Archives for category: Poverty
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Why Does U.S. Continue to Spend More on Affluent Children?

By dianeravitch
November 7, 2013 //
22

An excellent and unexpected article appeared in the business section of the New York Times on November 5, written by Eduardo Porter.

Despite bipartisan rhetoric about “closing the achievement gap,” and giving every child an equal change “regardless of zip code,” the evidence suggests that this is empty blather. What really matters is which schools get the best funding.

Porter writes:”

The United States is one of few advanced nations where schools serving better-off children usually have more educational resources than those serving poor students, according to research by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Among the 34 O.E.C.D. nations, only in the United States, Israel and Turkey do disadvantaged schools have lower teacher/student ratios than in those serving more privileged students.

Andreas Schleicher, who runs the O.E.C.D.’s international educational assessments, put it to me this way: “The bottom line is that the vast majority of O.E.C.D. countries either invest equally into every student or disproportionately more into disadvantaged students. The U.S. is one of the few countries doing the opposite.” The inequity of education finance in the United States is a feature of the system, not a bug, stemming from its great degree of decentralization and its reliance on local property taxes.

And he adds that much of the disparity stems from our nation’s heavy reliance on property taxes:

Today, the federal government provides only about 14 percent of the money for school districts from the elementary level through high school, compared to 54 percent, on average, among other industrial nations. More than half the money comes from local sources, mostly property taxes, which is about twice the share in the rest of the O.E.C.D.

This skews the playing field from early on. In New York, for instance, in 2011 the value of property in the poorest 10 percent of school districts amounted to some $287,000 per student, according to the state’s education department. In the richest districts it amounted, on average, to $1.9 million.

The state government in Albany redresses part of the imbalance: In the 2010-11 school year it transferred $6,600 per student to the state’s poorest school districts, about four times as much as it sent to the richest. But it’s still a long way from closing the gap.

That year, the most recent for which comprehensive data is available, the wealthiest 10 percent of school districts, in rich enclaves like Bridgehampton and Amagansett on Long Island, spent $25,505 on average per pupil. In the poorest 10 percent of New York’s school districts — in cities like Elmira, which has double the nation’s poverty rate and half its median family income — the average spending per student was only $12,861.

In other states, the disparity between the richest districts and the poorest districts is even larger.

What a shame that Race to the Top was targeted at test scores and not at leveling the playing field in systematic ways.

 

 

Categories Education Reform, Poverty

Governor Christie Berates a Teacher, Again

By dianeravitch
November 3, 2013 //
80

Governor Chris Christie has made clear that he doesn’t like the public schools in his state. He calls them “failure factories,” as he campaigns for vouchers. (He is a graduate of Livingston High School.) He seems to despise public school teachers. He enjoys berating teachers, especially if they are female. He is one big, tough, strong guy who knows how to put down women.

Melissa Tomlinson is a public school teacher in New Jersey. She went to a Rally for Governor Chris Christie and she held up a sign.

Read this wonderful description on Jersey Jazzman’s blog of Melissa’s courage in confronting a bully.

Her sign said:

“I am a public school teacher.

“We are NOT failing our students.

“N.J. is ranked 3rd in the US.

“Christie’s refusal to finance public education is failing our students.”

She asked him: “Why do you portray our schools as failure factories?” His reply: “Because they are!” He said: “I am tired of you people. What do you want?”

So, the most powerful executive in the state of New Jersey treated this dedicated public school teacher with arrogance, rudeness, and disrespect. She didn’t back down. She had him cornered. She is right. He is wrong. Probably, he knows he is wrong, so he felt compelled to shout her down instead of engaging in civil dialogue.

Melissa Tomlinson was right that Governor Christie has underfunded the schools. He froze the spending that was supposed to be used to repair schools with leaky pipes and mold and crumbling facilities.

But Tomlinson was wrong about one thing: on the 2011 NAEP, New Jersey was second in the nation in reading, behind Massachusetts and tied with Connecticut. In math, New Jersey was second in the nation. Not third, but second.

The districts in New Jersey that are failing are the ones that are controlled by the state, some for decades. The state has no idea what to do other than to hand students and public funds over to private corporations.

As Julia Sass Rubin pointed out in an earlier blog today, the Christie administration has systematically underfunded districts that enroll children of color. It has stripped them of democratic governance. It has overloaded them with charters that skim the best students and increase segregation. Governor Christie praises charter schools that exclude children who have serious disabilities and children who don’t speak English. The state has embarked on a policy of separate and unequal for the districts that are powerless.

Governor Chris Christie should be ashamed of himself for his systematic neglect of the education of New Jersey’s most vulnerable children as well as his rude and disgraceful behavior towards public school teachers. He should stop his war against public education. It will not help him become president. It will be a huge liability.

Here is a blog in California. Governor Christie, your reputation as a bully is going national.

Categories NAEP, New Jersey, Poverty, Privatization, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration, Teachers, Vouchers

Governor Christie’s Disastrous “School Reforms”

By dianeravitch
November 3, 2013 //
15

Julia Sass Rubin, an associate professor at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University and a founder of Save Our Schools NJ, here explains the ugly face of what is deceptively called “school reform” in New Jersey during the administration of Governor Chris Christie.

It would be more accurate, she writes, to say that Governor Christie has promoted a policy of “separate and unequal,” targeting children of color.

First, he imposed massive budget cuts that disproportionately harm children of color. She writes:

For example, the Paterson, Elizabeth, and Newark school districts combined lost over $300 million since 2010. If the New Jersey Supreme Court had not intervened in 2012 to restore some of the funding, the damage would have been even greater. Gov. Chris Christie also tried repeatedly to permanently alter the State’s school funding formula, to reduce funding for the almost 40 percent of New Jersey public school students who are low-income and/or Limited English Proficient.

Second, allowing schools that serve the neediest children to become unsafe and unsanitary. Rubin writes: Trenton High’s 1,800 students, and thousands of others, attend schools plagued by rats, roaches, asbestos, and black mold because the Christie Administration has all but frozen the work of the Schools Development Authority. The authority is charged by law with building and renovating public schools in the 31 former Abbott districts, while those school districts are precluded from repairing or rebuilding their dilapidated public schools.

Third: Suspending local control in districts where most students are children of color and subjecting these districts to years of state control, which facilitates privatization. The assumption behind this policy is that democracy is the problem; but the state’s lack of success demonstrates that poverty and segregation are the problems that the state refuses to address.

Fourth, the state is determined to get rid of public schools wherever possible, and replace them with privately-managed charter schools. The suburbs have staunchly resisted charters, which would weaken their public schools and divide their communities, so the state controlled districts have become the petri dishes for charters. Rubin points out that the charters have intensified segregation: The Christie administration “has ignored the fact that many of the charter schools are contributing to the segregation of students by income, language proficiency and race…New Jersey Department of Education 2012 – 2013 data shows that Hoboken’s three charter schools educate 31 percent of the City’s total public school students, but a significantly larger proportion of its white students (51 percent), and a significantly smaller proportion of its impoverished students (6 percent of the free lunch and 13 percent of the reduced lunch). The charter schools also educate none of the city’s Limited English Proficient students. Thanks to the charters, the remaining public schools are weakened by the concentrated enrollment of students with the greatest needs.

What is in store for New Jersey in another Christie administration?

A sustained assault on public education, especially in communities of color. More charter schools that skim off the highest-performing students and kick out those that don’t meet their standards. More segregation. The destruction of community participation and democratic governance in communities of color. The suburbs may think they are safe from these policies, but with a renewed mandate, they should expect to see budget cuts, and a redoubled effort to divide their communities by introducing charter schools.

Rubin concludes:

We know what is effective: addressing concentrated poverty; involving parents and communities in decision-making; providing adequate funding and healthy and safe facilities; ensuring access to high-quality pre-kindergarten and wraparound social services. The research is clear and consistent. We only need the political will to follow.

It is ironic that Governor Christie is so hostile to public education, inasmuch as he was educated in the state’s public schools. Even more ironic is that New Jersey has one of the top public school systems in the nation. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, New Jersey ranks second or third in the nation, along with Massachusetts and Connecticut, on tests of math and reading. If New Jersey took realistic and research-based steps to improve its poorest districts–like Camden, Paterson, and Newark–New Jersey would very likely rank first in the nation. Yet Governor Christie continues to badmouth the state’s good public schools and tear down urban public education with failed privatization policies.

The Christie administration will renew its attack on public schools across New Jersey. Join other parents to save public education in New Jersey.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, New Jersey, Poverty, Privatization

Another Perspective on International Test Scores

By dianeravitch
October 27, 2013 //
16

The Atlantic published a very interesting article about the latest international test scores by Julie Ryan, and the title is significant.

It says: “AMERICAN EDUCATION ISNT MEDIOCRE, ITS DEEPLY UNEQUAL.”

That’s an apt way of saying that poverty drags down test scores.

This is true of every standardized test, whether it is the state tests, the SAT, the ACT, the NAEP or international tests.

As I wrote in an earlier post, the tests ores don’t predict our economic future.

If we wanted higher scores, we would reduce poverty and foster greater equality.

Categories International, Poverty, Testing

Melissa Harris Perry: Fabulous

By dianeravitch
October 26, 2013 //
90

Friends, I was interviewed this morning on MSNBC by Melissa Harris Perry and was incredibly impressed by her. Unlike most TV journalists, she had actually read the book.

She asked smart questions. She really gets it.

This was the best conversation I have yet participated in on national TV, including the panel that followed. No “Gotcha” questions, just a thoughtful effort to assess some important issues.

Here is the link: http://www.msnbc.com/melissa-harris-perry/watch/the-case-against-school-privatization-57195587667

Diane

Categories Corporate Reformers, Poverty, Race to the Top, Reign of Error

As Poverty Grows, the Claims of “School Reform” Fade

By dianeravitch
October 24, 2013 //
34

Remember all the times that “reformers” like Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, Wendy Kopp, and Joel Klein have said that the answer to poverty is to “fix” schools first? Remember their claims that school reform (more testing, more charters, more inexperienced teachers, larger classes, more technology) would vanquish poverty? For the past decade, our society has followed their advice, pouring billions into the pockets of the testing industry, consultants, and technology companies, as well as Teach for America, the over-hyped charter industry, and the multi-billion search for a surefire metric to evaluate teachers.

But what if they are wrong? What if all those billions were wasted on their pet projects, ambitions, and hunches, while child poverty kept growing?

The latest study, reported by Lyndsey Layton of the Washington Post, shows a staggering increase in child poverty across the nation. The majority of public school students in the South and the West now qualify for free or reduced price lunch. By federal standards, that means they are poor.

The United States has a greater proportion of children living in poverty than any other advanced nation in the world. We are #1 in child poverty. This is shameful.

The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once remarked on the phenomenon of “feeding the horses to feed the sparrows.” In this case, the horses are the educational industrial complex. They are gobbling up federal, state, and local funding while children and families go hungry, lacking the medical care, economic security, and essential services they need. Instead of helping their families to become self-sufficient, we are fattening the testing industry. Instead of assuring that their schools have the guidance counselors, social workers, psychologists, and librarians the children need, our states are stripping their schools to the bare walls. Instead of supplying the arts and physical education that children need to nourish body and soul, we let them eat tests.

Every dollar that fattens the educational industrial complex–not only the testing industry and the inexperienced, ill-trained Teach for America but the corporations now collecting hundreds of millions of dollars to tell schools what to do–is a dollar diverted from what should be done now to address directly the pressing needs of our nation’s most vulnerable children, whose numbers continue to escalate, demonstrating the utter futility and self-serving nature of what is currently and deceptively called “reform.”

Once these futile programs have collapsed, once they have been exposed as hollow (though lucrative) gestures, we will look back with sorrow at the lives wasted, the billions squandered, the incalculable damage to our children and our society.

Someday we will say, as we should be saying now, that we cannot tolerate the loss of so many young lives. We cannot continue to blame teachers, principals, and schools for our collective abandonment of so many children. We cannot allow, and should no longer permit, the income inequality that protects the billionaires while neglecting the growth of a massive underclass. The age of the Robber Barons has returned. Good for them, but bad, very bad, for America.

Categories Poverty, Students, Teach for America TFA, Testing

The Testing Madness in Rhode Island

By dianeravitch
October 23, 2013 //
3

Carole Marshall is a retired teacher in Rhode Island who explains how State Commissioner Deborah Gist’s insistence on standardized testing has discouraged educators and students across the state. The most pernicious effect of this policy, Marshall shows, has hurt poor and minority youngsters the most.

In an article in the Providence Journal, Marshall writes:

The Oct. 15 Commentary piece (“R.I.’s diploma system brings out the best”) by Deborah Gist, Rhode Island’s commissioner of elementary and secondary education, is yet another demonstration of her ability to say what she wants to be true, as if the saying of it makes it true.

Among the many half-truths and untruths in her screed is the insinuation that students who score badly on the New England Common Assessment Program tests, i.e. urban students, have been subject to “years of poor, inadequate education,” while students who do well have teachers who, by contrast, “provide great instruction that engages students on many levels and teaches key academic skills.”

This malicious slur on urban teachers is the ultimate in hubris from a young woman who spent a handful of years teaching in an elementary school and since then has glided up the professional ladder on the shoulders of right-wing politicians and millionaires like Jeb Bush and Eli Broad. If there are any urban teachers who didn’t know what the commissioner thought of them before, they know now.

I left urban teaching before I had planned to for one reason only: I could not be a participant in what top-down, standardized testing does to destroy education in urban schools and, by extension, the lives of students who are already hanging on by a slender thread to the dream of a successful middle-class life.

Before the systematic destruction began, I would have held my school, Hope, up against any other school in the state in terms of who was providing great instruction. Hope’s faculty included a significant number of advanced degrees, Ivy League graduates, and national-board-certified teachers. With the support of then-Commissioner Peter McWalters, we taught literacy across the curriculum, shared rubrics for scoring work, and created a system for student portfolios. We were doing the slow, careful job of building a climate characterized by rigorous, accountable learning.

Then high-stakes testing arrived on the scene and to nobody’s surprise, urban schools’ scores were worse than the scores of suburban schools; the same pattern repeats itself year after year in every corner of this country.

Why? There are a host of extremely well-documented reasons for this. To name just a few: Urban schools have a hugely disproportionate number of students who are new to the language; a hugely disproportionate number of students with learning disabilities; and large numbers of students with serious behavioral problems, including those sent from their suburban districts to group homes in the cities.

That is in addition to the reality that students from impoverished environments are often handicapped by circumstances beyond their control, such as vocabulary deficits, health problems, unstable homes, hunger, and the list goes on. We can all wish these conditions didn’t exist, but we can’t, as Commissioner Gist likes to do, simply ignore them away. Throwing tests at urban students does nothing to solve their problems. The disparities will only grow wider as mandatory test preparation steals more and more time from real education in urban schools.

On the subject of test prep and teaching to the test, Commissioner Gist is correct about one thing: “schools with students who perform well on state assessments do not focus on test preparation.” Pretty tautologically obvious in my opinion; the schools with students who perform well have no reason to focus on test preparation.

On the other hand, in the schools that are being threatened with closure solely on the basis of test scores, you can be sure administrators are not just sitting around, waiting to lose their jobs. The specter of low scores powerfully encourages test preparation and teaching to the test.

This year, the turn-around company hired for $5 million to raise scores in Providence schools hired tutors who spent every school day during the month of September prepping 11th graders for the NECAP assessments.

The students were missing their regular classes every day, even in subjects like physics and foreign languages, so that the schools could show improvement. Suburban parents would never have allowed this; urban parents were not informed.

Students are disingenuously told that this is all happening for their own good. Any reader of this newspaper who truly believes that the testing juggernaut is about benefiting the students is sorely uninformed.

The textbook publishers who sell the test and test-prep materials will make their billions, the so-called turn-around companies will make their millions, and carpetbaggers like Ms. Gist will continue blithely along their career paths, leaving behind wrecked schools and crushed dreams in the cities.

Carole Marshall taught at Hope High School for 18 years, retiring in 2012. Before that she was a business correspondent for the Observer of London and taught journalism at Fairleigh Dickinson University and the University of Rhode Island.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Broad Foundation, Bush, Jeb, Chiefs for Change, Poverty, Testing

Elaine Weiss: Rhee vs. Ravitch

By dianeravitch
October 19, 2013 //
4

Elaine Weiss of the Broader Bolder Approach appraises the dichotomous views of Michelle Rhee and me.

Which is fact and which is fiction?

Come to the Economic Policy Institute in D.C. this Friday at noon to hear these issues discussed. I will be there with Elaine Weiss and Randi Weingarten.

Categories Poverty, Ravitch, Diane, Rhee, Michelle

The Unavoidable Topic? Can Schools End Poverty?

By dianeravitch
October 10, 2013 //
44

A reader sent these comments:

“The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor.” ― Voltaire.

Schools can not end poverty by simply making sure all students are “career and college ready”. As long as the rich and powerful continue take most of the wealth for themselves, we will have poverty. Wealth is finite.

Instead of looking to schools to solve the problem, “we are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished.” –MLK

Categories Poverty

Petrilli: Schools Are Best Way to End Poverty

By dianeravitch
October 10, 2013 //
28

Before I had my own blog, I shared a blog called “Bridging Differences” with Deborah Meier, hosted by Education Week. We had a great run of five years, and then I started this blog. Since then, Deborah has had exchanges with various conservative thinkers.

Currently, she is trying to “bridge differences” with Michael Petrilli of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute. In this post, Mike argues that the best way to end poverty is to persuade young people to get married and wait to have children until they are able to take care of them financially. Since no one knows how to do that, he maintains that the best cure for poverty is “great” schools.

He suggests that those “on the left” have given up on social mobility. I am not sure whether he believes that schools–rightly organized–will facilitate social mobility or will end poverty, as he seems to use the terms interchangeably, at one point referring to the schools as “the great equalizer,” at other times suggesting that it is upward mobility (for some) that he expects schools to promote. Mike makes clear that he opposes raising the minimum wage or increasing income transfers. So that leaves schools with the burden of either ending poverty or increasing social mobility, whatever, since nothing else can do it, in his view.

Of course, the schools have always provided a path to upward social mobility for some, but the problem is that many millions of children and families are stuck in poverty. It seems unlikely that the schools alone can push that large number down. No matter how many “No Excuses” charter schools open, there will still be many millions trapped at the bottom, while a huge share of the national income flows to the top 1% and the top 5%.

Mike’s answer: Fix the schools!

My answer: Improve every school, open health clinics attached to schools, provide free pre-natal care to all women who cannot afford it, make pre-K universal, make sure that schools serving the poorest kids have the resources for small classes, social workers, psychologists, librarians, the arts, and a full curriculum, just like the kids in affluent suburbs. And change the tax structure so that income inequality is reduced.

I might also note that many young people who have graduated college now find themselves unable to get a good job because so many middle-class jobs were outsourced by our corporate leaders. So you will find college graduates working at minimum wage–or slightly above it–in Starbucks or selling iPads or working in jobs that don’t require a college diploma.

I look forward to Deborah’s answer.

In the meanwhile, here are some interesting comments:

Leo Casey of the American Federation of Teachers wrote as follows:

If you are serious about reducing, let alone eliminating, poverty, there is a historical record that needs to be addressed. From the New Deal to through the 1970s income inequality and poverty in America were reduced, with two very significant periods of change – the New Deal, especially Social Security, reduced immensely the numbers of elderly people living in poverty, and the Great Society reduced the numbers of mothers and children living in poverty. The rate of poverty was cut almost in half between 1960 (from about 22% to 11%) and the beginning off the Reagan years. With the Reagan years, poverty climbs once again (now hovers around 15%). Of course, these are aggregate numbers – there are many more children living in poverty (1 in 4) than adults. This is also related to general income equality: there is a period of the reduction of income equality, beginning with the New Deal and extending through the 1970s, followed by a great increase in income inequality beginning in the 1970s and extending to the current period. Timothy Noah’s The Great Divide has a pretty comprehensive analysis of these trends. Two factors are particularly important: the effects of ‘the race to the bottom’ initiated by economic globalization, in which unionized jobs in industry were exported abroad to low wage, authoritarian nations such as China where workers could not form independent unions to improve their pay and working conditions, and the related decimation of industrial unions that supported middle class jobs in the United States.

My old mentor and colleague, Michael Harrington, who had a few things to say about poverty {-; never tired of saying that the best anti-poverty program was a job.

Debbie’s pessimism, if I read her correctly, is whether there is a political will to reduce poverty and income inequality in the United States. There is no great secret on how to do it; the question is whether there is a political will to address a problem that falls so heavily on the backs of women and children, particularly of color.

Leo

 

Categories Poverty
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