Paul Thomas of Furman University has emerged as one of the most eloquent voices on behalf of children in poverty. In this essay, linked by Maureen Downey in the Atlanta Journal-Consitution, Paul explains why “grit” and “no excuses” are not enough to overcome the burdens of poverty.
Paul says that the reformers’ narrative is not only wrong but misguided because it distracts public attention from the root problems of poverty and segregation.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
http://www.10tv.com/content/stories/apexchange/2013/11/25/oh–closed-charter-schools.html
“DAYTON, Ohio (AP) — A newspaper reports that the state of Ohio paid nearly $1.2 million to a string of charter schools that closed weeks after they opened.
The Dayton Daily News (http://bit.ly/1ck7QJo ) said Monday that all the schools operated
under the name Olympus High School. They were operated by Education Innovations International, whose officials have not responded to repeated requests for comment.
The schools — which are now suspended by the state — were operating under a model that blended classroom time and e-learning. The classrooms had no teachers, only coaches to help the students with their online lessons.”
I’m seeing these franchises pop up all over Ohio. Is this the “blended learning” model that the US Secretary of Education is promoting, and if so, why didn’t he anticipate that for-profit operators would use it to rip off states and students? I mean, obviously this thing was ripe for abuse the moment it was conceived.
Was I wrong to think they were going to do this on the cheap and in the most profitable way that is humanely possible and still call it a “school”? No. I knew they would. Why didn’t the US Department of Education?
http://www.10tv.com/content/stories/apexchange/2013/11/25/oh–closed-charter-schools.html
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His description of poverty as a bear-trap on the leg of poor children is poignant and imaginative, especially the advice given to the poor to enable them to run faster:
“Living in poverty is a bear trap (and it is), and education is a race, a 100-meter dash. “No excuses” advocates calling for grit, then, are facing this fact:
Children in poverty line up at the starting line with a bear trap on one leg; middle-class children start at the 20-, 30-, and 40-meter marks; and the affluent stand at the 70-, 80-, and 90-meter marks.
And while gazing at education as a stratified sprint, “no excuses” reformers shout to the children in poverty: “Run twice as fast! Ignore the bear trap! And if you have real grit, gnaw off your foot, and run twice as fast with one leg!”
These “no excuses” advocates turn to the public and shrug, “There’s nothing we can do about the trap, sorry.”
What is also revealed in this staggered 100-meter race is that all the children living and learning in relative affluence are afforded slack by the accidents of their birth: “Slack” is the term identified by Mullainathan and Shafir as the space created by abundance that allows any person access to more of her/his cognitive and emotional resources.
In the race to the top that public education has become, affluent children starting at the 90-meter line can jog, walk, lie down, and even quit before the finish line. They have the slack necessary to fail, to quit, and to try again—the sort of slack all children deserve.
Children in relative affluence do not have to wrestle with hunger, worry about where they’ll sleep, feel shame for needing medical treatment when they know their family has no insurance and a tight budget, or watch their families live every moment of their lives in the grip of poverty’s trap.”
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Please, everyone who reads this blog, forward this article and essay. It gets to the root of the matter just as well as a 200 page book would. The only thing I would add is that structural inequality disproportionately affects people of color and that another word for “slack” could be “white privilege”. It is one thing to not do something about child poverty. It is quite another to impose an ideology on all children that encourages them to rationalize their challenges, successes and failures as having only to do with how hard they worked as individuals. Unless the entire social science section of the library of congress is lying, we know this is not the full story.
As MLK said “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
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GE2L2R: thank you for your comments.
I like to use a baseball analogy—students living in poverty and impoverished neighborhoods are grudgingly given a chance, once in a while, to come up to home plate and take a swing at the ball, while their more affluent peers are automatically advanced to first, second or third plate without even having to dirty their hands on the bat.
How does this work out concretely? Going to what was called an “all-city” high school in the depths of the [allegedly] less cagebusting achievement gap crushing twentieth century, I remember a young woman who took an advanced French class from a very demanding Francophile who was, in the understated parlance of the time, “not an easy grader.” After a couple days in the class, the teacher told my classmate that she was going to get an automatic “A” [unheard of from this teacher!] and that she would be helping to teach the other students.
How was this possible? Was the young woman a linguistic genius, the Mario Pei [google if you must] of her day?
Nope. Her family was upper middle class. From the moment she was born, every summer you could find her and her parents on the French Rivera. French was as familiar to this student as English, and her family encouraged her and provided her with the means to be at the same grade level in French as she was in English.
To belay any misconceptions, I only add that she was a modest and humble person who was well aware of the fact that she had had certain advantages that gave her a big head start in life.
In other words, she understood what the education rheephormers today deny.
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I articulated this issue in 2002 in the last chapter of my dissertation when I begged the question, “How can we discuss achievement of children in poverty when we ignore their poor health, constant mobility, and other stresses that are a result of their parents’ SES?” My study was focused on teachers’ use of constructivist-based strategies to teach science. By the time I ended my study I was convinced that it was hypocritical for me to talk about how teachers can impact student achievement if I didn’t address the other factors that have a greater impact on their achievement. The opportunity gap is just as important as the achievement gap and as right thinking people we need to push for economic development that includes job training and living wages in our cities and rural areas.
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This excellent article goes to the heart of these issues. If we could only tattoo it on the brains of the “reformers” or those advocating for fiascos such as “common core” and the like, or motivate them to read it. I will copy my comments posted on FB here for the record. This is about the insane trends in No Child Left Behind and “Race to the Top”, where schools that are in poor areas or that serve deprived kids are punished when they don’t show enough improvement in test scores. Test scores prove absolutely nothing about actual education and are easily manipulated by those who know the tricks of the trade. But, more importantly, this essay is a lesson for the fools who insist on blaming poor people for their poverty and suffer from the delusion that all it takes is determination and hard work to get out of a desperate situation. In some cases, there is a degree of truth in that concept, but in most, it is a cruel myth. Most people who get out of poverty without functional social programs or strong family and community support do it only through criminal activity or making terrible sacrifices, cheating everybody they can and exploiting others who are deprived and desperate. Rarely does anyone with good ideas or a solid business plan find the financing to get a foothold in order to start something and realize their dreams. It is the same in education. Kids that start out with disadvantages remain disadvantaged except when dedicated teachers make huge sacrifices and others along the way give them a break or social programs create unusual opportunities. The Republicans have it 100% wrong, but what can you expect, they’re Republicans!
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I write frequently on economic development and the growing need for state and local governments to address inequality and poverty. I thought you might be interested in this piece that went up today on our website.
http://www.governing.com/gov-institute/funkhouser/col-economic-development-incentives-federal-law-washington-state-seattle-boeing.html
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Like Mr. Banks in Mary Poppins, I think those who make education policy should go into the classroom and implement it. Not only understanding poverty, but understanding children and youth is a must.
“A British bank is run with precision, a British home requires nothing less Tradition, discipline and rules must be the tools Without them disorder, chaos, moral disintegration In short, you have a ghastly mess, I quite agree! The children must be molded, shaped and taught That life’s a looming battle to be faced and fought In short, I am disturbed to hear my children Talking about poping in and out of Chalk pavement pictures, consorting With racehorse persons, foxhunting Yes, well I don’t mind that quiet so much But anyways its tradition but tea parties on the ceiling I ask you, having tea parties on the cieling I am highly questionable outings of every other kinds If they must go on outings these outings ought to be Fraught with purpose, yes and practicality These silly words like Superca, superca, superca Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, yes, well done, you said it And popping through pictures have little use, fulfill no basic need They’ve got to learn the honest truth Despite their youth they must learn about the life you lead Exactly, they must feel the thrill of totting up a balanced book A thousand ciphers neatly in a row When gazing at a graph that shows the profits up Their little cup of joy should overflow, precisely! It’s time they learned to walk in your footstep My footsteps To tread your straight and narrow path with pride With pride Tomorrow, just as you suggest Pressed and dressed Jane and Michael will be at your side”
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Thank you for that lovely romp down memory lane! And although I desperately wanted to be Ms. Poppins herself when I was a young girl, I reckon that I turned out a bit like that suffragette momma who knew that few tea parties on the ceiling is not a bad thing at all.
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Thanks for this reminder of our own narrative histories.
When the “No Excuses” report first came out (it must be a dozen years ago), Jerry Bracey and I teamed up and had some fun. He took on the “researcher” (who turned out to have no investigative experience; I believe she was a doctoral student in theology — which in retrospect was fitting).
Meanwhile, I exposed the three “no excuses” schools they cited in Chicago to show that the claims made in “No Excuses” were nonsense. Others did the debunking in other places.
Their choice of “Chicago grit” was an example.
One of the schools was the Marva Collins school, which we had exposed as a fraud back during the 1980s. Marva had pioneered many of the silly talking points that became legendary since, but once her own claims were debunked (finally, before a national audience during a two-day airing on “Donoghue”) her time as an example for the Wall Street Journal was limited.
The other two Chicago “No Excuses” schools were so-called “inner city” schools that served middle class kids!
“No Excuses” knew so little about Chicago that they ignored the fact that Chicago had many middle class (and even affluent) communities — even on the South Side and even in the Black Ghetto.
Phi Delta Kappan then ran our challenges to “No Excuses,” while people in California picked up on the same frauds in the “No Excuses” stuff for the California schools. (That was before PDK sold out to Broad Foundation money).
Of course, the ruling class propagandists didn’t flinch when the facts proved them wrong.
They simply continued banging their drums and repeating their chants. After all, we are dealing with theology and ritual, not science.
When Paul Tough’s “Grit” book came out, you knew even before reading it that it was going to be the same nonsense — a full 30 years after Wall Street began publicizing the nonsense being spouted in the Marva Collins talking points. (It’s been 28 years since we devoted three lengthy articles to that exposé — “the Marva Collins Hoax” — in Substance). Each year there will be another “Waiting for Superman” or “Grit,” and the business of talking that nonsense will always prove lucrative for some handful of “Won’t Back Down” types. They just have to be cast with the right working class looks and language.
But this stuff is really nasty — and as usual, a form of child abuse.
Arne Duncan perfected one kind of that during his years (2001 – 2008) as CEO of Chicago’s schools.
One of the ugliest things about this No Excuses propaganda is that it tries to make poor and working class kids blame themselves for their “failures” (and the “failures” of their schools).
Beginning with Duncan’s attack on Williams and Dodge elementary schools in 2002, I heard the same evil over and over and over again. (The mewlings from Duncan on TV after his “White Suburban Moms” stuff sounds so familiar it’s nasty…).
Duncan targeted three Chicago elementary schools for his first “turnaround” attack in 2002. One was Terrell, which had lost most of its students because the housing projects it had served for 40 years had been torn down.
The other two (Williams on the South Side and Dodge on the West Side) were facing unique problems the year Arne assaulted them and libeled their teachers. Of course, Arne repeated that nonsense about “change is hard” and “we have to make the hard choices” (as if he had ever faced a choice more difficult than which gym shoes to buy in his privileged life…) and the Chicago Sun-Times and Tribune chanted praise for his courage. (I’m tempted to use some 1940s historical analogues, but won’t for now…).
On dozens of occasions when Arne Duncan was beginning the “Turnaround” fraud here in Chicago, we covered the “hearings.” Actually, the hearings were more like the Show Trials of the 1930s. A mercenary “hearing officer” sat in judgment against poor kids. The carefully scripted ritual was on the “failing” schools and why they had to be closed and turnarounded.
And the children showed up (just as I’ve seen from the video from the same ugliness in New York and elsewhere) and did their best.
At many of those Chicago hearings, the children (almost always, all black and poor) would be crying and testifying that they would “do better” because they didn’t want their favorites teachers to be fired. The scheme made the children believe that if they studied harder and “did better on the test” (the test changed from year to year, as we all now know; it’s not which test but the ranking and sorting and secrecy that count) their school would “pass” and their teachers wouldn’t be fired.
Although that policy began under Paul Vallas (CEO Chicago 1995 – 2001) in 1997 with “Reconstitution,” it really took off under Arne Duncan (CEO Chicago 2001 – 2008).
That criminal behavior became national policy after Duncan landed in D.C. in 2009 as Barack Ohamab’s U.S. Secretary of Education. And the first national confrontation over it was Central Falls Rhode Island, for those who remember.
But like so many things, a good bit of the preliminary work on that policy had been field tested in Chicago by Paul Vallas, Arne Duncan and the “Chicago Boys” before Barack Obama brought the show to the nation as “Race To The Top.”
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All the sudden emphasis on grit makes me suspicious that it will be a code word for “suck it up, poor kids, and don’t use the disasters in your life as an excuse not to perform as well as the the kids who have never missed a meal.”
I’d love to see the grit-lovers make a meal of grit. (Not grits, which make a lovely meal here in the South where poverty is flourishing.)
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Poverty will persist in America, the wealthiest (and greediest) nation on the planet, as long as the underclass is plauged by mental illness, poor nutrition, low wages, bad luck, fear, crime, drugs, family dysfunction, dependence, and complete despair. Much of what we are experiencing can be traced back to the legacy of our racist past (and present). For anyone to expect schools to be able bail our underclass out of this mess by simply encouraging them to “pick themeselves up by their bootstraps” show some “grit and tenacity” and make “no excuses” simply puts their ignorance on display.
Its just so much easier to blame the schools, and the teachers, and the parents, and the students.
I remember asking a professor what he thought it would take to fix the problems regarding social stratification and the permanent underclass. His answer always stuck with me: “At least a thousand years of cultural evolution.”
Excellent article. A must read for all eductors and edufrauds alike.
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Or, you and me and a few other folks too. 😉
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One of my favorite paragraphs from the U.S. DOE publication on “Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance”:
“Student data collected in online learning systems can be used
to develop models about processes associated with grit,
which then can be used, for example, to design
interventions or adaptations to a learning system to promote desirable
behaviors. Dependent behavioral variables associated with a
challenge at hand may include responses to failure (e.g., time
on task, help seeking, revisiting a problem, gaming the
system, number of attempts to solve a problem, use of hints),
robustness of strategy use (e.g., planning, monitoring, tools
used, number of solutions tried, use of time), level of
challenge of self selected tasks, or delay of gratification or
impulse control in the face of an enticing off task stimulus.
Such data can be examined for discrete tasks or aggregated
over many tasks.”
Huh?!?!?!?!?!?!!???!?
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Let me just say that what is proposed here could be interesting, but researchers have been seeking to unlock the resilience mechanism for ages. It seems as though the idea is to look at “grit” though discrete tasks. Doing so might work to a certain extent, but I’d wager that the most confounding issues underlying student performance wouldn’t resemble the experimental conditions. There is simply no way to get around the fact that we are developmental, cultural and social creatures. I am sure such research could identify some “tweaks” or best practices for specific issues, but the money would be better spent on simple supports such as: safe environments, improving nutrition and sleep, and fostering attachment between children and their caregivers.
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It takes a helluva lot more grit and tenacity to grow up poor and underprivelged than rich and fortunate.
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Hear, hear.
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This is about giving ed-tech entrepreneurs a market opportunity in children of poverty. Dependent behavioral variables are recorded by software that captures each keystroke a child enters, and mining that data stream will permit the development of a software response that encourages the one thing children living in poverty need — grit.
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There is a lot of very interesting work on grit being done, most famously by Angela Duckworth at Penn.
When you read the actual scholarship on the role of grit I think its something that any teacher would find accurate and sensible. Unfortunately, the word is being co-opted and morphed into something quite different in the context of education reform discussions.
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Reblogged this on TMO Alief and commented:
For those of us who are weary of hearing about poverty, what must it be like for the 30% of Houstonians who live in poverty. In Alief ISD, a suburb of Houston over 1000 children are homeless this Thanksgiving. Unfortunately a food basket won’t solve the problem Happy Thanksgiving folkd
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In the late 19th century about 1000 poor Chinese immigrants, mostly Hakka peasants, arrived in Jamaica to work as indentured laborers in the sugarcane populations. When these people arrived they were totally illiterate, did not speak English and possessed essentially nothing except the clothes they wore. They worked for years at hard physical labor to pay off the debts they had incurred to migrate to Jamaica. After paying off their debts they were subject to harsh anti-Chinese laws and occasional anti-Chinese violence. They were otherwise totally ignored by the Jamaican governmental authorities. Nevertheless by the time of the 1965 anti-Chinese riots the Jamaica Chinese numbering less than one percent of the Jamaican population operated over 90% of the retail shops in Jamaica.
In the long run genetics trumps environment.
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NYS Teacher – A thousand years is a long enough time for significant genetic change to occur through natural selection. Unfortunately at the present time the less intelligent are out-reproducing the more intelligent. Until that changes there will not be any improvement.
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Like all human behavioral traits “grit” is substantially influenced by genetics. As a basic personality trait there is probably not much that can be done to teach “grit”.
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