Richard R. Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics at Indiana University, compiled the following reading list to help others understand the root causes of low academic performance:
Professor Hake writes:
“Penny” commented: ”We know that poorer (lower socioeconomic) students tend to do poorer in school. How about looking at the true root cause.”
For the “true root cause” see the REFERENCE list below containing poverty-related references from my *complete* post “The Contentious Common Core Controversy” at http://bit.ly/Y7ocMv
Richard Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Indiana University
REFERENCES
Berliner, D.C. 2009. “Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success.” Education and Public Interest Center (Univ. of Colorado) and Education Policy Research Unit, (Arizona State University); online as a 729 kB pdf at http://bit.ly/fqiCUA. In his abstract Berliner states: “This brief details six Out of School Factors (OSFs) common among the poor that significantly affect the health and learning opportunities of children, and accordingly limit what schools can accomplish *on their own*: (1) low birth-weight and non-genetic prenatal influences on children; (2) inadequate medical, dental, and vision care, often a result of inadequate or no medical insurance; (3) food insecurity; (4) environmental pollutants; (5) family relations and family stress; and (6) neighborhood characteristics. These OSFs are related to a host of poverty-induced physical, sociological, and psychological problems that children often bring to school, ranging from neurological damage and attention disorders to excessive absenteeism, linguistic underdevelopment, and oppositional behavior.”
Brady, M. 2012. “Eight problems with Common Core Standards,” in Valerie Strauss’ “Answer Sheet,” Washington Post, 21 August; online at http://wapo.st/15Z4kTg. Note especially Brady’s crucial problem #4: “So much orchestrated attention is being showered on the Common Core Standards, the main reason for poor student performance is being ignored-a level of childhood poverty the consequences of which no amount of schooling can effectively counter” – see e.g., Berliner (2009), Duncan & Murnane (2011), Kristof (2013), Marder (2012), Neuman & Celano (2012), and my 14 blog entries on the overriding influence of poverty on children’s educational achievement at .
Duncan, G.J. & R. Murnane, eds. 2011. “Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances.” Russell Sage Foundation, publisher’s information at http://bit.ly/nCkmKv. Amazon.com information at http://amzn.to/r3MrCh.
Kristof, N.D. 2013. “For Obama’s New Term, Start Here.” New York Times OP-ED, 23 Jan, online at http://nyti.ms/WnEhU2. Kristof wrote: “Something is profoundly wrong when we can point to 2-year-olds in this country and make a plausible bet about their long-term outcomes – not based on their brains and capabilities, but on their ZIP codes. President Obama spoke movingly in his second Inaugural Address of making equality a practice as well as a principle. So, Mr. President, how about using your second term to tackle this most fundamental inequality?”
Marder, M. 2012. “Failure of U.S. Public Secondary Schools in Mathematics,” Journal of Scholarship and Practice 9(1): 8-25; the entire issue is online as a 2.7 MB pdf at http://bit.ly/KPitWM, scroll down to page 8. Marder wrote: “The collection of nationwide data do point to a primary cause of school failure, but it is poverty, not teacher quality. As the concentration of low-income children increases in a school, the challenges to teachers and administrators increase so that ultimately the educational quality of the school suffers. Challenges include students moving from one school to another within the school year, frequency of illness, lack of stable supportive homes with quiet places to study, concentration of students who are angry or disobedient, probability of students disappearing from school altogether, and difficulty of attracting and retaining strong teachers. Most people who see the connection between poverty and educational outcomes are confident that low-income students in a sufficiently supportive environment will learn as much in a school year as students in well-off communities.”
Neuman, S.B. & D.C. Celano. 2012. “Giving Our Children a Fighting ChancePoverty, Literacy, and the Development of Information Capital,” Teachers College Press, publishers information at http://bit.ly/ZVCsil. Amazon.com information at http://amzn.to/VVml0G, note the searchable “Look Inside” feature. The publisher states: “This is a compelling, eye-opening portrait of two communities in Philadelphia with drastically different economic resources. Over the course of their 10-year investigation, the authors of this important new work came to understand that this disparity between affluence and poverty has created a *knowledge gap* – far more important than mere achievement scores – with serious implications for students’ economic prosperity and social mobility. At the heart of this knowledge gap is the limited ability of students from poor communities to develop *information capital.* This moving book takes you into the communities in question to meet the students and their families, and by doing so provides powerful insights into the role that literacy can play in giving low-income students a fighting chance.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Let’s cause confuse cause with intervention. If a child falls and breaks his arm, a doctor fixes it with a cast. The cause is different from the intervention.
Let’s say the cause was that the child was playing in an unsupervised and dangerous location because a parent had to work and couldn’t afford child care. Now, let’s say we see a ton of kids with broken arms coming through the same hospital. Best practice would be 2 responses:
1) Design a community outreach program to help address the issue of unsupervised play, perhaps by providing better access to child care, and
2) Fixing the broken arm.
In schools, it’s the same. Teachers don’t often cause kids to NOT read. Yet, they are absolutely the ones to fix the problem if it does come in to school. If a majority of kids are reading below grade level, say, because of poor access to early reading materials (moms can’t read to kids because they don’t have books), best practice would be:
1) Provide moms of toddlers and infants with books (perhaps done by a nonprofit), and
2) Use reading interventions to improve children’s reading abilities.
Hopefully we’re on the same page here. I see a few comments in the references seeming to compare teacher quality with out-of-school or pre-school (before kids enter school) conditions. It would be a faulty and inappropriate statement to say that because teachers didn’t cause problems that teachers aren’t a part of the solution, and that we therefore should not attempt to make schools as great as they can be.
Perhaps your suggestion about how to address the root cause of the inability to read at grade level – give out books – was just a placeholder for another, more serious suggestion, but I’ll treat it as if it’s serious: it clearly cannot ameliorate the causes of poor performance detailed in Diane’s post.
There’s a bit of work that can be done in the classroom to address the effects of poverty. But most of the real change will have to come outside the classroom. I don’t mean to let teachers off the hook. If anything, I think that the task is harder that you do. Teachers, and students, and parents, and all citizens must take to the streets and demand a change in those societal and economic conditions which give rise to poverty. We don’t need new pedagogical techniques. We need societal revolution.
Let’s not confuse interventions that will work with kids from middle-class backgrounds with ones that work with kids who go come to highly stressful, dangerous and abusive high-poverty, low-education environments.
Yikes, I really have to edit these notes before posting them. Again. Let’s not confuse interventions that work with kids from middle-class backgrounds with ones that work with kids who go home each day to highly stressful, dangerous, abusive, high-poverty, low-education environments.
We need graduate schools of educational public health to make develop these important studies into an influential field:
http://literacyinleafstrewn.blogspot.com/2012/10/where-are-our-graduate-schools-of.html
This passage from the reading list seems to say that proper interventions for the children of poverty have never been tried much less be found to work. Is this true?
“Most people who see the connection between poverty and educational outcomes are confident that low-income students in a sufficiently supportive environment will learn as much in a school year as students in well-off communities.”
Perhaps there are two completely different social problems here which require two completely different solutions. One is the policy for schools serving the general non-poverty populations, policy which the good public school systems exemplify and whose students thrive well-enough and go on to college.
The second would be policy for schools serving the poverty population whose children do not have a “sufficiently supportive environment.”
I wonder whether the concept of “equity” perhaps mitigates against solving the problem of those kids who need more than equity to thrive. One hears that if one takes out of the statistics the measures of performance for the poor, American schools are doing just fine. Perhaps there needs to be differentiated educational systems rather than differentiated instruction in the same classroom.
It reminds me of the problems of education in third world countries, but the third world is right here at home, often in the centers of our major cities.
I’m sure I’m missing something here.
Excellent points made. I agree that we may need to have more differentiated education systems. The fact is that the policies that are being made are not effective for our lower income students. There are are way to many factors that are contributing to the achievement gap and lower educational outcomes.
Teaching in a classroom in some our inner cities is a completely different experience than teaching in most affluent neighborhoods. There is no way that both groups of students can be taught with the same policies and methods when the two groups of students are coming into the school system on two different playing fields.
If you want to look at our education system as a science experiment where we are trying to get the same outcome. It’s not possible because there are way too many variables.
The question in the system should be how can we get students, no matter what the socioeconomic status, on the same levels when they enter the school system.
What if it cannot be done, to get students, no matter what their socioeconomic status, on the same level when they enter the school system? Or rather WHAT would it take to get every kid on the same level when they enter the school system? To have every kid entering kindergarten at the same starting line, rather than five years behind. Is there enough money and will power to do that?
It would take investing money into poverty stricken neighborhoods, day care and preschool programs, parenting classes, health and fitness classes… the list goes on. I don’t know if it is possible…but it is what would need to be done to stop the cycle.
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