A reader comments:
As the first woman in my family to graduate from college, I am still the working poor, with no health insurance (and several physical ailments) and no pension. It is extremely stressful and disconcerting to have multiple college degrees and still be in poverty. I’m in my 60s and I will never be able to afford to retire, so I have no choice but to work until I die.
Yesterday, I posted an article about growing income inequality in New York City. This morning, I posted an editorial from Bloomberg News claiming that the Census Bureau was overstating the extent of poverty by not counting transfers like food stamps.
A reader sent this story, which should remind us that it is no picnic to be poor in America.
Let me add a personal note. I am not poor. I have never been poor. But I hope I never reach a point when I stop caring about others less fortunate than I. I hope I never become so hard-hearted that I say, like some others do now, that the poor don’t know how lucky they are, or that poverty is just an excuse for bad teachers, or that fixing schools (by privatizing them or firing their teachers) will fix poverty. Or that we don’t know how to end poverty so we shouldn’t do anything about it.
I think it is shameful that so many people live in desperate poverty in the richest nation in the world. I think it is shameful that so many children come to school hungry and so many families are homeless. I think it is shameful that we have so many billionaires. I don’t know how to reorganize the tax code. It doesn’t seem fair if it produces the society we have now, where some people struggle to survive while others count their yachts and helicopters. Something’s wrong with that.
Remember the story in yesterday’s New York Times that described the increase in income inequality in New York City? That’s the one that said that the gap between the richest quintile and the poorest quintile has not only grown but is one of the largest in the world, putting us in the same league as countries like Namibia.
Well, there is good news from Mayor Bloomberg’s own publishing house. Poverty is really not so bad in the U.S. because the Census Bureau didn’t count all the benefits and transfers that the poor get. So when you read that someone is subsisting on $8,844 a year, don’t forget that they get food stamps! And an earned income tax credit. And so many other freebies. Don’t you feel better already?
Just by coincidence, Forbes published its annual listing of the richest people in the world. It is here: http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/#p_1_s_a0_All%20industries_All%20countries_All%20states_
Mayor Bloomberg is not all that rich. He is #20 on the list with $22 billion.
Everything is relative.
While the billionaires and multi-millionaires wring their hands over the public schools and promise to end poverty by testing kids and their teachers, there is a back story.
The back story is that income inequality is growing worse in America. And nowhere is it more blatant and more outrageous than in New York City, the very epicenter of faux education reform.
While the mayor and his three chancellors have expanded the number of charter schools, increased testing and demanded value-added assessment of teachers and waged war against tenure and seniority, the income gap between the rich and poor has become a wide chasm.
An article in the New York Times today says that the poverty rate is at its highest point in a decade.
And get this:
“Median income for the lowest fifth was $8,844, down $463 from 2010. For the highest, it was $223,285, up $1,919.
“In Manhattan, the disparity was even starker. The lowest fifth made $9,681, while the highest took home $391,022. The wealthiest fifth of Manhattanites made more than 40 times what the lowest fifth reported, a widening gap (it was 38 times, the year before) surpassed by only a few developing countries, including Namibia and Sierra Leone.”
Do the reformers still believe that we can fix the schools first, then turn our attention to poverty? Or that if we fix the schools, then poverty will take care of itself? Yes, they do. Do they have any evidence that any of this will happen? No.
The economic policies of the past decade have been very very good for the very very rich. Not good at all for the other end of the spectrum.
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 .
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?
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?
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.
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
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?”?
