In the past two weeks, I have found myself lecturing several well-meaning people on the impact of poverty in education. Both of them were people who had clearly bought into the popular reform idea that charter schools and vouchers, the favorites of corporate reformers, can overcome any and all social issues. I don’t blame them. I think it makes people feel good to think that education can be the great equalizer since it seems like we can fix education while poverty seems unsurmountable. Bush’s “soft bigotry of low expectations” put anyone who wanted to try to solve the poverty problem on the defensive as we seemed to be making excuses for low student achievement rather than being willing to roll up our sleeves and just teach every child no matter where they came from. As with most slogans, it simplified an incredibly complex problem.
In fact, trying to tackle the issue of poverty as a way of boosting student achievement is all about high expectations not just for students or schools but for our society in general. We want to do more than get every kid to pass what are often lowest-common-denominator multiple choice tests. We want them to come from homes where wondering about the next meal can be replaced with wondering about the universe.
Valeria Strauss, author of The Answer Sheet at the Washington Post, has been a consistent voice in the fight to reveal the effects of poverty on student achievement. She speaks through her own voice and that of educators who speak from the front line rather than the front office. Here are a few recent columns:
- Is Poverty Destiny?
- The Hard Bigotry of Poverty
- The Bottom Line on ‘No Excuses’ and Poverty in School Reform
And, for all those people who wonder why the US isn’t first in international testing, here’s a great blog post from Mel Riddle that links the international test (PISA) to poverty in the countries in which it is taken: http://nasspblogs.org/