Lloyd Lofthouse is a Vietnam veteran who taught school in a barrio ruled by violent street gangs for thirty years. From his blog, which he calls Crazy Normal, I would say that he is disgusted with those who take pot shots at teachers. He just discovered my existence and ordered Reign of Error.
I can’t wait to read his reaction.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Yes but he blames parents and families instead for being dysfunctional. Well yes there are copious amounts of dysfunction caused by poverty. However blaming or scapegoating does not foster examination and reflection of the questions. Poverty is an outcome of what? Inequity. I fear that if we dont get at roots and causes we will not solve these vexing questions. I am heartened that you are out there on the Frontlines for children and teachers. Best, Christine Lonergan A bad ass teacher taking a break to reflect before jumping back into the fray, after 30 years of passion and devotion to teaching. Sent from my iPhone
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Although I agree with almost everything Lloyd Lighthouse wrote in his blog…I stop at his blaming parents as the singular reason for the challenges facing American education. Thanks for sharing his blog.
I believe that Lloyd Lofthouse is being honest about his feelings and is speaking from his particular experience in a very particular setting: a barrio that was full of gangs, violence and dysfunctional shattered families. He taught in an extreme setting and came to a seemingly extreme conclusion, that the parents were to blame for the bad behavior of the children and their hostility to education or learning. That was not my experience but then I didn’t teach in a barrio. On the other hand, the 2 other commenters make valid points; cthebean said, “However blaming or scapegoating does not foster examination and reflection of the questions.” Quite true.
Joe, I was with you in your analysis of Lofthouse’s position, and while I agree with the other commenters in principle, his life has obviously been centered around this very dysfunctional environment in which he worked for thirty years. That much time devoted to educating children in a climate that perpetuates degradation is likely to color one’s perception. I hope his discovery of Diane Ravitch’s work gives him cause for hope and an avenue for becoming a catalyst for change, but I will not chastise him for his present worldview. That he devoted thirty years to this community tells me more about him than his despair.
2old2tch: your handle does not do you justice.
“Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach.” [Aristotle]
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
🙂
I posted a comment about poverty on his blog and he posted a rambling reply that includes all the usual canards about “throwing money at poor people” with a few anecdotes thrown in for good measure – it all boils down to poverty is no excuse.
Sorry, he’s no champion of public education.
Dienne, I don’t think you read my “rambling reply”. I think if you spent time digesting what I wrote, you would realize what I was saying that poverty is an abstract idea and people are concrete.
There are many examples of people who come from poverty and/or dysfunctional homes but they become successful in school, go onto college and then leave poverty behind.
One avenue to escape poverty is the U.S. military and some take that route. For example, I had one girl who went into the air force and while she was serving in different countries around the world in a Patriot battery, she was also earning an-online degree from a state university in California—and while she was on active duty, the air force was picking up the tab for her university education.
She grew up in that barrio and left the gangs behind. She visited me six years after high school graduation and said she would stay in the Air Force until she earned her masters.
Another boy who grew up in the poverty of that barrio had parents who spoke no English; were devout Catholics and very involved with their children. As a senior, his college entrance exams were so high, he ended up going to USC on a full scholarship.
Both of the examples I have shared here are of young people who grew up in a barrio surrounded and living in poverty. The difference was the parents.
That is why I say when you have a dysfunctional child who is still functionally illiterate or illiterate after spending thirteen years in the public schools, you can almost always trace that failure back to a dysfunctional, unresponsive parent/s.
It wasn’t as if the help wasn’t there in the schools. There were tutoring programs before and after school in the libraries. There were outreach programs. Teachers were constantly attempting to contact the parents who often were difficult to reach or promised support and never delivered.
But I think you are obsessed with poverty as the reason when the people who live in poverty are the reason they stay stuck there and the older they get the more difficult it is to break out.
Again, blaming poverty without identifying the root cause will not solve this problem. If the schools had the legal, funded infrastructure to identify parents who are stuck in poverty, the only way to break their children out is through interventions starting before the child is born with nutritional programs and monitoring in addition to literacy programs that start as early as 18 months and as late as age three where outreach programs through libraries and literacy groups working out of the public schools and libraries spend quality time with these toddlers introducing them to books and reading to them until they are reading for themselves.
Blaming the education gap on poverty alone is not going to change the situation. But constructive, well thought out intervention programs that followed a child all the way to graduation from high school would stand a better chance of breaking the chains to poverty that come through dysfunctional parents.
Throwing money at poverty in the form of food stamps and welfare checks in addition to school breakfast and lunch programs will never be enough to break this chain. And I’m not saying we should abandon these programs but there must be more of an effort instead of just blaming teachers.
Parents are the single biggest influence in a child’s life and it doesn’t matter if that family lives in poverty or not.
I’m well aware that more affluent most white and/or Asian communities have a much higher success rate; literacy rate and high school grdua6tion rate followed by higher college graduation rates.
I am now on Chapter thirteen of “Reign of Error” and have nothing but praise for what I have read so far. If you had read most if not all of the posts on my Crazy Normal blog you would have a better idea of where I’m coming from.
However, I’m also editing the Beta rough draft of memoir of one of my teaching years. In the early 1990s I kept a daily journal that focused on my classroom experiences as a teacher. That year was the second year that I had been the adviser and teacher of one journalism class in addition to teaching four period of college prep 9th grade English.
In that journalism class I worked with students who came from AP and Honors programs while in m y English classes I was dealing with gang bangers and kids reading from 2nd grade to college literacy levels in the same class.
One thing I haven’t mentioned is that the high school where I taught also had middle and upper middle class kids coming from more affluent neighborhoods in the hills southeast of the school–these kids did not live in poverty.
The gang infested, poverty-ridden barrio was in the flat land that surrounded the high school. Even the police avoided those streets at night. Until that journalism class, my exposure with the kids from the more affluent community that did not live in poverty was limited.
Here’s a link to the Nogales High School Accountability Report Card:
Click to access 2012%20Nogales%20High%20School%20Accountability%20Report%20Card.pdf
The demographics have changed since I left.
Hispanic/Latino was 70% in 2005 with 8% black; 8% white and 8% Asian/Filipino. The white, Filipino and Asian students were the ones that usually lived in the more affluent community so it wasn’t as if I were cut off totally from students who came from more educated and literate and affluent families.
If you check the current data for Nogales High school, you will discover that 78.4% are listed as socioeconomically disadvantaged and 41.5% are English Learners.
Another factor is not poverty as much as it is cultural. Most of the English learners that make up 41.5% of the total enrollment are Hispanic/Latino and come from homes where most of the parents only speak Spanish. The educational values that came with those Spanish speaking parents—who are often illiterate in their own language from south of the American border—has a big impact impact.
Mexico, for example, has a high school graduation rate that is about 33% of adults, and there is a lot of illiteracy and functional illiteracy in Mexico where the schools are not that great.
Those parents more than most need intervention and support from programs that do not exist today to assist in breaking the habits that fuel poverty.