Wendy Lecker, an experienced civil rights attorney in New York and Connecticut, writes here about the enormous stresses under which low-income children live and how they impair children’s ability to learn.
She writes:
A new UCLA report centers on those out-of-school factors that interfere with learning. The report, titled “It’s About Time,” found that community stressors such as economic distress, hunger, lack of medical care, family problems, unstable housing and violence, result in lost learning time three times as often in high poverty schools as in low poverty schools.
While the report focuses on California, I have heard identical stories from teachers, principals and district officials in Connecticut and New York. Children in impoverished districts often arrive at school hungry, without coats, socks or with broken glasses. High school students miss the first few periods of each school day because they must ensure their younger siblings get to school safely. Children bring to school the instability they experience in their lives.
These are not isolated stories. These are the barriers many poor children encounter every day when they try to learn, and teachers encounter when they try to teach. Before a child can focus on learning, she needs to be fed and clothed and have a way to deal with any trauma she may have experienced the night before. This is why social workers, behavioral specialists, psychologists, counselors and other therapists are essential educational resources. “Support staff” is a misnomer.
In the current fevered atmosphere, teachers are blamed for the low scores of their students who live in poverty; common sense has gone out the window. It takes remarkable dedication to teach in schools where children are burdened by poverty, where resources are often inadequate, where the children come to school without coats and miss school because of illness.
Lecker writes:
One has to wonder why the Obama administration pushes policies that not only fail to correct the inequalities in educational resources, but instead exacerbate them.
The UCLA report revealed that poor schools lose three times more instructional days than low poverty schools to standardized testing and test prep — more than four weeks of instructional time.
It is now well-established that standardized tests do not improve learning, and narrow a school’s curriculum. It is also well-known that yearly testing is unnecessary, since a child who passes a test one year is overwhelmingly likely to pass the next.
Yet U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan clings to the faulty conviction that children must suffer through standardized tests every year so that children “do not fall through the cracks.” How absurd. Teachers know which children are struggling academically.
If policymakers were truly concerned with children falling through the cracks, they would make sure that every school had a safety net to catch them. Too often, our neediest children must face life’s harshest realities. It is time politicians stop ignoring how those realities impact our schools.
If policymakers were truly concerned with children falling through the cracks, they would make sure that every school had a safety net to catch them.
Basic value system in the present corporate takeover of schools and the larger culture is survival of the fittest, irrespective of the circumstances of individuals. Portray teachers as failures rather than addressing fundamental income inequity and everything else that contributes to the appalling reality that 51% of students are living in poverty.
For public institutions, the basic value system is to transform everything now supported by taxes a cash cow for private investors. Also silence the voice of the people, especially by making it difficult to vote or to regulate any thing for the common good. Bash unions, get rid of due process, forget social safety nets (including pensions). Create distrust of everything. Greed is good. Lie as often as you can get away with it.
If I sound terribly cynical today, it is a by-product of watching the news.
Today in Los Angeles, Howard Blume writes a column in the LA Times full of innuendos, but short on facts, about the March 3 School Board election for BoE members to run LAUSD. Although he gives info on the vast amount of money donated by outside and billionaire sources to support the charter school candidates (particularly Refugio Rodriguez who is running against incumbent educator Bennett Kayser who is a union and teacher supporter), he does not expand on how the district has been overrun for too many years by Eli Broad and his Bonfire of the Vanities partners such as Reed Hastings, the Waltons, etc., in their goal to take over all aspects of America’s free public schools and turn them into free market Wall Street investment profiteering.
A mailer sent to some of us today from Rene Deidrich which shows the huge mistake made by the BoE and others in electing to build Belmont High School over a toxic oil site in the early 2000s, and how the BoE used PR spins to resell this HS in 2008 (without producing public data as to remediation of the site, making it safe) by renaming it after a popular Latino legislator, Ed Roybal. This HS is infamous for being the most expensive public school ever built with taxpayer money in the whole of US history, and with profits ostensibly all going into the pockets of the developers (can it be that Broad was one of the developers?) and their ‘insider’ collaborators. Doctors at USC medical school report in this video that children’s lungs and brain tissue can be permanently damaged by breathing the toxic fumes that were found to permeate this campus. Well worth watchng this report….Rene, please post it here for all to see.
LA voters are being further scammed by the LA Times support for incumbent Tamar Galatazan who, with current BoE member Monica Garcia (the BoE prez during the Belmont/Roybal scandal), supported the former Supt. John Deasy as he made one horrendous and costly bad decision after another. Now the interim Supt. Cortines, again being sued on sex charges, says there is not enought money in the LAUSD till to pay teachers….and not enough to hire back nurses, librarians, counselors, and others whose training is vital to support student education. In only 4 years, Deasy wasted about $670 Million of taxpayer money with his bad decisions as to iPads, MiSiS, etc. and both Garcia and Galatzan supported him in every penny he wasted. The FBI is looking into this now as to potential fraud, and hopefully they are also investigating Deasy’s BoE supporters Galatazan and Garcia.
I urge everyone to support Kayser’s reelection, and to vote for Schmerelson, a lifetime educator and administrator, to take over the seat of the devious Tamar Galatzan.
Do not follow the instructions of the biased LA Times and their Broad supporters on the their editorial Board.
Diane…please consider featuring my remarks above as a column before this Tuesday’s election when the LAUSD BoE is under threat of even more takeover by the charter school onslaught by big corporate PAC money.
.http://www.fulldisclosure.net/2008/07/belmont-opening-toxic-or-not-l-a-officials-tout-billion-dollar-school-project/
FDN has a long running series on this and a great deal more that inducts the district. The reasons fir LAs escalating poverty and despair are closely connected to the city and LAUSD’s deeply entrenched corruption . Eli Broad has his signature all over that mess which finds a few thousand human beings, most of them poor inner city children of color in a school perched on an earthquake fault beneath a toxic Meghan nightmare that experts dubbed unsafe for habitation . One brave scientist refused to demur . He could not be bought off not was he easy to intimidate , in one interveiw on this site he says the only way the site will ever be safe is if they can build the school on poles many feet anovr the former dairy. Inhaling even the smallest amount of this methane stuff can cause profound profound cognitive damage l after another site like it exploded in the community where I used to teach, our special Ed population expanded drastically . About a year ago , the posh site was evacuated because a noxious gas wafted I to the school police officers suites . Several got sick and had to be treated by paramedics l no one who covered the story alluded to the site’s dubious history .
I think this situation epitomizes the evil these folks are capable of . I urge you to watch the series especially if you live in LA
Here is the link to the video sent out today by Rene. Worth watching…true story of how corruption may rule in LA. This video shows why candidates for Boe at LAUSD must be carefully vetted by the local print and other media…and why old decisions must never be forgotten. The charter supporters and their oligarch funders generally have ulterior motives.
http://www.fulldisclosure.net/2008/07/belmont-opening-toxic-or-not-l-a-officials-tout-billion-dollar-school-project/
Methane nightmare. $&@**# ipads
I hear you, girl. It’s a roller coaster, but you’re in Portland , right? I think few cities are as proactive and on task like that city is thanks to tracgers like you who keep on top of all this.
Again, Diane, I urge you to feature this info before the March 3 election in LA and it might influence some readers to vote more carefully and not use the limited and biased info they read in the LA Times.
When children firmly believe that they will not live to be over 21, see violence in their lives continually, come to school hungry, ad nauseum
can ANYONE actually believe that they are going to be interested in an education devoted to paper and pencil answers to “academic” questions – academic in the sense of; it is of purely academic interest?
Evidently: It must be so. Our glorious politicians keep telling us it is so.
Teachers and schools just have to work harder especially when these same politicians have such fallacious ways of grading teachers.
“The Wire” (TV drama series based in Baltimore) is like an extended Dickens saga, delving deep into the daily lives of kids like those you describe, exposing the political games used to maintain the status quo, & paying lots of attention to how the education-reform game effects the lives of these kids in Seasons 4 & 5.
Common sense out the window describes life for a teacher very aptly. M-F 7:00am-6::00pm Add Saturday another 4 hours. I would do more but groceries shopping and laundry are my must do list as well. More on Sunday if needed. This must not be hard enough. I leave school feeling like I failed at something most days. I am so exhausted when I get home that I find it difficult to interact with my family in the evening. I feel like I am expected to act like a professional but I am treated as a blue collar worker. If I were a blue collar worker at least I could get over time and a 15 minute break every couple of hours.
My first bout of teaching ended after 2 years for the reasons you list. I decided I would be better at it “when older”, & that what I really needed was the in & out boxes of the [pre-computerized] office, & a kind of work where I had some sort of handle on whether I was doing a good job or not. I finally got strong enough to return to teaching at the age of 50. Kudos to you for your strength and dedication.
Please send me the link to the UCLA report noted in this article. Thanks for your help.
Here it is:
Click to access Its%20About%20Time.pdf
Wendy Lecker’s words are so true but they make me want to “primal scream” because HOW MANY TIMES DO WE TEACHERS IN TITLE ONE PUBLIC SCHOOLS HAVE TO SHOUT LECKER’S MESSAGE before we are actually heard? The powers that be tragically understand our message but it just does not fit in with their master plan of privatization. Who is looking after MLK’s timeless messages about humanity? Title one teachers in America deserve one giant Nobel Peace Prize because they endure and persevere despite the barrage of vicious attacks on them now in the form of RTTT initiatives. It is so not about teaching the students – title one students have enough suffering in their lives without suffering all day long at school thanks to Arne Duncan’s initiatives which are fully supported from the top. Why do title one public school teachers persevere? For the love of teaching and seeing that EVERYONE despite impoverished lives deserves the best education possible!
It feels like the children are in a blender that is programmed not to stop. Money is the the only thing that can cure poverty. To get money you have to have a job. To have a job you have to have skills. To obtain the skills you need a education. Children are denied a education because of the poverty level they live in. When they become adults they are given jobs that are menial and pay little money. Angry and disgruntled they abuse their families, and the cycle continues.
I don’t think that this is a presidential issue but a societal issue that mostly is effected by “Big Business” and people who don’t see or appreciate the resources that are in these people.
…or people who could care less about their resources, perhaps even seeing a silver lining in keeping them down so low the only way to thrive is through crime– making them fodder for the private prison system,