Archives for category: Poverty
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Why Do “Reformers'” Ignore Mass Incarceration?

By dianeravitch
September 17, 2012 //
6

Sharon Higgins, parent activist in Oakland, writes:

sharonrhiggins@yahoo.com

http://charterschoolscandals.blogspot.com/

Comment Mass incarceration is the huge elephant in the room that arrived AFTER Lyndon Johnson was trying to address the harmful effects of poverty in 1965. Its effects must be added to the mix of what public school teachers have to deal with.

Back in 1972, the U.S. had 300,000 people in jails and prisons. In 2008 that number was up to 2.3 million, with an additional 5 million on probation and parole. The astronomical increase was largely due to “drug war” policies.

Get this: the U.S. ranks #1 with imprisonment of its citizens at 715 prisoners per 100,000. To put this in perspective, Russia is #2 at 584, and Belarus is #3 at 554. Finland is #113 at 71. http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_pri_per_cap-crime-prisoners-per-capita

The mass incarceration being carried out in the U.S. has disproportionately affected people of color. In 2004, the Kirwan Institute reported that the number of incarcerated African Americans increased 800% since the 1950s. From a Sentencing Project report: “The rapid growth of incarceration has had profoundly disruptive effects that radiate into other spheres of society.

The persistent removal of persons from the community to prison and their eventual return has a destabilizing effect that has been demonstrated to fray family and community bonds…” In other words, it is damaging to kids. http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/inc_iandc_complex.pdf (865 KB) It is a national disgrace that politicians and ed reformers in our “land of the free” won’t bother to acknowledge our grotesquely ugly mass incarceration problem, not to mention our child poverty rate.

The impact of mass incarceration on children is just one of our many societal ills heaped on public school teachers’ plates. Michelle Alexander and Bryan Stevenson talk about mass incarceration with Bill Moyers here: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04022010/watch.html .

Categories Poverty

A Startling Thought

By dianeravitch
September 17, 2012 //
37

This teacher read Alex Kotlowitz’s article in the New York Times about how teachers can’t solve poverty all by themselves and this was her reaction:

Alex Kotlowitz says about solving poverty, “teachers can’t do it alone.” I say, we can’t do it all, and I’m sick of being even imagined to be able to do it. I teach, that’s it, I TEACH.

Think of it. If she teaches chemistry, is she solving poverty? If she teaches art, is she solving poverty? Some would say yes, others would say that the best way to solve poverty is to create jobs. This teacher says, just let me teach.

Is she wrong?

Categories Poverty, Teachers and Teaching

What’s Missing in Chicago Debate

By dianeravitch
September 16, 2012 //
5

Pedro Noguera knows that closing public schools and shifting kids to charter schools is not a remedy to the huge economic and social problems of Chicago.

What else is needed?

Categories Chicago, Obama, Poverty, Unions

The Gates Foundation Responds to Anthony Cody

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2012 //
12

The Gates Foundation, on its blog-site called “Impatient Optimists,” responds to Anthony Cody’s searing critique of the foundation’s support for market-based reforms.

Please read Anthony’s post, then the Gates’ response.

Also read Anthony’s post about poverty, and Gates’ response.

I think it is shameful that the foundation’s representative begin by questioning whether Anthony believes that poor children can learn. This is the standard reformer tactic to anyone who raises the issue of poverty as an impediment to learning. They would have us believe that being hungry and homeless is just an excuse for bad teachers; that it doesn’t matter if children can’t see the front of the room, can’t hear the teacher, because they have never been screened for vision and hearing. No excuses!

To say this to Anthony Cody, who taught for nearly 20 years in the public schools of Oakland, California, is especially shameful. Do foundation executives who sit in plush headquarters in Seattle have the authority to impugn his bona fides?

Read the exchange. And ask yourself why the Gates Foundation has the moral authority to define the nation’s education agenda. Its two hobby horses right now are teacher evaluation and charter schools. It has spent hundreds of millions to find the magic formula that would identify those “bad” teachers and put a “great” teacher in every classroom. Now school districts across the nation are dancing to Gates’ tune, and no one knows whether the arcane mathematical formula designed by economists and statisticians really do produce “great” teachers, or even identify them. One sure result of this endeavor is that many millions will be–have been–diverted from instruction to testing and building data systems to tie test scores to teachers.

As for charters, study after study shows that they typically get the same results as public schools. Study after study shows that many charters exclude ELLs and special education students. There are some with high test scores, some with low test scores, but on average they don’t get better scores than public schools. The reason that Gates insists that they ARE public schools is because they are not. They are privately managed schools receiving public funds. Getting public dollars does not make them public schools. They are part of a larger movement of privatization, to remove an essential public institution to private control. No wonder the Wall Street crowd loves them so, regardless of results. No wonder the for-profit sector is growing.

Thanks to Anthony Cody for persuading the Gates Foundation to go public. They had nothing to say on the subject of poverty and in this post, they demonstrate that they continue to neglect its effects on students’ ability to succeed in school.

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Poverty

Do Testing and Accountability Promote Critical Thinking?

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2012 //
29

Jan Carr, an author of children’s books, is a dedicated public school parent. She wrote a post wondering why the powerful elites in our society are so obsessed with testing and data. She wondered why they care so little for developing critical thinking.

Jan wrote: “I’ve been a scrappy public school mom for 12 years and counting, and I’ve watched the increasing encroachment of the data and accountability business, which would have our kids prepping for and taking deadening tests at every turn, and our teachers endlessly graded and derided for test results that are a meaningless distraction from real learning. A rich and full education digs deeper; it’s inextricably entwined with books, literature, writing, and the life of the mind; it develops critical thinking.”

I read her latest post and asked Mike Petrilli of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute to respond to it. I have known Mike for many years, and I hold out hope that someday he too will evolve and renounce the reforms he now champions. I think this will happen when his own children encounter them, as Jan Carr’s did.

I invite readers to comment on this discussion.

This is Mike’s commentary:

Dear Ms. Carr,

I enjoyed reading your post about critical thinking; it sounds like you and your son have been lucky to have had some very talented teachers.

l’ve never met Bill Gates, or Eli Broad, or Michael Bloomberg, or Rupert Murdoch; I can’t speak for what lies in their hearts. But I find it very unlikely that they don’t want children to “think critically” because they want to produce a generation of drones. I know that sort of rhetoric is common on the left (including from the late Howard Zinn) but to believe it you have to also believe that Barack Obama, the late Ted Kennedy, the liberal icon George Miller, and countless other liberal supporters of education reform are also out to unplug our children’s minds. That doesn’t pass the “critical thinking” test.

What motivates these folks, as I understand it, is an earnest belief that in today’s knowledge economy, the only way poor kids are going to have a shot at escaping inter-generational poverty is to gain the knowledge, skills, and character strengths that will prepare them to enter and complete some sort of post-secondary education–the pathway to the middle class. And that while reading and math scores don’t come close to measuring everything that counts, they do measure skills that have been linked to later success in college, the workplace, and life.

I suspect that all of these men would like to see students engaged in more of the kind of critical thinking that you describe, and that’s one reason many support the move to the more rigorous “Common Core” standards for English Language Arts and math. The ELA standards, in particular, are designed to push students toward this sort of complex thinking.

The testing movement has caused a lot of harm, I agree, in terms of narrowing the curriculum and encouraging bad teaching. Moving to better standards and tests is one way to address that. But by throwing out the baby with the bathwater we risk going back to the days when poor and minority kids were held to very low expectations–and their achievement plateaued as a result.

In the last two decades, poor and minority kids have made two grade levels of progress in reading and math, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The hope–and it’s really only a hypothesis at this point–is that those greater math and reading skills will help a generation of kids do much better in college and the real world than they otherwise would have. The question for educators and reformers is: How do we keep the good that’s come from testing and accountability while eliminating the bad?

Mike Petrilli

Categories Accountability, Broad Foundation, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Parents, Poverty, Students, Testing

Good News from the Heritage Foundation

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2012 //
24

The Heritage Foundation has released a study showing that the poor are really pretty well-off in America. Lots of them own their own home, have a car and air-conditioning.

Message: Stop whining about the poor. They should thank their lucky stars they are living in America! They should not expect a handout as they are doing just fine. Forget about the vast income inequality that exists in our society. Who cares?

Are the kids homeless and hungry? Blame their parents or their absent father. Are they sick because the parents don’t have health insurance and can’t afford a doctor? Their fault.

What would you call this report? “Compassion is for the weak”? “The poor will always be with us”? “Poverty is your problem, not mine?”?

Categories Poverty

Are People Poor Because They Make Bad Choices?

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2012 //
15

A good discussion of how the rightwing frames discussions of poverty.

The strategy is to personalize issues rather than seeing them in context of poverty or other frames. That way, writes Bill Boyle,

Need I say that whole corporate ed reform movement follows the same logic? Schools “under-perform” not because of the context of poverty, but because of their people issues. The need for reform is personalized, and we can blame the people involved. The solution? Rid the schools of “under-performing” teachers, rid the schools of the unions which “protect” these under-performers, and then hold the new people accountable to metrics (i.e. tests). Or just offer charter schools, which does all of this in one fell swoop.

And a good video from Melissa Harris-Perry show on MSNBC about race, poverty, voter ID, welfare, income inequality, and other volatile issues.

Categories Poverty

Is Poverty Destiny? This Reader Says It Is.

By dianeravitch
September 9, 2012 //
7

One reader says that schools and teachers can lift children out of poverty. He says it is happening.

This reader dissents.

To be clear, and I think the writer of this post would agree, teachers and schools save children’s lives every day. Poor kids can succeed. Poor kids can make it into Harvard, thanks to their grit and the support of family and teachers.

But that is not the norm, and it never will be. Teachers alone, no matter how great they are, can’t overcome poverty. Thinking that it is so doesn’t make it so.  Saying that it is so doesn’t make it so. As this reader says, tests always produce results correlated with income.

The irony of reform today is that it relies on the one measure guaranteed to reflect family income: standardized tests.

No it’s not “happening”, Shaun. I have millions of data points from every administration of NAEP, PISA, TIMSS, ACT, and SAT for many years in history. Kids in poverty ALWAYS score lower on average.

Poverty IS destiny, at least when it comes to results of standardized testing. If a school high in poverty does well on a standardized test, you can bet the teachers and/or administrators cheated. The results are that obvious when looking at the results of standardized tests.

Poverty dictates student achievement more than any factor, and schools and teachers cannot overcome its effects. Nor should we have to.

Politicians and economists MUST fix poverty. But they are too busy ruining the teaching profession to care.

And more now than ever, from study after study, financial mobility is becoming more and more difficult for the poor and even the middle class.

So, just where is this “happening”, and please no miracles allowed? If you want to rely on miracles, for every one miracle student or school (that didn’t cheat) you want to show me, I can show you exponentially more that never make the miraculous feat.
Categories Education Reform, Poverty, Testing

The Most Segregated Big-City Districts in the Nation

By dianeravitch
September 8, 2012 //
18

Thanks to a reader for sending this story from the New York Times. It has a graph showing the most racially segregated big-city school districts in the United States.

The winner of this disgraceful award: Chicago.

Second place: Dallas

Third place: New York City

Fourth place: Philadelphia

Fifth place: Houston

Sixth place: Los Angeles

Undoubtedly there are smaller districts that are even more segregated, and some that are nearly 100% black and Hispanic.

In New York City, half of the city’s schools have enrollments that are at least 90% black and Hispanic. New York City’s Department of Education doesn’t care about integration.

New York City’s Chancellor Dennis Walcott was once head of the city’s Urban League. Does he care?

New York City is known for its school choice policies. These policies may have intensified this extraordinary level of segregation in the schools.

This is a scandal.

Our nation has abandoned school integration.

And the result is concentrations of racial segregation and poverty in certain schools and certain districts.

This is a blight on our society.

Categories Education Reform, NYC, Poverty, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration

Making Sure That Poverty Is NOT Destiny

By dianeravitch
September 6, 2012 //
5

Paul Thomas reminds us that poverty is destiny if we do nothing about it.

Finland figured this out and it has a strong system of social protections for children and families.

If we keep expecting schools to close the achievement gap by testing more, by adopting higher standards, by closing schools with low test scores, by evaluating teachers by test scores, and by offering carrots and sticks to teachers, we are deluded.

To make sure that poverty is not destiny, we have to take concrete steps to improve the lives of children and families.

Categories Poverty, Teacher Evaluations
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