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Robert Putnam: Yes, Poverty Matters. It Matters a Lot.

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2015 //
15

I recall reading Robert Putnam’s previous book, Bowling Alone, about the decline of civic life in America. It caused quite a stir. I am looking forward to reading his new book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. It seems certain to upset the “reformers,” as it blows away their assumptions that the schools are failing our children. As I read this review in Education Week, our society is failing our children, and we are not funding our schools in ways that help the neediest kids.

 

Sarah D. Sparks writes that Putnam “gathers a flood of research on the unraveling web of formal and informal supports that help students in poverty succeed academically and in life.

 

“If it takes a village to raise a child, the prognosis for America’s children isn’t good: In recent years, villages all over America, rich and poor, have deteriorated as we’ve shirked collective responsibility for our kids,” Mr. Putnam wrote. “And most Americans don’t have the resources … to replace collective provision with private provision.”

 

The attack on public education by the elites funding privatization is part of the shirking of collective responsibility. The drumbeating for “choice” is a way to replace collective responsibility with individual preferences, which are sure to intensify racial and economic segregation.

 

Sparks writes:

 

Mr. Putnam directly ties education to economic and social class; he speaks interchangeably of poverty and earning a high school degree or less, and of wealth and earning at least a four-year college degree.

 

Schools are not to blame for the academic gap between rich and poor students that starts before kindergarten, but, Mr. Putnam said, “the American public school today is as a kind of echo chamber in which the advantages or disadvantages that children bring with them to school have effects on other kids.”

 

He pointed to an analysis by the School Funding Law Center which found that as of 2009, 16 states had funding systems that provided less money per pupil to high-poverty school districts, while only 17 provided more per-pupil spending for districts with greater poverty. (An update of the study suggests those trends have worsened, with only 14 states providing significantly more money to high-poverty schools, and 19 states providing significantly less.)

 

Schools with 75 percent poverty or more offered one-third the number of Advanced Placement courses in 2009-10 than did wealthier schools—four each year on average compared to nearly a dozen each year at schools with 25 percent poverty or less.

 

Even where high-poverty schools get compensatory funding, Mr. Putnam told me: “Equalizing inputs is not equalizing outputs. Just because you have the same student-teacher ratio, just because you are investing the same dollars per kid, does not mean you are closing those gaps.”

 

For example, he noted in the book that high-poverty schools have more than twice as many disciplinary problems as low-poverty schools, and “equal numbers of guidance counselors cannot produce equal college readiness if the counselors in poor schools are tied up all day in disciplinary hearings.”

 

As a result, nearly 15 years after the federal education law was revised to “leave no child behind,” an analysis of the National Education Longitudinal Study data finds that even the brightest students in poverty can’t get ahead. Students in the poorest quarter of families who performed in the top third on national mathematics achievement were slightly less likely to graduate college than the worst math performers in the wealthiest quarter of families, 29 percent versus 30 percent.

 

The graph reproduced in this article starkly shows how poverty affects academic achievement and college graduation rates. This is not a problem that can be solved one student at a time. It requires a rearrangement of school funding so that schools enrolling poor students get the resources they need, not equal funding but more funding. It requires that the federal government invest in infrastructure programs that rebuild our crumbling highways and bridges and tunnels and sewers while creating meaningful work for men and women who can’t find jobs. That’s a tall order, but sooner or later our society must make decisions to do something significant to reduce poverty and inequality or to continue with the illusion that more high-stakes testing and more privatization of public education will solve those problems.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Poverty, Privatization, Testing

Peter Greene Disagrees with Mike Petrilli

By dianeravitch
March 10, 2015 //
30

For some reason, the New York Council of School Superintendents invited Mike Petrilli of the conservative Fordham Institute to attend their annual meeting in Albany and tell them how to end the war over school reform.

 

I say “for some reason,” because Mike is one of the most determined warriors in the war over school reform. His idea of ending the “war over school reform” is for people to share his views. He loves charters, he hates unions, he is a fierce advocate for the Common Core, he thinks that poverty doesn’t matter, and he believes that charters are for strivers, not for unmotivated students. I know Mike fairly well, or I did, since I used to be on the board of the Fordham Institute. I don’t think we have had a conversation since I left the board in 2009. So far as I know, he has never been a teacher or a principal or a superintendent. He is not a scholar of education; he has no experience as a researcher in any discipline. He has worked for a conservative think tank with a strongly partisan point of view, and he worked as a political appointee of the George W. Bush administration in charge of “innovation.” He is now president of the Fordham Institute, which makes him a big player inside the Beltway and in conservative circles.

 

Peter Greene read his speech (I have not) and called Mike out on a number of points. Mike dissed defenders of public education (like me) because we think that poverty is an obstacle for poor kids and affects their ability to attain high test scores. People like me think that schools that enroll high numbers of poor kids need smaller class sizes, and more of everything that is taken for granted in well-resourced suburban schools. He thinks we are making excuses, despite the fact that standardized tests everywhere serve as measures of family wealth–with children of the affluent at the top and children of the poor at the bottom. However, as Peter points out, Mike is quite willing to exclude kids from charters who don’t meet their expectations.

 

Peter Greene writes that Petrilli’s views are:

 

……also insulting to the millions of teachers who are in the classroom day after day, doing the best they can with the resources they have. Hey, teachers– if you’re not succeeding with all of your students, it has nothing to do with obstacles and challenges in your path. You just don’t believe enough.

 

Then Petrilli pivots to criticize reformers, mostly for creating unrealistic definitions of success and failure. All students will not be ready to go to college, and not all schools labeled failing are, in fact, failing. 

 

He suggests that superintendents advocate for growth measures in evaluating schools. He calls on them to call out schools that are failing, because it will increase their credibility. He does not take any time explaining what standards the individual student growth should be measured against, nor why.

 

He also throws in a plug for vocational education, and on this I’m in complete agreement with him.

 

But in this section Petrilli has mapped out a “sensible center” that I do not recognize. On the one side, an extreme straw-man version of reform opponents, and on the other, a tiny concession that assumes the fundamentals of reform are sound. Petrilli’s sensible middle has nothing to say about the destructiveness of test-driven accountability, the warping of the system that comes from making schools accountable to the federal government, or the lack of full funding and support. On the one hand he dismisses anyone who wants to talk about the effects of poverty on education, but on the other, he acknowledges the unfairness of comparing schools where students arrive already behind on their first day. Petrilli’s sensible middle is a bit of a muddle….

 

Petrilli acknowledges that his charter love might be why eyebrows have been raised to ceiling height for his appearance at the supers’ gathering, but he says New York is charter territory because Albany leads the nation in production of education red tape. The awesome thing about charters is that they get to run without all that tapiness, and the superintendents should agitate for the same tapeless freedom. And if they can’t get it, they should get in on the charter fun.

 

This third point is brief, perhaps because there are no details to add to this. How does one elaborate on these points. Ask Albany for freedom that they won’t grant you in a zillion years? Join the charter game by finding millionaires to back you? Stop being so resentful that politicians, with the backing and encouragement of outfits like the Fordham Foundation, have been steadily stacking the deck against public schools and in favor of charteristas? Yes, it’s probably just as well that Petrilli didn’t dwell too long on this point.

 

I am sure Mike didn’t mention that two of Albany’s most celebrated charters–the Brighter Choice middle schools–were closed a day or so before Petrilli spoke to the superintendents–for poor performance.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Education Reform, Poverty, Privatization

John Kuhn: The Big Error of “Accountability”

By dianeravitch
March 9, 2015 //
24

John Kuhn, Texas superintendent, is a brilliant orator and writer. In this article, he skewers the cheerleaders for high-stakes testing in Texas by showing how they cherry pick data to buttress their case for testing kids more and more instead of providing adequate resources for them to learn.

 

He begins by demonstrating how they situate their love of testing as a civil rights issue. They cite the Brown decision and in other ways claim that they love the children who are poor and needy and want the best for them. But what they never do is to advocate that the Legislature restore the billions of dollars that were cut from the schools attended by the children they claim to love.

 

Here is a small sample of a smartly argued and well documented analysis:

 

In “The Big Idea of School Accountability,” their slick apologia for high stakes testing and punitive accountability, both of which have dominated American education politics and pedagogy since the 1980s, Bill McKenzie and Sandy Kress start out on the high road. McKenzie is a high-ranking opinion-shaper at the George W. Bush Institute and a former editorialist for the Dallas Morning News. Kress was an architect of Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and, though he leaves this out of his bio attached to the essay, a long-time lobbyist for Pearson, the world’s leading vendor of K-12 standardized tests. The two edu-lobbyists begin their essay by mentioning historical moments in education policymaking and politics that would seem to appeal to a wide audience. They condemn segregation and celebrate Brown v. Board of Education. They praise the Elementary and Secondary School Act of 1965 (later renamed ESEA) and they celebrate its noble intention that “schools in disadvantaged communities would receive the resources to provide their students a decent education.”

 

Pay close attention to that statement, because it is the last time the authors will refer to resources as a necessary element to ensuring quality education in disadvantaged communities. Through the sleight of hand that has been perfected by the modern education reformer—and McKenzie and Kress are education reformers of the highest order—the writers deftly pivot from any and all talk of the need to provide equitable educational resources across all communities so that schools in even the poorest areas can deliver on the promise of education, and they spend the remaining pages of their article discussing something much easier on the taxpayer’s pocketbook: accountability, or the careful creation of just the right punishments to make teachers and students succeed in making learning happen, without respect to the pesky details of resources available to them (or unavailable to them, as they case may be). In the next paragraph—without establishing that the equity of resources LBJ’s law intended to guarantee was ever successfully attained—the writers begin to speak of campuses being “held responsible,” of the need to “hold schools accountable” and of “what should happen if schools do not show progress for all their students.”

 

Pivot complete.

 

The authors have shifted totally from an inconvenient conversation about fair and equitable investment in children and communities—investment that is adequate and comparable regardless of a student’s zip code or skin color—to one about holding children and communities responsible for their own outcomes. Accountability is constructed on the principle of blame and consequences as leverage to move schools and kids forward (blame and consequences, it should be noted, entirely directed at the teachers and students, with no consequence whatsoever reserved for citizens outside the schoolhouse who may or may not provide adequate fiscal supports for schools and children). At the urging of testing advocates like the authors of this essay, educational improvement via punitive test-based policies has eclipsed humane concepts of shared assistance and support for hurting American children (particularly anything resembling the investment of tax receipts) as the “civil rights issue of our time.” Educational accountability is designed as a low-cost replacement for social responsibility.

 

Children in America’s poorest neighborhoods lack all manner of opportunities and resources from birth that many American families take for granted. This isn’t to say they can’t learn. Of course they can learn, but there are obstacles they must overcome that society has kindly ensured do not litter the path of many other children from middle and upper class areas. From birth weight forward, all the data in impoverished zones is stacked against children, and elevating accountability for schools as our primary lever for improving these children’s lives has the effect of squelching any urgency and attention directed at efforts to feed and clothe and love and help them outside the school. We hear reformers speak of “the fierce urgency of the now” when they speak of improving schools, but we never hear it when they speak of improving lives. More than anyone in the United States, the poor child needs a hand up. More than any organization in the United States, the public school—the place where our children gather, and where they come as they are—needs support…..

 

Folks in the accountability camp like to say “we can’t throw money at the problem.” In fact, they apparently prefer actively pulling money away from the areas where the greatest problems exist. It is lunacy to believe that a testing program can do anything to help children who are being denied the same educational resources provided to their peers in wealthy communities. And to compare those under-funded students with their better-funded peers is nothing short of cruelty.

 

Thanks to the shift in focus toward testing and away from resourcing, in 2015 Texas sank to 49th in the nation in school funding (2). The accountability clique convinced lawmakers that funding was of little import; academic success could be forced upon children at a discount via test-based coercion and threats. An analogy might be if the Good Samaritan in the Bible story had stopped beside the injured traveler and, instead of lifting him out of the dirt and paying for his recuperation at an inn, had stood over him with a stopwatch and told him to hurry and get up, and assured him that he was comparing his time with that of uninjured people.

 

After quickly dismissing the topic of equitable funding for schools in poor areas, the authors praise bipartisanship and claim the legacy of Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert Kennedy as they discuss the debate surrounding ESEA. But even as they quote LBJ opining how his signature education law meant more “to the future of America” than anything he had signed before, they neglect to mention that what they are advocating in this essay—the continuation of required annual standardized testing in grades 3-8 and once in high school and significant punishments for schools, teachers, and students based on said tests’ results—were nowhere in LBJ’s bill.

 

Kuhn knows that reformers like to say that any reference to poverty means that you don’t believe poor children can learn. He knows that poor children can learn, but he also knows that poor children need at least the same resources as affluent children to learn. The “big error” of the accountability hawks is that they think that high-stakes testing is a substitute for resources. It is not. A brilliant and powerful essay.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Poverty, Testing

Peter Greene: David Brooks Gets Everything Wrong (Again)

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2015 //
40

Peter Greene here reviews David Brooks’ latest effort to advise the nation about education issues. Brooks argues that it would be a mistake to try to reduce poverty by redistributionist policies (I assume he means such policies as higher taxes on billionaires or direct benefits to those who are poor or government programs for job creation); instead, we should count on education to reduce inequality and poverty.

 

In earlier columns, he concluded that Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone charters were “miracle schools” that had closed the achievement gap between white and black students (however, the miracle has not been sustained, even though Canada kicked out the entire entering class whose scores were low, and his schools spend substantially more than public schools with which they are compared); and Brooks endorsed the idea that teachers would produce higher test scores through a trick called “loss aversion,” where they are given a bonus at the beginning of the year, but the bonus is taken away if the scores don’t go up. In 2011, after he heard me speak in Aspen, Colorado, he wrote a column criticizing me for questioning high-stakes testing and charter schools, and of course, he complained that I said that poverty is a leading cause of low test scores. He seems to believe that testing and charters are the answer to poverty, even though after some 13 years of high-stakes testing and 25 years of charters, there seems to be more child poverty, not less.

 

In today’s column, Brooks claims that the way to prosperity is not to reduce poverty by, for example, creating jobs for people who want to work or raising taxes on the super-rich (that would be redistributionist, which is a very bad thing in his eyes), but by making sure that everyone goes to college. If everyone goes to college, then everyone will get good jobs, and no one will be poor. But where will all those new jobs come from? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the 20 occupations that will supply the most jobs between now and 2022 are mostly low-paying. Except for registered nurses and managers, 18 of the 20 occupations are not high-wage occupations. Do we need to improve our schools? Yes, of course. Will that be enough to reduce poverty? No.

 

Greene writes:

 

Mostly Brooks wants to argue for education as the miracle engine of economic justice. And to make his argument, he trots out the work of Raj Chetty, a piece of research that proves conclusively that even researchers at Harvard can become confused about the difference between correlation and causation. (Chetty, for those of you unfamiliar with the “research,” asserts that a good teacher will result in greater lifetime earnings for students. What he actually proves is that people who tend to do well on standardized tests tend to grow up to be wealthier, an unexciting demonstration of correlation best explained by things we already know– people who score well on standardized tests tend to be from a higher-income background, and people who grow up to be high-income tend to come from a high-income background.)

 

Brooks also cites magical researcher David Autor of MIT, who believes that if everyone graduated from college with a degree, everyone would make more money because, reasons. Because if everyone had a college degree, flipping burgers would pay more? Because if everyone had a college degree, corporations would suddenly want to hire more people? The continued belief in the astonishing notion that a more educated workforce causes higher-paying jobs to appear from somewhere is big news to a huge number of twenty-somethings who are busy trying to scrape together a living in areas other than the ones they prepared for these days.

 

Brooks isn’t done spouting nonsense:

 

[Brooks writes:] “Focusing on human capital is not whistling past the graveyard…No redistributionist measure will have the same effect as good early-childhood education and better community colleges, or increasing the share of men capable of joining the labor force.”

 

Because the vast number of high-paying jobs currently going unfilled is….. what?

 

Brooks says that redistributionists don’t get it, that they believe that modern capitalism is fundamentally broken, but that their view is biased by short-term effects of the recession. I have two responses for that pair of thoughtbubbbles.

 

First, it’s not clear whether capitalism is broken or not because we are currently tangled up in some sort of twisted fun-house mirror version of faux capitalism where the free market has been obliterated by a controlled money-sucking machine run by the government on behalf of the oligarchs. I’m actually a fan of capitalism, but what we currently have in this country is not capitalism at all.

 

Second, your argument about the “temporary evidence” of the recession is invalid because the recession was (and is) not the result of some mysterious serious of natural events. The economy went in the tank because the CEOs and Wall Street put it there. The economy broke because the “capitalists” broke it, and consequently the recession itself is Exhibit A in the case against modern faux capitalism and the greedheads who run it.

 

Throwing all this back at a magical belief in education is simply another way to blame poor people for being poor. So sorry you need food stamps and health care, but if you’d had the guts and character to go to college and get a degree, you wouldn’t be in such a mess. Your poverty is just the direct result of your lack of character and quality. Well, that and your terrible teachers. But it certainly has nothing to do with how the country is being run. It’s all on you, lousy poor person. And also your teachers.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Jobs, Poverty, Testing

Daniel Tanner: “Sorry, President Obama, But High-Stakes Testing Doesn’t Cure Cancer”

By dianeravitch
February 28, 2015 //
12

Daniel Tanner is a professor emeritus at the Rutgers University Graduate School of Education. He has long been one of the leaders in the curriculum field.

In this article, he notes that many of our policymakers have come to believe in the magical powers of standardized testing, especially when high-stakes are attached to them. He notes with disappointment that there is no difference between George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind and President Obama’s Race to the Top program. Neither has succeeded, he says, and neither will ever succeed. He explains patiently that tests can’t cure poverty, nor can they close achievement gaps rooted in poverty. Only direct action to address poverty can cure poverty.

Categories Charter Schools, Poverty, Testing

Wendy Lecker: The Challenge of Learning in Chaos

By dianeravitch
February 26, 2015 //
17

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.

 

 

 

 

Categories Equity, Funding, Poverty

Daniel Katz: Why the NY Times Is Wrong About Annual Testing

By dianeravitch
February 22, 2015 //
39

Daniel S. Katz of Serin Hall University explains here why the New York Times is wrong about the value of annual standardized testing.

The editorial acknowled that there is too much testing, but failed to acknowledge that this condition is the result of federal mandates. It credits the high-stakes testing regime with higher achievement but doesn’t recognize that test scores increased faster before NCLB.

It is hard to believe that the Néw York Times editorial board is so out of touch with parents, students, teachers, and the realities of school.

Categories NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Poverty, Race to the Top, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration, Standardized Testing

Ladd and Fiske: If North Carolina Wants to Improve Achievement, It Must Address Poverty

By dianeravitch
February 20, 2015 //
17

Helen Ladd, Professor of Public Policy at Duke University, and her husband, Edward Fiske, former education editor of the New York Times, reviewed the recently released letter grades for schools and here explain what they mean. 

 

They write:

 

In a nutshell, we need to figure out how to break the link between poverty and achievement in our schools. A crucial first step is to support policies and programs that directly address the particular challenges that poor students bring with them to school.

 

The most striking pattern that emerged from the letter grades from the NC Department of Public Instruction was the near-perfect correlation between letter grades and economic disadvantage. The News & Observer reported that 80 percent of schools where at least four-fifths of children qualify for the federal free or reduced lunch received a D or F grade, whereas 90 percent of schools with fewer than one in five students on the subsidized lunch program received As or Bs.

 

The fact that, on average, students from disadvantaged households perform less well in school than peers from more advantaged backgrounds has been documented at all levels of education.

 

What can we do? Ladd and Fiske say there are three possible strategies:

 

1. Reduce poverty directly. That will be politically difficult and take time, even though it is the best response.

 

2. Ignore the problem. This is the approach of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.

 

They write about this approach of denial:

 

Policymakers often rationalize their denial of the relationship between poverty on achievement because they sincerely believe that schools should offset the effects of low socio-economic status. Others fear that setting lower expectations for some groups of students – what President George W. Bush called the “soft bigotry of low expectations” – will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But in both cases, simply wanting something to be true does not make it true.

 

Still other policymakers cite examples of schools serving low-income students, such as some of the Knowledge as Power Program (KIPP) charter schools that have managed to “beat the odds” with disadvantaged students. Consistent with such exceptions, according to The News & Observer, about 5 percent of North Carolina schools where at least three-fifths of students qualify for subsidized lunches, received As or Bs as letter grades, some of them charters. But such successes are often largely attributable to these schools’ success in attracting students from the high end of the ability or motivational spectrum, or to substantial supplemental funding from foundations, or to extremely hard work of their teachers. Absolutely no evidence exists that the few success stories can be scaled up to address the needs of large proportions of disadvantaged students.

 

3. A third – and far more preferable – approach is to acknowledge that while we are not going to be able to eliminate poverty any time soon, we can find ways of targeting the specific ways in which poverty hampers learning. Put another way, we can address the particular challenges that disadvantaged children face as they pursue their education.

 

Fortunately, we already know a lot about these challenges. A wide body of research has demonstrated how poor health care – both physical and mental – and the lack of quality early childhood education translates into low cognitive performance. Research by one of the authors, Helen Ladd, and two colleagues has shown that quality early education programs reduce the need for spending on special education later on.

 

Other research has documented how poor children often have limited access to the language and problem solving skills that serve as springboards to future learning. We know how family poverty also translates into limited access to books and computers at home or to the enrichment that comes from vacation travel….

 

The challenge for policymakers is to look for ways to minimize the impact of the particular challenges that many disadvantaged children face. We should, in short, look for ways to provide children from low-income families with the same sort of education-enriching experiences and resources that middle-income children take for granted.

 

They give examples of valuable interventions such as school-based health clinics, early childhood programs, after-school and summer programs, and other “wraparound” services.

 

The message of the letter grades, say Ladd and Fiske, is that the relationship between poverty and low school achievement can no longer be denied.

 

 

 

 

Categories North Carolina, Poverty

Arthur Camins: Boosting a Few More Children Out of Poverty Is Not a Worthy National Goal

By dianeravitch
February 20, 2015 //
16

Arthur Camins, Director, Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education, Stevens Institute of Technology, critiques here the now-popular idea that the best way to end poverty is by improving education. While both parties continue to talk about race and poverty, they have given up on integration as a strategy. What they propose, he says, is that education is the best anti-poverty program. Unfortunately, this claim has neither evidence nor  logic to support it.

 

He writes:

 

Integration has largely evaporated as a key driver in the struggle for equity. It has been replaced by the idea that education is the most effective anti-poverty program. The argument is framed by the following ideas:

 

“A high-quality education offers the best path out of poverty and into to the middle class. The new and improved, common-core aligned, standardized tests will accurately reflect the differential levels of student learning in areas that matter for their own future and that of the nation. Students who perform poorly on these assessments are unlikely be very successful in their post-secondary college and career endeavors. As a result, they are headed for low paying jobs or unemployment. Therefore, if we can increase their performance on these tests they will be more likely to succeed and escape poverty.”

 

This argument, while simplistic, sounds reasonable and appealing. However, close examination reveals that it is not evidence-based, nor is it logical.

 

Camins adds:

 

The logic about escape from poverty only works on the individual level. While individuals are certainly better off with the best possible education, there is no evidence that attaining a significantly increased percentage of high achieving students would eliminate the need for people to clean our offices, homes and hospitals, stock our store and warehouse shelves or serve us in fast food restaurants. There is no evidence that employers will suddenly agree to pay such better-educated workers a living wage that would enable them to provide adequate food, clothing and shelter so that poverty would cease to exist.

 

Maybe, more effective teaching will increase the size, diversity and creativity of the nation’s knowledge workforce, who will subsequently spur innovation and new kinds of well-paying employment for others. Maybe, our superior innovation capacity will offset the competitive advantage of lower wage countries. These would be good outcomes, but they will not end poverty. Unless, we commit to real high-quality universal health care, food and housing security, and full employment at fair living wages for all (through, for example public investment in infrastructure improvement), it is illogical to believe that universally high-quality education will significantly reduce, much less end poverty. Imagining that it will do so represents magical, not evidence-based logical thinking….

 

Sadly, too many policy makers seem more committed to enabling profiteering from the results of poverty than ending it. The testing industry is an excellent example. Education policies sanction and encourage multi-billion dollar testing and test preparation corporations that enable destructive punishment and rewards for educators, gaming the system and sorting of students for competitive access to an increasingly unaffordable post secondary system that perpetuates inequity. State and federal education policies support costly, overly stressful and time consuming high-stakes testing in order to verify and detect small differences within the very large socio-economic disparities we already know exist.

 

Well-designed large-scale assessments can contribute evidence for institutional and program level judgments about quality. However, we do not need to test every student every year for this purpose. Less costly sampling can accomplish this goal. I am not opposed to qualifying exams- if they validly and reliably measure qualities that are directly applicable to their purpose without bias. However, imagine if we shifted the balance of our assessment attention from the summative to the formative. Then we could focus more on becoming better at interpreting daily data from regular class work and use that evidence to help students move their own learning forward. Imagine what else we could accomplish if we spent a significant percentage of our current K-12 and college admission testing expenditures on actually mediating poverty instead of measuring its inevitable effect. Imagine the educational and economic benefit if we invested in putting people to work rebuilding our cities, roads, bridges, schools and parks. Imagine if we put people to work building affordable housing instead of luxury high rises. Imagine the boost to personal spending and the related savings in social service spending if a living wage and full employment prevailed. Imagine the learning benefit to children if their families did not have to worry about health, food and shelter. Imagine if our tax policies favored the common good over wealth accumulation for the 1%ers.

 

Such investments are far more logical than the current over-investment in testing and compliance regimes. Education, race and poverty are inextricably intertwined. Let’s do everything we can to improve teaching and learning. More students learning to use evidence to support arguments would be terrific. But, if we want to do something about poverty we need to ensure good jobs at fair wages for the parents of our students. That is where evidence and logical thinking lead.

 

At least since the adoption of No Child Left Behind legislation education reform has been promoted as an anti-poverty program and a way to narrow the racial achievement gap. Maybe that appeal is a good sign about the conscience of US citizens. Apparently, many people still believe that the connection between educational achievement, race and socio-economic status is unfair. However, no policy makers have been forthright enough to reveal or admit to themselves their real underlying logic: We have given up on ending or seriously mediating poverty. The best we can do is to give some kids who are willing and able to work hard a better chance to make good. That is why we support school choice. No one will say this out loud because it sounds so pessimistic and cynical.

 

Maybe it is time to hold policy makers accountable in their own behavior for what they demand of students: At least be clear about your hypothesis, experimental design and collect appropriate evidence. That would allow the public to participate in deciding whether escape from poverty for a few more students is a worthy goal that represents our values as a nation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Education Reform, Poverty, Race

Peter Greene: A Fantasy View of Milwaukee Reforms

By dianeravitch
February 17, 2015 //
7

Peter Greene discovered a bold new policy plan in Milwaukee. It turns the war on poverty into a war on the poor.

He writes;

“On Wednesday, Senator Alberta Darling and Representative Dale Kooyenga released “New Opportunities for Milwaukee.” It’stunning. It’s a blueprint, a plan, a carefully-crafted rhetorical stance that turns the war on poverty into a war on the poor. Does it present new opportunities? It surely does– but they are opportunities for more privateers to use the language of civil rights to mask the same old profiteering game.

“Make sure your seat belts and safety harnesses are locked in place, because we are about to travel to a place where up is down and forward is backward. The first chunk is directly related to education; the rest is not, but I’m going to go the distance anyway because it helps lay out a particular point of view that is driving some reformsters. The full report is twenty-five pages; I’ve read them so that you don’t have to, but you may still want to. Forewarned is forearmed.”

The report begins with this claim;

“2014 marked the 50-year anniversary of the war on poverty. Since 1964, taxpayers spent over $22 trillion to combat poverty. Little, if any, progress has been achieved.”

“”Two-thirds of the incarcerated African-American men come from six zip codes in Milwaukee and it is no coincidence that those zip codes are also home to the greatest density of failing schools and the highest unemployment in the state.” Boy, and that’s true. It’s also no coincidence that every time I see a building on fire, there’s a fire truck right nearby, or that every time find water dripping off my car, there’s rain. Say it with me, boys and girls– correlation is not causation.”

The plan not only declares the war on poverty a failure (no point throwing money at poverty, even though lack of money defines poverty) but declares the civil rights movement a success, therefore matters like segregation are unworthy of our attention.

Peter, in his inimitable style, dissects the recommendations for ending poverty without spending money. It starts with charter schools…

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, For-Profit, Milwaukee, Poverty
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