condition for learning.
Many people are concerned with the accumulation of wealth. At times, some people will fail to see or care that others are suffering from the ravages of poverty. The children in the those homes often experience hunger, sleeplessness, little supervision or affection due to circumstances beyond their control. These situations contribute to difficulties with learning. Finding solutions to poverty and educating the communities and adults by providing a safe, healthy environment for growing up.
I think that it is difficult to determine what causes poverty. However, judging those who are less wealthy contributes to the prevailing attitudes about the reasons for their situation. The cycle continues, poverty continues, condescension continues, and nothing ever changes.
The privatization of schools (whether parochial, charter, or specialized) seems to me to be all about parents’ desires to put their own children into their perception of the best learning environment possible, without regard to the other students. The result is to resegregate schools by income level, parent involvement, race, religion, or interest. Many people feel that they don’t want their children exposed to anything by their own particular views, class, or intelligence level. As more and more money is pulled from public education and following the students to private schools, only those who can afford the transportation will benefit from the changes.
But, will the students really benefit? Possibly, students will excel, but there is no guarantee. What I do believe, though, is that the children will be insulated and more likely to perpetuate stereotypes and a lack of understanding. Currently, I feel that there is a movement, a pressing back, if you will, against our society representing all people. As long as this governs many communities, we’ll be unable to answer so many of the questions that public education has been trying to address. Some people simply don’t WANT the United States to “work for” everyone. I think that is what is happening to our communities and schools.
Personal anecdote: When my sons were in the elementary school, we lived in a nice community that was diverse. However, many people in the community had decided to get “babysitting permits” for their children to attend an elementary school about a mile away. The resulting composition of the student body at our sons’ school was that few people from our community attended that school. In any case we chose to keep our sons in classes that others did not prefer. Teachers asked us to consider keeping them in classes instead of being moved to a more middle class environment. They were/are bright boys and always helpful and understanding to others who were less fortunate. They have grown into fine adults that have friends of many cultures, religions, ethnicities, and income levels. I feel that they learned so much from the diversity of those young years and the other opportunities in their lives. They also learned to recognize the negative aspects of living in a more ethnocentric, middle class, homogenous area when they were teens.
I don’t know how anyone (this group) can push back against the movement to isolate children into groups of “superior” learning opportunities, but I do know that our society will not prosper by leaving certain groups of people out of the loop and unable to succeed. Charter and private schools that serve a limited group of students might, at times, provide a better learning outcome for some students, but they will never be able to address the needs of the society at large. Those in most need of attention, education, and encouragement will continue to increase in number.
The corporate takeover of public schools will not create a better America. It will simply recreate more :haves” and “have nots”.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education and commented:
This article speak more clearly to the reality of what’s wrong with education than anything I have read in a long time.
It is quite sad that many in our society seem to have a little problem with redistributing the wealth upwards, but at the same time they resent redistributing the wealth downwards. We really need to wake up and face the truth of what poverty does to people in the United States. We certainly have wasted precious time in trying to camouflage this fact. It appears to me that there is no real, sincere effort being made to improve the actual education of those in poverty.
So how about mandatory parenting classes in high school? I told my students that they needed to talk to their children and read to them from an early age, and that would help them be successful in school later. One student incredulously commented, “Does that really work?” It’s not income disparity; it’s lack of education about enriching pre-school experiences that are critical. And putting children in government run early childhood centers isn’t the answer. Educating future parents is the answer.