It is all the rage among the pseudo-reformers to dismiss the importance of poverty. Although most of the pseudo-reformers grew up in affluence, attended elite private school, and send their own children to equally splendid private schools, they feel certain in their hearts that poverty is a state of mind that can be easily overcome. All it takes is one great teacher. Or three effective teachers in a row. Or lots of grit. Or a no-excuses school where children dress for success, follow rules without questioning, and act like little test-taking machines. One by one, the pseudo-reformers insist, they will end poverty.
No one needs a higher minimum wage. No one needs a change in the tax structure. Nothing need be done except fire teachers who can’t raise test scores and hire lots of TFA, whose enthusiasm is sure to overcome their lack of training and experience.
The fact that social scientists have demonstrated the significance of poverty on one’s life chances never penetrates the discussion. In one State of the Union Address, the President lauded a peculiar study which claimed that the influence of a third or fourth grade teacher affected one’s lifetime earnings, even prevented pregnancies years later. Enough such teachers, one surmises, and poverty will be vanquished. The Secretary of Education used to point to schools where 100% of the students, impoverished as could be, went to college, until the news media realized that such schools usually had a trick, like high attrition rates.
The fact is that poverty does matter. No matter what standardized test you look at, the results portray the influence of socioeconomic status on test scores . Despite outliers, the kids with the most advantages are at the top, the kids with the fewest advantages are at the bottom. This is true of international tests, state tests, federal tests, the ACT, the SAT.
Standardized tests are the means by which privilege is distributed. The outcomes are predictable.
Here is yet another demonstration that poverty matters. So does advantage. But no matter what research or evidence shows, the charade goes on.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Don’t you think it’s way past time we stop attributing “good intentions” to the people pushing this particular road to hell?
YES, I AGREE whole-heartedly.
Yes, Jon, because they are forcing teachers and students to stay on this road to hell, when they desire with all their hearts to take a better road!!!
Strongly agree.
We don’t want to believe that national leaders, political and corporate, could possibly be so cynical. But it seems to be true – clearly, the goal is to extract as much profit out of public education as possible, then kill it. Vulture capitalism applied to public schools.
These people are crooks, nothing more.
Ixxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I agree. Ed reform as currently practiced is clearly a scheme to minimize the amount of public money put into the school systems in poverty-stricken areas. Hopefully they won’t be reading the linked study, or the next move will be to put a ring of casinos around every decayed urb.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé.
Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times calls it “The Compassion Gap.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/opinion/sunday/kristof-the-compassion-gap.html?ref=opinion&_r=0
If poverty matters then affluence doesn’t matter either? These people just succeeded because of their inherent talents and abilities? The last time I read a similar argument it was proclaimed by a man in a very shiny and pointy hat.
Of course. They don’t want to admit that they had more privileges than others that lead to their successes. A lot like white privilege.
“. . . man in a very shiny and pointy hat.”
Lost me on that, please explain.
Thanks!!
“Poverty isn’t bad housing, dirty clothing, families of 10, It’s never having been loved, or even respected. Not knowing the difference between love and abuse..” ~ Father Joe, Call the Midwife
There are always a few Horatio Alger stories, (I am surprised we aren’t seeing references to his work in ELA CC aligned curriculum), that supporters of punitive educational policies love to point, and say, “See, it can be done!”. My father escaped rural poverty and found a way to put himself through community college and eventually got an engineering degree from Rochester Institute of Technology. He never forgot, or let me forget, that he was lucky, perhaps the only one who go out of his poor town. So many went to jail or died. Horrible odds that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
I still think that those who have managed our schools (not the teacher corps) needed a scapegoat for low-SES student group learning outcomes or a ready explanation for the achievement gap. It makes sense as neither the teachers or the administrators really should take the fall for a societal problem and the admins make 2-3 times the salary–who wants to give up 10K per month?. But, heads had to roll so it became “let’s pin the blame on the teachers.” An easy sell and now we find ourselves here witnessing a disaster in the making. But there is some good news.
Here in Ct. there seems to be a groundswell of resistance to the misguided “education reform” campaign thanks to this blog and others. Let’s hope 2014 sees a further erosion of the privatization of public schools effort.
“The standard-issue Thomas-Friedman solution to our major economic woes — no jobs, income inequality, terrible wages — is for low-wage workers to just go and get themselves an edumacation already. Smarten up, get new skills, and the jobs and higher wages will come, while the cares and worries of globalization, offshoring and outsourcing will just wash away. It’s also an argument against raising the minimum wage — if workers were worth more, by being smarter, then the Invisible Hand would pay them more.
Except it’s not necessarily true. Particularly since the Great Recession, highly educated people have ended up taking low-paying McJobs, mainly because those have been the most plentiful.
This is also a longer-term trend: Workers are better-educated and more productive, meaning they can produce more in fewer hours. That has helped boost corporate profits to record highs, while wages have stagnated.
Turns out that more education does not necessarily mean more pay.
Low-wage workers are a lot more educated than they were nearly 50 years ago, but they are making much less, according to a new study by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.”
In 1968, 48% of Low-wage workers had a High School Diploma/GED
In 2012, 79% of Low-wage workers had a High School Diploma/GED.
In 1968, 17% of Low-wage workers had “College Experience”.
In 2012, 46% of Low-wage workers had “College Experience”.
Ideology or Data?
One issue with the statistics you cite is the change in the percentage of the population with high school diplomas.
In 1968 55% of the population reported a High School Diploma/GED while in 2012 87% of the population reported a High School Diploma/GED.
Lets do a little experiment. What percentage of low wage workers would have a high school diploma/GED if 100% of the population had a high school diploma/GED? What would be the policy implications if that was true?
Thank you Dorothy, they have no idea what poverty is. May 2014 be the year it really is addressed and not try to smokescreen with the problem being Public Education.
I haven’t kept up with what the reform movement folks in the USA have been saying. Have they been saying
A) Poverty doesn’t matter.
or
B) Poverty need not be destiny.
Those are two totally different things. A) is obviously wrong, B) seems right to me.
They are saying because A) Poverty doesn’t matter, then B) Poverty need not be destiny. False correlation. Because some charter operators have been able to game the system (see today’s entry on the Success Academies) by cherry picking students, counseling out low performers, and spending all the teaching time on test prep.
They are also saying C) Passing a standardized test is proof that poverty doesn’t matter, the assumption being that, by passing the tests, the poor students will magically get into an upper level university or college, paid for by ? ? ? ?, rise into the middle class then upper middle class, and become conservative capitalists, I guess.
By capitalizing on the now nearly impossible American dream and bootstrap raising, they are able to avoid responsibility for the 1 in 4 children who go to be hungry every night in the USA. And the third world level infant mortality rate. And the millions living in poverty while working. It’s quite the grift.
Well if what you say is true then they are making odd arguments indeed.
I work in a public school system in a developing country where 100% of the students are in poverty. Most of the students will never have a paying job, much less a job that gives them a path out of poverty. Females have it especially tough. That said, education is a potential path out of poverty… and that is perfectly consistent with the view that poverty is hugely important.
Chris in Florida: please excuse, but sometimes a picky point can be important.
I have never ever heard or read the expression “poverty need not be destiny” from any of the self-style “education reformers.”
The actual expression they use is “poverty is not destiny.” This rolls more trippingly from the tongue and engages nicely with other such bromides as “the soft bigotry of low expectations” and “a great teacher in every classroom” and the like.
The actual expression they use leaves, IMHO, a much stronger implication that poverty [often very narrowly defined] is an excuse or life-style or state of mind or character-building challenge rather than a complex of incredibly difficult self-reinforcing difficulties that have great potential to hobble and limit and destroy.
And by excuse, etc., they mean both for the adults dealing with students in poverty as well as the students themselves and their parents and their communities.
In other words, those adhering to the ‘no excuses’ variety of “poverty is not destiny’ school of thought tend to quickly wash their hands of Rahm’s ‘uneducables’ and Petrilli’s ‘non-srivers’ and the like when they fail to meet the expectations and needs of the adult “education reformers.”
One last point: I am strictly speaking here of the leading charterites/privatizes and their edubully enforcers and edufraud enablers.
Just my dos centavitos worth…
😎
KrazyTA, you said:
“The actual expression they use leaves, IMHO, a much stronger implication that poverty [often very narrowly defined] is an excuse or life-style or state of mind or character-building challenge rather than a complex of incredibly difficult self-reinforcing difficulties that have great potential to hobble and limit and destroy.”
“And by excuse, etc., they mean both for the adults dealing with students in poverty as well as the students themselves and their parents and their communities.”
I guess I just don’t see the implication you describe. To me “poverty is not destiny” is perfectly compatible with the view that poverty is a “complex of incredibly difficult self-reinforcing difficulties that have great potential to hobble and limit and destroy”.
I think to say that “poverty is not destiny” means “poverty doesn’t matter” is as unfair as saying that “poverty is a hugely important factor in student achievement” means “why even have school for poor kids? Just throw ’em on the street… they’ll end up there anyway”
Great answer, Krazy. CTee, you must live among especially enlightened people, for here, this notion that the poor are responsible for their poverty is very, very common indeed among people who have never faced a major difficulty in their lives.
A couple examples (though I could multiply these many, many times): A number of years ago, I was sitting at a luncheon, across the table from a powerful politician who had lived a life of extraordinary privilege. The conversation at the table that day turned–I don’t recall why–to those living in the poorest section of our city, and this politician said, “Here’s the thing I just don’t understand about those people. If their lives are so difficult, why don’t they just get up and move to another town, somewhere else? I mean, isn’t that just ridiculous? Why should we try to help people who won’t do the slightest thing to help themselves?” As I listened to this, I thought, here is someone who makes policy that affects the lives of the poor who is utterly clueless about what it’s like for a mother to go searching through her apartment desperately looking for the one additional quarter that she needs to pay the bus fare to get across town to get to that job that pays, under the table, less than minimum wage, knowing that if she doesn’t find that change and has to walk, she might be late and be fired, which will mean that the children will not eat.
A few years before that, I was editing a book by a very well known, very influential conservative American scholar with powerful political connections. He had been a great friend to President Ronald Reagan and often made personal calls on Ronnie at the White House. One day I mentioned to this fellow an encounter I had had, the evening before, with a homeless person. The “great scholar” puffed up and with a venom in his voice that astonished me said, “Let me tell you about those people. They are where they are for one reason and one reason only–because they are too damned lazy to work. They are shiftless leeches who expect decent people to support them, and what they deserve is to be rounded up and shot. That’s what I would do with them.” I knew that it would be useless to explain to this man that most were severely mentally ill and that many suffered from debilitating disease.
Bob Shepherd: your response is better than what I had planned to write.
Yo teach!
😎
P.S. Ok, my one and only sentence should read “your response is MUCH better than what I had planned to write.”
Krazy props.
Bob Shepherd:
Thanks for the reply. I never meant to say or imply that I do not think that there are people, including very politically powerful people, who believe that the poor are responsible for all their own problems. Pace the general consensus on this blog, however, I don’t think that all TEH RHEEFORMER$$$$$$$$$$ have the same view on the causes of poverty. Believing that poverty is not destiny is compatible with many views on the causes of poverty, and who bears responsibility for the level of poverty in the US:
You might believe that poor people are responsible for all their own problems, like the folks in your anecdotes seem to believe. If that is your view, then you probably think that poverty is not destiny, since the poor can presumably just pull themselves up by their bootstraps. This view is obviously wrong to anyone who has ever been poor, or worked closely with the poor, or even just spent more then 2 seconds thinking about the issue… but its sadly still a prominent view, as your anecdotes illustrate.
You might believe that poor people are responsible for some of their own problems, and not others. It would make sense here to say that poverty is not destiny, as long as you think its possible that the challenges of poverty (whatever their causes) can in some cases be overcome by something other than pure luck.
You might believe that poor people are responsible for few to none of their own problems, and that they have been marginalized and exploited in many complex ways, both historically and presently. Growing up poor is immensely challenging, and many of the bad aspects of being poor are completely out of the control of any single poor person to mitigate or change. But here too it would make sense to say poverty is not destiny, as long as you think it is possible that the challenges of poverty (whatever their causes) can in some cases be overcome by something other than pure luck.
A hypothetical analogy: Suppose someone gets hit by a car (through no fault of their own), and ends up with an injury. 85% of people with that injury never walk again, but there are therapies that exist and there really are people who have learned to walk again thanks, largely, to those therapies. Would a good physical therapist tell them that they might as well give up now because they are a victim of an unjust world and there is nothing they can do about it? Or would a good physical therapist tell them that “injury is not destiny”, and do everything they could to get the patient to work as hard as he could at the therapy, despite the depressing 85% statistic?
CTee, we are all bright people here and capable of performing operations in elementary logic. Of course we understand the strict implications of the these statements, but as I have tried to explain, via these examples, we commonly encounter folks in the education reform movement who use the Poverty is not destiny line as cover for ignoring the issue altogether.
I think all of you have made many valid point. The one that stands out to me is that one that Bob made about the disconnect between the policy makers and those that need to follow those policies. I think they all need a long lesson from Ruby Payne on the differences of being poor, middle class and rich. There is a different mindset that comes with each economical level.
Bob Shepherd, you say:
“we commonly encounter folks in the education reform movement who use the Poverty is not destiny line as cover for ignoring the issue altogether.”
I guess this is where I’m coming up short. Is it really that they think that poverty doesn’t matter, or is it that educational reformers take the reasonable strategy of focusing on educational reforms rather than the more broad poverty issues that surely exert the strongest force on educational achievement?
So take an educational reformer like Diane Ravitch. She occasionally discusses the fact that poverty is the biggest force in the achievement gap, but she spends way more time discussing charter schools, Common Core, TFA, etc. Why? Because she’s an education expert. It would be silly of me to look at her corpus of work and say “Ravitch seems to think poverty doesn’t matter. Sure, she occasionally pays lip service to the impact of poverty, but then she spends way more time blaming all our problems on corporate reform, charters, Common Core, TFA, standardized testing, etc. When will she wake up and realize that its poverty, not corporate reform, that is the primary factor in the achievement gap?”
I guess I don’t see the problem when an educational reformer spends their time working on educational reform.
CTee, it is not that they believe that poverty doesn’t matter; it’s that they believe that any government intervention simply makes things worse, and the so-called education reforms that we are experiencing are making things much, much worse. High-stakes accountability in the early grades does not redress the gap in linguistic competence that kids bring with them when they first enter school. See my note about that below.
And CTee, Diane spends time addressing charter schools because they skim and make the problems worse, standardized testing because these are part of the mechanism of the Matthew Effect that multiplies initial inequity (in addition to the other issues with them), and TFA because the organization is being used to effect these other “reforms” that heighten the inequities. I highly recommend that you read Diane’s books The Death and Life of the Great American School System and Reign of Error.
Bob Shepherd:
I thought that the argument precisely *is* that they think that poverty doesn’t matter.
There is a huge difference between “both sides acknowledge that poverty matters but one side is fundamentally and systematically misguided on what steps to take to mitigate the impact of poverty on educational achievement (to the point that they encourage policies that make things worse)” and “one side thinks that poverty doesn’t matter, i.e. it has little or no impact on student achievement”. The latter is obviously wrong but I haven’t seen any educational reformers say anything that could be reasonably construed in those terms. The former just seems like a reasonable statement of the viewpoint of someone who thought that the key “reform movement” policies (charter, CCSS, tfa, high-stakes testing, etc.) are really bad policies.
I’m not splitting hairs here. I think its actually really important to correctly state your opponents view, both because it keeps the debate from degenerating into pointless mud-slinging (“TEH RHEEFORMER$$$$ WANT TO FEED YOUR CHILDREN TO THE RICH!!!!!!) and because if we have an accurate statement of the empirical claims involved in the views of each side then those claims can be subject to scientific scrutiny and not just anecdote trading and mood affiliation.
Let me finish by adding that I agree with a lot of the specific policy critiques I read by folks like Ravitch. For instance, I’ve read with interest a lot of what you’ve written on CCSS and I find myself pretty much agreeing with you across the board. I haven’t used CCSS myself since I work outside the US. The point is, I don’t want to be read as someone who is uniformly pro-Charter, pro-TFA, pro-testing, pro-CCSS, etc. etc. just because I disagree with ya’lls characterization of the “reform movement” in this instance.
outstanding post
Poverty does indeed matter and I see it daily. Perhaps we teachers should make a giant list of the myriad ways that poverty effects learning and send it to those idiotic “reformers” who shout the mantra of grit and perserverence overcomes poverty or whatever ridiculous mantra they preach that ignores the significance of poverty! Here is just one of a million concrete examples that is the latest for me. Friday I went into a classroom of 4th grade special education students to teach my subject. One student was very lackluster. At one point shortly after my arrival, she put her head down on her desk. I went quietly over to the classroom teacher to find out if she had not had enough sleep or was ill. The teacher told me that the child had a very severe toothache and despite telling her mother about this repeatedly over several days, she did not take her daughter to the dentist. This teacher was going to have the student go down to the nurse in hopes that the nurse could contact the parent. Too bad the free dental van had already visited the school a month ago to give students free check-ups. I am guessing the parent could not take off from work and did not have dental insurance or money up front to pay for a dentist even if reimbursement would come later somehow. This kind of situation where a student cannot focus on studies due to an untreated medical ailment would not happen in a family that was financially stable. Yet this happens all the time in title one schools and the students cannot focus under these conditions.
I totally relate.
Serious tooth ache
No glasses but nearsighted as mr. Magoo
Didn’t have a meal all weekend
As you said, happens all the time in title one schools.
And I joke, in a pathetic way, that it is clearly the fault of my lacking enough RIGOR that my sick, hungry, vision-impaired, sleepy students aren’t gifted superstars.
That’s what the Florida Differentiated Accountability (DA) gestapo tells us every day, along with “No negative attitudes!” and “No excuses, just results!”
They haven’t explained to me how a human person with a heart and a soul overlooks the tears and stomach cramps caused by hunger while a 6-year old whimpers throughout the lesson.
Since they, clearly, have no heart or soul anymore, they are more RIGOR-oriented than I am, I guess.
I feel you, Chris.
Hang in
I will add that I did TFA, and I don’t recall ever hearing, from recruitment through the two years, any statement that could be reasonably interpreted as “poverty doesn’t matter”.
@CTee … The very notion that a temporary (most often two year) TFA teacher coming into a high needs school with no education training and indoctrinated to believe that all students will succeed in their classroom is basically tantamount to supporting the idea that “poverty doesn’t matter”… I am recalling the mantra tossed around for way too long, “no excuses”. This mantra was not being repeated at schools of the middle and wealthy classes. So it does take on the false implication that poverty is not a factor in learning. And to this day, every time an idealistic, naive TFA teacher enters a title one classroom expecting to make miraculous learning gains, this only supports TFA as a “poverty does not matter” organization. And no real teacher buys the argument that a belief that “poverty matters” is equal to saying that impoverished students cannot learn. This is the “ed reformer” smokescreen which attempts to hide the real issue – that poverty stricken students could learn a lot more if they (and generations of their family members) did not suffer from the effects of poverty to begin with.
Take a good look at public schools because in fifty years they won’t exist. It’s the haves and have nots. Most of you writing here are the have nots. Your children will fight for the jobs to serve the rich overclass. The wealthy control politics, the media, real estate, basically everything. Voting and Democracy is mostly an illusion for the masses.
There won’t be enough jobs in the future (most have already been sent away), so competition will be fierce. Some of your children may get on barges to work as slave workers in Asia or Europe. This is happening in Europe already. Life is cheap in the future and there isn’t much money. It will be those who eat lunch and those who are lunch. In this scenario, how much education does your “student” or child really need? Think about it. Education would make them depressed or unwilling to board those barges to the East. Why educate slaves? You just teach them what they need to know to do the job. So let American students bounce and throw those balls and continue to be ignorant. They find joy in sports and updating their facebook accounts, so let them concentrate on that. Leave the books and thinking to the ruling class and their children. That is where education really matters. The rest is just going through the motions, isn’t it?
Interesting perspective.And entirely plausible.
Another thing people don’t get is the huge differences in human intelligence. I am not going to get into racial differences in I.Q., but I will tell a small illuminating story.
This year, for some reason, I have a big group of Russian Jews in my class. They are Ashkenazi Jews. This is the group that produced Einstein, Kafka, etc. They all came to America as children and know each other. They are so smart that they get the concepts almost immediately. As soon as I say it, they know it. I teach a foreign language, and halfway through the first year, they can basically carry on full conversations. It is uncanny. I have never seen anything like it. They had no previous exposure to the language. I teach an unusual language. The other kids (all anglos) in the class get it to varying degrees, but none are this good. This Jewish subgroup is so clever that I had to rewrite my tests and quizzes (even the games) to make them more challenging this year. Then the problem becomes that these four get a 100% or close to it and everyone else doesn’t do very well. It is a real problem.
This is where genetic I.Q. comes into the equation. I couldn’t go into the inner city and find many kids like these. There may be 1 out of 1000, or 1 out of 10,000. This is why magnate schools in the cities become all Jewish and now all Asian as the Jews move to the suburbs. It isn’t all work ethic. This kind of intelligence I am talking about cannot be taught, not even by the best teacher. Kids either have this or they don’t. I am not saying kids can’t learn to the best of their ability. What I am saying is that there are huge differences in human intelligence,and no one talks about this. We are in a kind of denial of human nature. We think that we can teach intelligence, we can’t. We can educate people, but we can’t make them smarter.
It is similar with sports. Our best athlete didn’t practice much. He slouched around. He was just fast, genetically fast. He was simply faster than anyone else, way faster. Maybe the job of teaching is to identify these “geniuses” and track them upwards. They are the ones who will help humanity.
The range of intellectual abilities is as extreme as the range of physical abilities. From physically handicapped to freak athlete. Same with mental capacity. Good point Mike.
Mike, there is more variation, on average, within so-called racial groups (the concept of race has no scientific validity) than there is across them. And what are the differences between your Russian Jewish students and their families and your Anglo students and their families in their life experiences with having to learn new languages quickly and thoroughly?
I agree that poverty is a critical factor, but there are other factors. It is not necessary that poverty should be determining educational achievement. Also, the term ‘poverty’ has more of a labeling effect than an accurate description of value-orientations or influence over a child or community. The school is expected to overcome the initial conditions of student ‘careers.’ However, this has become a daunting challenge. Is it constructive to sarcastically degrade a school’s effort, or the educational system’s effort to override SES? The intimation that you, Diane, make is that students themselves do not want to achieve because of their parent’s income! This is wrong. If student’s could see their way to improving comprehension, if the necessary resources were provided, if the entire political structure supported the educational enterprise, students would desire to learn. They would actually study! But, the roadblocks and barriers, obvious to all and most obvious to their teachers, are stark reminders of discrimination and the real value of an education. If the political structure was serious about equal opportunities, schools would not fail and most students would be prepared for college. Instead of blaming “poverty,” why not address the causes of poverty and while you are at it address the contradictions to the societal value structure. The civil sphere in our society is a shamble: all people should be reading and writing, but studying is ridiculed and ‘stared at.’ Studying is hated! Either the researchers, like yourself, should clearly describe the real functions of education and schools in terms of the facts as they see them, or we are left competing for expensive and shrinking acceptance letters from admissions offices. The hatred of learning is not an instinct or a habit, it is the result of a statistical inference: limited seating in quality schools.
Fredrick did you read the article attached to this post “This Is Your Brain on Poverty…?” Second question: Have you ever worked in a low SES school where student’s agressive behavior, foul language, disrespect, etc., trumps academics?
Diane isn’t saysing “students themselves do not want to achieve because of their parent’s income”. Rather income is an indicator of student achievement.
The article list these observable factors that I see everyday in the students I work with:
Lack of impulse control, can’t form attachments, don’t possess resilence, and lack of social/emotional skills.
Here’s a quote from that article that hit the mark: “…worrying about poverty…less time spent on other task…”
You need to visit these schools and work with these kids to know firsthand, before you make assumptions that providing “seating in quality schools” will solve these issues. We have “highly effective” teachers at our school. They are burning themselves out.
What you are referring to as having a political structure that supports equal opportunity is true, however, that is not all that is needed. Before you can provide academic supports, the behaviors that the students bring with them must be resolved, so that they can reach their rull potential. What you don’t realized is the effects of poverty is beyond a teacher’s and principal expertise. You have to extinguish these behaviors before learning can take place.
I have been in many schools to know that reward and consequences that we are trained to deliver can only work for some. When it becomes a mental health issue, it is out of our hands.
I am glad that you saw some light in my post. Of course I have worked in schools where poverty is a serious problem, why would I take any time to address this issue if I hadn’t. I am surprised that you do not perceive concern in my painstaking effort to address Diane’s bias. I clearly stated that poverty is not the only factor of relevance, and I defined poverty as strictly SES which others have differentiated into attitudinal complexes.
Anyway, you are right about how the school’s goals have to address behavior if the students are unable to sit and focus with an appropriate rate of comprehension. AND, I might add, that it is a tragedy when the administration and parents bottle up the teachers and students in classrooms without the necessary support to address behavioral problems, like groups of students who dominate the lessons by interfering.
For years, I repeatedly stated that we must have a policy and practice where students who are interfering must participate in a parental conference with admin and teachers. But, these were far and few between and rarely set the recalcitrant student on the right track. IMHO, willful students are disrupting and interfering with the majority of students education.
“The intimation that you, Diane, make is that students themselves do not want to achieve because of their parent’s income! This is wrong.”
The owner of this blog can speak for herself, but the above statement and what follows do not accurately represent what I have read and heard of her POV, at least during the last five years.
However, it is not infrequent that what one writes online doesn’t come out quite as one wishes. Or that what one writes is misunderstood by those that read it.
No biggie…
😎
The achievement gap between low income and high income students is not a problem that exists just in our country, “International tests show achievement gaps in all countries”
http://www.epi.org/blog/international-tests-achievement-gaps-gains-american-students/
Monday Diane Rehm show will be on Common Core. It is a call in show for those not familiar with it.
And this on Yahoo news today…nothing about poverty, just charter success all over the place. Good for you New Orleans, I’m glad poverty isn’t a problem for you now that charters are there.
http://news.yahoo.com/orleans-goes-charter-schools-showing-way-203814901.html
I have just read through the myriad of comments. Most nail some of the issues found in schools which have a high percentage of students in poverty.
And that’s the issue. There is not one right answer – the reasons that these children fail is diverse and varied. Yes, it’s survival needs of food, health, and even shelter. Yes, it’s a lack of resources which affect their psyche. Yes, there is an attitude problem made even worse by poor attendance. There are also IQ discrepancies as well as learning disabilities, some due to fetal alcohol syndrome, drug addiction, and lead poisoning. Add in the fact that the standardized tests are geared toward white, middle class students who have an advantage especially in regards to reading passages which assume a general knowledge and vocabulary which is not common place to all. To top it off, the schools themselves are not equivalent. Inner city and rural schools tend to have less funding than their suburban counterparts. Less funding means larger class sizes and less resources for students who, at times, need individualized instruction.
There is also an anti teacher sentiment pervasive throughout our society which has brought us to this point. We have become the poverty profession. The general population feels we are overpaid as glorified babysitters. – overqualified, ineffective and interchangeable. (Even lazy). Our outcries are seen as indulgent and self serving. We are resented as being “too big for our britches” and we need to be “taken down a peg”.
Yes, there are those who value our services, but are there enough to stop the tirade leading to the downfall of the public school system? And the execution of our schools is mistakenly being done in the name of poverty.
How well I remember George Bush senior setting the direction for decades of policy by saying “You can’t solve the education problem by throwing money at it.”
Well, we have no problem throwing money at foreign military adventurism–6 trillion dollars in committed expenditures for Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the Cost of War Project at Brown University. And for what? The Army Times–an official publication of the U.S. Army–recently ran an article that asked the question, “Ten years on, what is our mission over here?” The implied answer: Who the hell knows. Who the hell has ever known.
6 trillion dollars.
Let me give you an idea how big that number is. A million seconds is 11 and a half days. A trillion seconds is 31,688.8 YEARS. So far, we have spent as much money in Iraq and Afghanistan as there are seconds in 190,133 years. 26 percent of US kids live below the poverty line. 45.8 percent of young black children (under age 6) live in poverty. And just one of those 6 trillion dollars would buy a kid lunch or a pencil and a composition notebook.
And we seem to have no problem throwing money at prisons in this country. As of year-end 2011, 6.9777 million U.S. adults were “under correctional supervision,” that is, on probation, on parole, in jail, or in prison. That’s about 2.9% of the U.S. population. It’s the highest rate in the world. Think of the most venal, corrupt, despotic regime in the world. Our incarceration rate is higher. As of 2010, according to a Pew report, average cost of incarceration per inmate in state systems was $47,421 in California, $50,262 in Connecticut, $38,268 in Illinois, $38,383 in Maryland, $41,364 in Minnesota, $54,865 in New Jersey, $60,076 in New York. . . . You get the picture.
We can pay on the front end to create compensatory environments for the children of the poorest in our society, or we can pay and pay and pay on the back end.
As Diane says, the single greatest predictor of test scores is family income.
We have to face the fact that that adopting national “standards” and giving the C.C.C.C.R.A.P. tests and firing teachers and replacing them with TFA scabs–the whole Son of NCLB Fright Night II, the Nightmare is Nationalized education deform approach–isn’t going to address the problems faced by the children of the urban poor (but will simply make those problems worse). The savage inequalities that Kozol wrote about decades ago are back with a vengeance, and until we address the poverty of kids’ communities and put a great deal of money, much more than we are now spending, into creating COMPENSATORY ENVIRONMENTS, we’re not going to make progress. Only an idiot thinks that one can make real change in the life of a hungry child or a child with a single meth- or crack-addicted parent simply by testing him or her more.
Look, we know that children of the urban poor, by the time they are four years old, have heard 30 MILLION FEWER words than have children from middle-class families. By the time they enter school, they are so far behind that it’s going to be almost impossible for them to catch up. They have missed a large portion of a critical window for linguistic development. Read the research. Here’s a great summary:
http://centerforeducation.rice.edu/slc/LS/30MillionWordGap.html
Firing teachers for the low test scores of students in low-SES schools is not going to fix that. The people who think that it will are deluded. They want a MAGICAL FIX, one that is free.
Every child deserves a shot at a decent life. That is the promise of our Declaration of Independence. For millions of American kids, that promise is a cruel joke, but every one of those kids, every one, matters. Only if we are willing to invest in compensatory environments for those kids–in wrap-around services extensive enough to provide such environments, and in very high quality public schools for all–are we going to make any headway. Magical incantations from Achieve and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and Students First and the Chiefs for Change and the CCSSO aren’t going to cut it. We shall get what we are willing to pay for.
In recent years, what we have been willing to pay for is foreign military adventurism and prisons.
But actually doing something about children in poverty in this country would be against the religion of the single party with two factions that now runs this oligarchical banana republic we live in. The wealthy in the United States are increasingly isolated in their enclaves, and they are CLUELESS. They like to talk about data-driven decision making, but they ignore the data. That was the point of Diane’s post, and this point would be crystal clear to anyone who was not deranged by adherence to a cultish political faith.
It is hard to disagree with your rant against the prison and military industries – they are out of control and reduction seems to be in view. However, I doubt that the neoliberal agenda will change, some things will simply take longer.
You said, “As Diane says, the single greatest predictor of test scores is family income.” We need to be critical about this notion. There is no necessity to the relation between income and test scores, it seems to be just so. I am sure there are some rich kids who drop out, or fail to complete college, or end up in prison. What happens to them? Or, should I say, what happened to them?
There are other factors related to underachievement. If all of the stakeholders in children’s educational life were focused on addressing this underachievement, all the while knowing that economic circumstances is not something they can change, what would they do. Perhaps educational contexts are not comprehensive enough, or the political structure has set policy which it is not willing to back up with the required resources. But, there are other factors. The big change with the CCLS is that high school or K-12 is now expected to prepare students for college, not simply for a job.
Reminds me of serenity: the power to control those things which I can control, or something like that.
OF COURSE THERE ARE OTHER FACTORS!!!! For example, there have been TONS OF STUDIES that show that simply rewarding kids for correct answers on IQ and aptitude tests by giving them M&Ms will increase their scores by one to one-and-a-half standard deviations!!! So motivation matters.
And where does that come from? Well, it doesn’t come from growing up in a community and culture in which everyone around you has come to believe that the FIX IS IN.
The CC$$ is just more NCLB. These putative “standards,” at least in ELA, are an amateurish joke.
Oh, yeah. I forgot. We’re WEREN’T TRYING to prepare kids for college and careers before. But now that we have DEFORMY MAGIC, we’re going to do that.
You have been drinking the Koolaid or mainlining the Soma, my friend.
And are any of the figures in my “rant” incorrect?
Is there something wrong with my reasoning that makes it a rant?
Am I furious about this? Yes, I am. THE LIVES OF CHILDREN ARE AT STAKE, and I am sick of having a bunch of pampered fools ignore the realities while peddling the same old snake oil elixir of standards and testing. Idiotic to think that more of the same will change anything. Completely idiotic.
Frederick, read that report I linked to, the one about the differences in the linguistic environments of poor and middle-class kids. We now know how very critical this period is for development of the neural structures for language. There’s a gap for you. And that 30-million-word gap by age 4 is an environmental condition that has to do with one thing and one thing only–having been born into a low SES family. And most kids will never recover from that. We now know that neural structures for language not engaged in this critical period are actually reabsorbed by the brain. They disappear, forever.
And so you test that kid later on and say, “This kid has a low IQ.”
No, children are born with hardwiring to learn language. The hardwiring instantiates, functionally, the basic principles of the language, and based on the ambient linguistic environment that the child encounters EVEN BEFORE BIRTH, parameters of the child’s internal language model–his or her basic linguistic competence–are set. Miss the critical window for this, and little can be done to fix the problem later on. If education people talked to linguists, they would understand this, and they would know how essential those early environments are.
To gain some understanding of the critical nature of the linguistic environment from the last trimester (even before birth!!) through the first five or six years, read Tom Roeper’s The Prism of Grammar: How Child Language Illuminates Humanism. It’s a very readable introduction to current science on early child language acquisition. Or read any contemporary syntax text. The ed deformers are talking out of their —es. They are basically clueless. They think it’s all a matter of getting tougher. Utter fools. They should learn some freaking science AND read some research outside their tiny echo chamber.
cx: in the post above, “as much money” should read “as many dollars”
Those are average ANNUAL costs for incarceration in those states, BTW.
Bob – you talk about learning speech patterns orally. What if you were brought up in a home where what we consider “normal” or shall I call it “formal” speech patterns are never learned? Places where a foreign language or dialect (such as eubonics) are spoken?
There is a difference in how my husband (a genius brought up in a blue collar, or redneck, family) speaks and how I speak (from a college educated middle class family) even though it’s been forty years since he left home. Of course, he’s much better now, but I sometimes hear that old pattern and I have to proof read his writing (where the inaccuracies are more clearly evident than when he uses the spoken word).
What kind of chance does the average inner city impoverished child have to polish their language skills?
What you are saying here, Ellen, is VERY, VERY IMPORTANT.
Almost all language is learned unconsciously. In the first few years of life, children’s brains create an internal model of the grammar (using that term VERY widely to refer to phonology, semantics, morphology, and syntax) of their native tongue. This is an automatic and unconscious process, and explicit teaching of the child is almost entirely irrelevant to it. Now, the internalized grammar that a child creates during that time is very, very complex. Thousands and thousands of incredibly bright linguists have been working for many decades, now, on figuring out the rules that a child has internalized by, say, the age of six, but these are so complex, that despite literally millions of person hours that have been devoted to this by linguistic scientists, we are still quite far from having a complete model of what that six year old has internalized for any natural language.
Now, let me emphasize that EXPLICT INSTRUCITON IS ALMOST ENTIRELY IRRELEVANT to this process. What is relevant is that the child have an ambient linguistic environment that is rich enough to provide the linguistic data from which his or her brain will automatically intuit those rules for the language AND that the child have significant, continual engagement with that linguistic data.
Feral children not exposed to language in the first few years of their lives CAN NEVER LEARN IT.
Now, subsequent work in school—reading and listening and discussion—depends upon the formation of that internalized grammatical model, which takes the form of actual physical structures—neural networks for doing the functional processing of the language—in the brain.
Now, if the child has not built a sufficiently robust implicit internalized model of the language, no amount of explicit instruction is going to correct that. THIS IS SOMETHING THAT LINGUISTS UNDERSTAND BUT THAT MANY EDUCATORS, INCLUDING READING SPECIALISTS, DO NOT.
Kids from middle-class homes come into school having heard 30 million more words than low SES kids have heard. The only way to fix that is to have wrap-around services that provide nurturing, rich linguistic environments FROM BIRTH ON.
We’ll never close the gap until we do that.
And one of the gaps that we need to close is the VAST ONE between what linguists now know about early childhood language acquisition and what is typically understood about that by education policy makers and education professors.
And please note that “grammar” in the sense that I am using it, above, has nothing whatsoever to do with what people call “grammar instruction” in schools, which is explicit instruction in a prescientific folk theory of grammar–a prescientific theory that is enshrined, btw, our new backward, prescientific ELA “standards.”
Oh, and about those IQ tests. When they were first given in the United States, guess who scored lowest on them? According to Stephen Gould, U.S. Hungarians and Jews and Asians. And guess who now scores highest on them? According to Gould, U.S. citizens of Hungarian, Jewish, and Asian descent.
So much for the immutability of IQ.
There are lots and lots of recent studies showing the effects of stress in the mother on genetic expression in the child and studies showing the consequences for IQ tests and aptitude tests of growing up in stressful environments.
But the defomers aren’t interested in data that don’t accord with their cultish faith. They don’t want to read how if you correct for socioeconomic status, those kids in the “failed” public system of the United States lead the world on the deformers’ own preferred measures–international tests of reading, math, and science.
And see my note, above, about the language environment gap in the early years. What effect do you think THAT has on scores on all sorts of tests–IQ tests, aptitude tests, achievement tests, classroom tests. One of the startling facts about language use in low-SES home environments is that there is almost no question-and-answer between child and caregiver. Hm. Wonder what effect THAT HAS, given that neural structures for later language use are being formed at this age?
What kind of person doesn’t make sure that his or her children’s basic needs are met?
What kind of country doesn’t do that?
Same question.
What kind of country doesn’t do that?
Love you, Bob!
love you back, Ang. 🙂
Bob – I’ve been in their homes. The moms and even dads do the best they can, but institutional poverty is like an electric fence. It’s tough to break out.
It makes me sick to think of the difference it could make in the life of a child in this country if he or she were switched in the maternity ward and went to parents with more or less income. Economic mobility in the US is at a historic low. Wealth and income inequality are both at historic highs.
But hey, poverty doesn’t matter. Not when you’ve got grit.
Bob, I’ve thought this more than once.
My kids were always bringing home “stray” boys who I took into my home when their parents kicked them out for various reasons. My oldest daughter’s first boyfriend lived with us for over six months. He called me Mom and I tried to provide him the structure and home life he lacked, but at age sixteen it was too little, too late. He ended up in prison for counterfeiting (using a color copier to print money). My daughter moved on, but I often think of this young man and wonder how his life might have been different if he had been one of mine from day one. His older brother was also “adopted” by his girlfriend’s family and his little brother lived in a group home. So sad!
Rich babies aren’t usually born in hospitals where the vast majority of births are paid for by Medicaid. Poor babies aren’t usually born in hospitals where all out-of-pocket expenses must be paid in full before delivery. I doubt such a switch could be possible in all but a few maternity wards.
Unless it is accompanied by a frank and meaningful push to fight segregation, which won’t happen without involving everyone’s school and everyone’s community, even a massive push to end poverty likely won’t fix much.
Children of color are about 3.5 times more likely to grow up in poverty than white children. White children growing up in poverty are far more likely to escape it in adulthood than children of color. The inequality and poverty crisis most profoundly affects people of color who are warehoused in starkly segregated urban areas, and this did not happen by accident, self-segregation, or “market forces.”
It’s an enormous problem, and I certainly don’t have any good solutions. But we can start by acknowledging the elephant in the corner of the room.
Thanks for sharing this information. I am well aware of the impact of poverty . this gives me good information what my colleagues want prove. I work with many of these children and continue to help them . I am starting a dinner/ study program with kids after school . Even though I am retiring in a few months, I will continue to champion for these children .
wonderful
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
Bravo, Diane…the status quo has every reason NOT to address e real underlying causes of education inequality, opting instead for “solutions” that blame the victims of their hubris and I attention. I work with low-SES kids in Chicago public schools in an effort to help them get to college; what I see and what they tell me drives me nuts. So many bright and eager kids and good teachers brought low by ridiculous requirements, poor facilities, and lack of funds. Then they return to communities eviscerated by heartless social policies. Not only that but it seems clear that what education these kids do get is geared primarily toward having them be obedient, subservient, and worker-oriented. God forbid they might learn to challenge the system that keeps them in check!
Reblogged this on College Counseling Culture and commented:
Once again, Diane Ravitch’s blog gets to the heart of he the topic.
I just got another important story. Poverty is closely linked with ADHD(representing 59% of kids belong to 200% of federal poverty line!). And education reform policy is held accountable for an increase rate of ADHD among school kids.
http://www.salon.com/2014/03/01/the_truth_about_adhd_over_diagnosis_linked_to_cause_championed_by_michelle_rhee/
The number of behavior problems have increased after NCLB. These behaviors could be ADHD related and undiagnosed.
Damn right, poverty matters! I remember when NCLB was being rolled out at my school. My principal pontificated (well, it might not have been his opinion, it might have been something he gleaned from a workshop he attended) about how we needed to prepare our students, who lived in one of the poorest communities in the state, to compete with the students at Beverly Hills HS for college and jobs. Huh?
Not long after that sermon, I received a phone call message from him one weekend, informing me that one of my students had taken a gun to his head, committing suicide. After later learning more details about this student, I came to the conclusion that, if he had lived in 90210, he probably would have had the resources to not be driven to his fatal act.
Rather than coming from a family of working poor, where one parent was ill in bed and not able to work or take care of the family, and the burden of taking care of his severely mentally retarded teenage sister fell on him, and there was no ability to hire help, like at least a chauffeur to take her to school rather than make him late because she refused to get dressed, if he had had a 90210 zip code, he probably would have had resources readily available to help him, even mental health resources.
He didn’t, and he blew his brains out in a bedroom he shared with siblings. And the family, not living in 90210, could not afford to hire anyone to clean his blood and brains off the bedroom walls and furniture. So they closed the bedroom door, waiting for after the funeral, but a teacher went over and helped clean and paint the room and redecorate it for his siblings, so they didn’t have to be reminded of the tragedy.
Think about moving? Where would they come up with the money to rent another place? First, last, deposits. Nope. They didn’t live in 90210.
On Monday morning, the principal called all of his teachers into his office and informed us that we were not to discuss the incident in class …because we had standards to teach, standards and only standards were to be discussed in class. Nothing else. Those were the principal’s words.
His fellow students came to class and already knew why there would be an empty desk that Monday in the classroom. They didn’t ask me, only wanted to know if I knew. I said, thank you, yes, I knew. We were all sad, but these students had experienced traumas all their lives, and this was just another tragedy that happens in their world. Their zip code was not 90210.
So, yes, poverty matters.
Oops! For some reason, my computer had me sign in again, but it’s me …donasonora! It can’t be because I’m on the road and I’m sharing my laptop with my husband. donasenora and donasonora are both me. Next post, I will see if donasonora will work again.
Poverty Does Matter, but not the way we like to think!
Poverty is important and it does matter, very much, in fact. And no, poverty is not a state of mind; it is a tragic condition in which millions of Americans languish.
Poverty is also an excuse for throwing up our collective hands as if the outcomes are out of our control. It is an excuse for continuing to do the same things we have always done, unquestioningly, convinced we are doing the best we can for the children in our classrooms, under adverse circumstances.
We cry out: “If only Congress would raise minimum wages; change the tax structure to more equitably spread the burden; if only they would find a way to lift the horrible mantle of poverty we could really help these kids.”
And, before you rush to stereotype reformers and their pseudo-counterparts and shut down your minds, I grew up in a low-income family and attended a school that, sixty years ago, was 30 percent black and 50% impoverished. In my first job as a juvenile probation officer I sat across a rickety card table that served as the dinner table for a mother striving to rear 4 children on welfare, drinking coffee while trying to find a way to keep her sons in school and out of the juvenile detention facility.
I sent my own three children to city public schools so they would learn to feel at home in the midst of diversity and not grow up to be elitist, upper-middleclass Americans, out of touch with how so many of our fellow citizens must live.
What I have learned from my own parents and from a lifetime of experience is that it is not poverty that keeps children from succeeding in school. For generations there have been children from the poorest families who have somehow learned how to excel academically; and these were not outliers to be discounted as not relevant to our discussion. Almost without exception there is a characteristic common to all of these youngsters. These children are blessed to have a parent or guardian who somehow still clings to hope that their child can have a better life.
Let’s cling to no illusions about the difficulties these parents face or that such parents are always successful. Sadly, many do fail in spite of the heroic efforts that are made . What matters, however, is that many do not fail and, as a result, their children enjoy some level of academic success.
It is not poverty that keeps children in poverty, it is the hopelessness that so often accompanies poverty. Poverty is, indeed, a very real condition but hopelessness is very much a state of mind. The operative question is why we do not attack hopelessness, ferociously. Hope and expectations are inextricably connected.
As much as I admire and respect public school teachers our public educators, as a whole, whether policy-makers, professors in college departments of education, administrators, or teachers cling to the traditions of an early twentieth century educational process that is woefully inadequate in a twenty-first century world; totally unaware of how what they do contributes to and reinforces the hopelessness of our nation’s disadvantaged.
These educators are blind to the fact that our educational process is focused on failure and sets the most vulnerable of our nation’s children up for failure and humiliation. Is it any wonder that these youngsters grow up to spawn new generations of children with little if any motivation to learn and even less hope for a better life.
For the love of all that is precious in life, can we not abandon our outdated assumptions and biases and open our hearts and minds to a new way of thinking about education in America? If only we will relinquish our obsession with tradition and open our minds to new possibilities we will discover answers that have existed, right in front of us, just beyond the illusionary horizon of intransigence.
To you, Diane Ravitch, who for so long has been one of our best and brightest advocates for excellence in education, we need you seek to understand rather than rebut. We need you to think exponentially and to provide a whole new level of leadership in a fresh paradigm.
I am not suggesting that there is a perfect solution to the challenges of education in America; there is no such thing as a perfect solution. With each stride down a new avenue of thinking, however, we will discover new and better ideas and each new answer will lead to whole new sets of questions followed by even more answers and even better ideas.
You know better than any of us that time is of the essence. We must act before those who are rushing to privatize education, place even more reliance on standardized competency examinations, and who want to separate our schools from the communities they exist to serve lead us to disaster.
Mel Hawkins, Author: Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America
I wish we could mass produce and distribute “hope”. A lack of hope passes from one generation to the next as surely as alcoholism or abuse.
Back before the computer labs were dominated by near-constant test prep, I would have my students do all sorts of internet-based projects. I was able to implement the 21st Century skills that Intel paid me to learn. My students, most of whom do not have access to reliable internet outside school (sometimes even within it), were able to do collaborative projects with students in another country whose teacher is the granddaughter of our school’s founder. I had two working computers in my room then, and we were doing some cutting-edge stuff.
Then the economy tanked and the test-based ratings changed. The computers that we had were never replaced once they quit working. The labs were taken over for remediation. Then the copiers started breaking down. I’ve had to downsize my possibilities due to poor health and the transfer to a substandard classroom, where we are all suffering the unhealthy environment in the school as a whole and the classroom in particular.
I would love to be able to take advantage of the world wide web to connect with students around the world. I have a former student in Namibia, one in Japan, and others around the country who could help me connect to teachers and students in other places. It would help my students realize what is good and bad about their experience. Too many of them don’t realize what a rich culture we have in Mississippi. Students abroad are fascinated by us! Yet until the testing tide turns and we are once again allowed to teach our children rather than teach their curriculum, teachers all over the country will keep their heads down and follow the script, lest they too find themselves unemployed and unemployable. (You all know we’re being tracked.)
Very important, brilliant, wonderful presentation on this issue:
http://sxswedu.com/news/2014/sxswedu-2014-video-highlights-keeping-promise-educational-technology
Here is a recent NPR story reinforcing the lessons to be learned from Finland system of education and political culture (backbone).
http://www.npr.org/2014/03/08/287255411/what-the-u-s-can-learn-from-finland-where-school-starts-at-age-7
This journalist (link) “gets it.” While I disagree with the section on charters, she at least acknowledges some of the criticism. Otherwise, the author explains the impact of poverty pretty well. http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/education/poverty-and-academic-struggle-go-hand-in-hand/article_944bf0f6-c13f-5bbc-9112-9ab9ae205607.html