Before I had my own blog, I shared a blog called “Bridging Differences” with Deborah Meier, hosted by Education Week. We had a great run of five years, and then I started this blog. Since then, Deborah has had exchanges with various conservative thinkers.
Currently, she is trying to “bridge differences” with Michael Petrilli of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute. In this post, Mike argues that the best way to end poverty is to persuade young people to get married and wait to have children until they are able to take care of them financially. Since no one knows how to do that, he maintains that the best cure for poverty is “great” schools.
He suggests that those “on the left” have given up on social mobility. I am not sure whether he believes that schools–rightly organized–will facilitate social mobility or will end poverty, as he seems to use the terms interchangeably, at one point referring to the schools as “the great equalizer,” at other times suggesting that it is upward mobility (for some) that he expects schools to promote. Mike makes clear that he opposes raising the minimum wage or increasing income transfers. So that leaves schools with the burden of either ending poverty or increasing social mobility, whatever, since nothing else can do it, in his view.
Of course, the schools have always provided a path to upward social mobility for some, but the problem is that many millions of children and families are stuck in poverty. It seems unlikely that the schools alone can push that large number down. No matter how many “No Excuses” charter schools open, there will still be many millions trapped at the bottom, while a huge share of the national income flows to the top 1% and the top 5%.
Mike’s answer: Fix the schools!
My answer: Improve every school, open health clinics attached to schools, provide free pre-natal care to all women who cannot afford it, make pre-K universal, make sure that schools serving the poorest kids have the resources for small classes, social workers, psychologists, librarians, the arts, and a full curriculum, just like the kids in affluent suburbs. And change the tax structure so that income inequality is reduced.
I might also note that many young people who have graduated college now find themselves unable to get a good job because so many middle-class jobs were outsourced by our corporate leaders. So you will find college graduates working at minimum wage–or slightly above it–in Starbucks or selling iPads or working in jobs that don’t require a college diploma.
I look forward to Deborah’s answer.
In the meanwhile, here are some interesting comments:
Leo Casey of the American Federation of Teachers wrote as follows:
If you are serious about reducing, let alone eliminating, poverty, there is a historical record that needs to be addressed. From the New Deal to through the 1970s income inequality and poverty in America were reduced, with two very significant periods of change – the New Deal, especially Social Security, reduced immensely the numbers of elderly people living in poverty, and the Great Society reduced the numbers of mothers and children living in poverty. The rate of poverty was cut almost in half between 1960 (from about 22% to 11%) and the beginning off the Reagan years. With the Reagan years, poverty climbs once again (now hovers around 15%). Of course, these are aggregate numbers – there are many more children living in poverty (1 in 4) than adults. This is also related to general income equality: there is a period of the reduction of income equality, beginning with the New Deal and extending through the 1970s, followed by a great increase in income inequality beginning in the 1970s and extending to the current period. Timothy Noah’s The Great Divide has a pretty comprehensive analysis of these trends. Two factors are particularly important: the effects of ‘the race to the bottom’ initiated by economic globalization, in which unionized jobs in industry were exported abroad to low wage, authoritarian nations such as China where workers could not form independent unions to improve their pay and working conditions, and the related decimation of industrial unions that supported middle class jobs in the United States.
My old mentor and colleague, Michael Harrington, who had a few things to say about poverty {-; never tired of saying that the best anti-poverty program was a job.
Debbie’s pessimism, if I read her correctly, is whether there is a political will to reduce poverty and income inequality in the United States. There is no great secret on how to do it; the question is whether there is a political will to address a problem that falls so heavily on the backs of women and children, particularly of color.
Leo
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I agree with your list Diane.
The problem with these philosophical fixes like Petrilli suggests is that you have to get everyone on the same page and sort of at the same starting point . . right? I think eradicating problems by fixing behavior is never the wise approach. We have to figure out how to make the best of situations, not spend time just figuring out how to not make them happen (unless there is a very specific scientific reason for them, like a particular virus or disease. .. to prevent epidemics). Mistakes are going to happen. Young women are going to get pregnant. It’s how we handle the situations that is the important part.
Trends can certainly happen in how people approach big life choices (marriage, domestic situations, having children, career paths, home ownership) but there will always be people who don’t follow the trends and if we purport that one best way to do things is the only way society will function, then you get marginalized people and the struggles continue. I think if we accept that there will always be hungry and poor people and that we need to have systems in place to keep them from pulling everyone down (with crime and disease) by giving them some basics when they need them (and personally I don’t think that encourages perpetual poverty–I think it keeps it from infecting everyone. It’s not like our welfare programs make people rich). But they do help keep people alive and from stealing and spreading disease (to generalize a bit). And while I don’t know much about unions and economic systems that help increase the size of the middle class, I do know that no middle class ain’t good. I know that systems that encourage the Matthew peffect need to be kept in check and intentionally guarded off. But to carry that into how people live their lives in terms of family structure might be a waste of energy. Also, I believe the more desperate a young woman feels (lack of support, lack of belonging, lack of achievement) the more likely she is to get pregnant young. So school is a place to help encourage those things in young women (and in girls before they are women).
I think the answers are in what we waste and how what we waste could be turned into productivity (I think we’ve only just begun to explore how recycling and reuse can be an industry). Schools are a good place to model that and encourage resourcefulness and ingenuity. From my limited experience, the retail industry has loads of waste and debt, as general practice. The arts is an excellent avenue for encouraging creativity in so many areas, and the arts in the schools is of huge value.
And as for the left glumly accepting that students of poverty won’t do well. . .I disagree. I think it is typically people of the left persuasion who are in the jobs that work with children, so our ideas about how to help them are less pie in the sky. For example, when you have a kindergarten student whose mama decided to take crystal meth when she was pregnant (and I’m sure there are a plethora of psychological, sociological and economic reasons why she was compelled to make that unwise choice), and his eyes sort of roll around in his head and he often rolls around on the floor during the day, unable to speak in complete sentences, you understand that “no excuses,” standardized tests for all, rigor rigor rigor, a young teacher with little training, no regard for his rights under IDEA will not work for this child.
The problems are vastly complex.
That said, I am glad to see attempts at building bridges. But people who have not spent time in classrooms in public situations should not be the ones coming up with the solutions regarding schooling. It takes conversations between those with wise business sense AND the ones who have been in the trenches to come up with best solutions to deal with problems.
It seems to me quite ironic that the vast of the “moral” right (aka corporate leaders) will say a vehement NO to abortion, yet want to reduce the quality of life even further for the poor. Wouldn’t we be best to solve the birth control issues? How many children has Bill Gates adopted or fostered? Hmmmmmmmm…he does have plenty of money…why doesn’t he take some special needs kids and show us how much better HE can educate them? Buwahaha. Yeah, right.
Michael Petrilli’s assertion that education can fix poverty may have a ring of truth to it but for reasons other than those that he offers. What is incorrect is to suggest, as many do, that there is a causal relationship between poverty and the problems of public education in America. Clearly one is influenced by the other and vice versa but that is as far as it goes.
In my new book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America, I suggest that poverty, deteriorating neighborhoods, the failure of so many American children, bad schools, and burned out teachers are all symptoms of the same underlying pathology. That we do not recognize the true nature of the relationship contributes greatly to the failure of educational reforms over the past half century.
I suggest that race has nothing to do with this failure but culture is another matter, entirely. There is a expanding population of American men and women who have lost faith and hope in the American dream and no longer believe that they possess control over the outcomes in their lives. These Americans exist under a blanket of hopelessness and powerlessness. What has happened as this cultural phenomenon has evolved since the end of World War II, is that an increasingly more pervasive cultural disdain for education has emerged and it transcends race.
Whatever the ethnicity of a subculture that is characterized by this disdain for education, children in these communities are not taught to value education and are not reared in an environment that would foster a strong motivation to learn. In a time when the American dream has become meaningless, an education, which for generations has been viewed as a pass of admission to the dream, is now a ticket to nowhere. The children from these cultural pockets throughout much of urban America, and in some rural communities, arrive for their first day of school with precious little motivation to learn an even less preparation. There, they are greeted by a system that is poorly equipped to respond to the challenges that these students present and by educators who are as much victims of the system as are their students. For huge numbers of these children our educational process sets them up for failure and humiliation and figuratively chews them up and spits them out.
That teachers and their principals are bewildered that these children are disruptive, earn failing grades and disappointing scores on state competency exams is, itself, bewildering. One wonders how intelligent men and women could ever be persuaded to expect anything else. Pleas to parents for help and support are shunned by men and women who, themselves, are victims of the same educational process. The expectations of these parents are that schools exist to keep the kids out of their hair for five days a week and they resent the intrusion.
In Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream, I reject the conventional wisdom about the reasons for the academic failure of a growing percentage of American children and offer an alternative hypothesis. I suggest that the problems with education in the U.S. are 1) this burgeoning disdain for education on the part of parents and the resulting lack of motivation on the part of their children, and 2) an educational process that is focused on failure. The very fact that children can fail contributes greatly to a reality in which so very many of them do.
The book then outlines 19 specific action strategies for reinventing the educational process to one in which children are taught how to succeed within the context of ever-rising expectations followed by 14 action strategies for re-packaging and reselling the American dream and then re-engaging parents as full partners with the teachers and principals; sharing responsibility for the education of their children. Your are invited to visit my website at http://www.melhawkinsandassociates.com where you can learn more about the book and also where you can explore my blog, THE LEADer, (Thinking Exponentially: Leadership, Education, and the American Dream)
I don’t know if you’ve seen this article written by Michael Petrilli: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/11/19/3670508/what-we-reformers-learned-about.html#.UladQ1P4dM0
In it, he proposes one type of public school for the poor, and another model for wealthier children:
“Top-down, one-size-fits-all efforts such as formulaic teacher evaluations tend to overemphasize the high-stakes testing that can take the joy out of learning. Parents and teachers in richer areas typically hate this pressure. Reformers can’t put together winning political coalitions if they lose the suburbs. When it comes to middle-class schools, reformers should follow the doctors’ dictum: First, do no harm.”
I honestly don’t see much point in trying to engage in debate with someone who would write something so outrageous.
You are absolutely right: there is no debating these people, but only the need to educate and organize to (borrowing/adapting from FDR) drive the money changers out of the temple of learning.
The author of that article also makes a second point:
“Second, we must renew efforts to show respect for teachers. This can be complicated: Many schools face a teacher-quality crisis after years of low professional-entry standards and lax accountability. At the same time, most teachers are dedicated and hardworking. We need to stress that bad teachers are rare but devastating and that efforts to weed them out will lift the entire profession. Any rhetoric that implies that most or even many teachers are incompetent or uncommitted to children needs to be scrapped.”
Perhaps that suggestion will be better received by the folks here.
The Fordham Institute has advocated that poor black kids need no-excuses schools while white affluent kids don’t
The Fordham Institute actually wrote that “poor black kids” need no-excuses schools and “white affluent kids” don’t?
The stock phrase, “No Excuses” — more properly delivered, “NO EXCUSE, SIR❢” — is one of the obligatory responses that makes up a part of military school and bootcamp culture.
Which ought to give everyone a clue what the 1‰ (1 per mill) have in mind for everyone else’s children …
I do think that some of the reforms suggested by Dr. Ravitch are more important in some schools than in others. Wrap around medical services, for example, might be a low priority at New Trier High School, but a much higher one at Anacostia High.
The most obnoxious and disrespectful students are middle class kids in high achieving schools. They think they are entitled and are quick to get the teacher in trouble with mama and daddy who rush up to the school to see what that awful teacher has done to their little darling. I taught mostly inner city and rarely got disrespected, but the times I taught suburban, I just wanted OUT. Yet middle class kids are not subjected to “no excuse” schools. They are not the ones on whom uniforms are forced and they get the experienced teachers who want to teach them. I think it all goes back to the euthanasia movement and even before, the idea that if you are poor, you are reaping the bad karma of previous lives or your parents did something wrong. Even Jesus’s disciples bought into this when they asked Him who sinned to make the man blind. I have found that wealthy systems buy into this and are quick to cater to the students and parents while regarding the teachers as expendable. While I would not wish any child a TFA or bad teacher, I think teachers with over 5 years of experiences should be offered a coaching supplement to teach in the schools with the lowest achieving students.
“Top-down, one-size-fits-all efforts such as formulaic teacher evaluations tend to overemphasize the high-stakes testing that can take the joy out of learning. Parents and teachers in richer areas typically hate this pressure. Reformers can’t put together winning political coalitions if they lose the suburbs. When it comes to middle-class schools, reformers should follow the doctors’ dictum: First, do no harm.”
He’s right, though, politically, and reform is POLITICAL despite denials.
It’s bigger than testing. The bottom line is that ed reform hasn’t strengthened or improved public schools, and that’s what the public was sold: not that reformers would replace public schools, but that they would improve existing schools. They never could have gained political power without that promise, because MOST children attend public schools.
We’ve spent billions of dollars and more than decade and existing public schools are not “better.”
Reform has harmed my rural district, and this isn’t a weak public school district. It isn’t “failing”.
It has been ALL downside for us. We got gimmicks and tests and discouraged teachers and narrowed curriculum and unfunded mandates, along with LESS state funding.
Reformers can’t answer this question: “how has reform benefitted existing public schools” and it has been more than a decade.
They have to answer that question.
Sigh. Big, deep sigh. Michael Petrilli. Again.
Petrilli passes himself off as “one of the nation’s most trusted education analysts.” And he’s not trying to be funny.
Although it surely is a joke.
Petrilli passes off conventional conservative dogma as “reform.” Little if any of it is grounded in factual reality.
Here’s some of the pap that Petrilli parrots:
He says, despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary, that “our education system is tattered. Some of it is fine, but too much is mediocre or worse.”
He attacks inner-city schools, with hardly a mention of poverty or degraded environmental conditions, and then says also that “our suburban schools are just getting by. They may not be dropout factories, but they’re not preparing anywhere near enough of their pupils to revive our economy.” As if public schools CAUSED the stagnant economy (and piled up deficits and debt) in the first place.
He whines inaccurately that “our schools haven’t improved,” but that “Republican governors like Chris Christie, Mitch Daniels, John Kasich, and Scott Walker are demonstrating real reform.” Say what? Is Petrilli living on the same planet as the rest of us. What about that nonsense that Petrilli is a “trusted” analyst?
Like his pals – Scott Walker, Mitch Daniels, etc. – Petrilli attacks teachers and their “unions” for “their gold-plated health care benefits or retirement pensions or lifetime job protections.”
Petrilli wants more “rigorous academic standards and tests,” and he says that we “should rate schools on an easy-to-understand scale, ideally from A to F, as Florida started doing under Governor Jeb Bush.” Jeb Bush? Seriously?
Petrillli thinks the world of vouchers, saying that “one of the best ways to get more bang for the education buck is to strap it to the backs of individual kids and let parents decide which schools deliver the best value for money.”
Petrilli is a conservative charlatan. A huckster.
He is not an “analyst,” just a deceitful hack.
“Michael Petrilli of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute”
Isn’t the Fordham Institute headquartered in Ohio?
Maybe they should stop attending policy roundtables for a week and look at some of their reforms in this state. Where are the successes? Cybercharters are a corrupt disaster. The mayors of both Cleveland and Columbus are openly complaining that they have no power to regulate or approve charter schools in their cities. Public school leaders in Lucas and Wood counties (Toledo, NW Ohio) are publicly complaining that reform is weakening strong public schools.
Reform is a disaster in Ohio. The only (large) city that seems to have escaped is Cincinnati.
I heard they were taking the show on the road to Idaho, of all places. One would think they could show a success in one state before they take this experiment national. Why these people continue to call themselves “conservative” is beyond me. They’re reckless.
Again — changing the tax code will not reduce income inequality. Because it will not reduce the incomes of the highest earners or increase the incomes of the lowest earners.
Actually, vastly increasing the top marginal tax rate as Joe advocates below (combined with steep penalties for off-shoring income/wealth) will go a long way toward reducing inequality. The top earners will be taking home less, which money will be available to the government to spend on programs that help the poor, working and middle classes. Also, the focus in business wouldn’t be so much on making the greatest amount of profit, since that would be taxed anyway. Business owners would have greater incentive to reinvest back into the company which will directly and indirectly help the working and middle classes.
I think FLERPs point is that income is generally measured before taxes, so the income distribution is not impacted by rawest except through changes in incentives which are probably not what you are interested in.
I would look at the broader capabilities approach developed by Sen as a better way to look at inequality and poverty.
Income inequality is measured by disparities in gross income, not take-home pay. So raising income taxes will not reduce income unless income taxes are raised so high that the people affected no longer have the incentive to earn more money. If you’re talking about tax increases that make it rational for people to try to earn less money than they do now, then yes, that might reduce income inequality (assuming the low end of the income curve stays the same or rises).
FLERP!
“that the people affected no longer have the incentive to earn more money”
That’s if you believe that it is the money that is the number one factor in people’s motivation. Were you an economist before your current profession???
I think FLERP is taking the reasonable position that it is a factor without making a claim about it’s relative importance. I certainly agree with FLERP if I am understanding the position correctly.
Return the top marginal tax rate to what it was during the Eisenhower administration (91%) or even during the Nixon administration (74%). Having a strong union movement would go a long way towards reducing poverty in this country. The unionization rate is currently at 11.3%, during the boom times of the 1950s it was at about 34%. We should have the unionization rate of Finland, 64%.
Education is simply the reflection of society, a mirror from which the beliefs, attitudes, and ultimatley the actions of our culture/s/society may be viewed. People who think that education is the change agent for society are placing the cart before the horse. Education should be included in formulating the solution, but is only a very small gear in a very complex machine. The solution lies in changing the beliefs and values of a generation, a very diverse nation, of people.
“Since no one knows how to do that. . . ”
TAGO, Diane, TAGO!!
Actually we (us conservatives that is, wink, wink) do. Just say no and become born again virgins (guys included)!!
“And change the tax structure so that income inequality is reduced.”
Wow, Diane, from Fordhamism to socialism, all in one lifetime!
Diane, I think this is a great post. Too often I seem to be reading “schools are not the answer,” but here you’ve made clear your point that schools are part of the answer, but not the only one by any means. You lay out a clear vision for a more comprehensive approach to addressing poverty. It will be hard for anyone to argue against your post.
I, at one point in time, believed that public education was “the great equalizer,” but a few years of college and reading about *real* US history disabused me of that notion. Diane, have you ever read Tim Wise? He writes: [education] “has been constructed to maintain existing hierarchies and division, with regard not only to race, but to class status.” http://books.google.com/books?id=PzgFrPGih4sC&pg=PA38&lpg=PA38&dq=tim+wise+education+%E2%80%9Cthe+great+equalizer,%E2%80%9D&source=bl&ots=bgk6vW3GqR&sig=Npqz2wHXjve1j79ZwpFYyWfifbA&hl=en&sa=X&ei=EwhXUu_JL8eViALkroGYDA&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=tim%20wise%20education%20%E2%80%9Cthe%20great%20equalizer%2C%E2%80%9D&f=false
In a perfect world, public education would be the great equalizer, but as you point out, in order to do that, we need “community schools” that offer all kinds of social services for poor students. And we’re not there yet.
Certainly schools cannot reduce poverty by themselves as is pointed out here but most certainly cannot when teachers cannot educate because of strictures on them and when available money is funneled off to the charters which instead of doing what was originally proposed, working with students who had difficulties in the public school setting are now instead competing with the public schools for the most academically gifted children.