Tag Archives: poverty

Of Platitudes and Poverty

Education, school reform

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:

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/principaldifference/2010/12/pisa_its_poverty_not_stupid_1.html

 

What Are Our Values?

Education, ,

This is the question asked by Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund at the end of a powerful essay that describes the deep cuts being made in education programs.  Education has not been a big part of  the Republican debates unless they are talking about reducing the federal government’s role.  And, indeed, the track record has not been good for the feds as they have led to a national obsession with test scores and now with teacher evaluation.

The government hasn’t always been such a detriment to education.  The response to Sputnik spurred new interest in science and federal money helped fund summer programs and teacher development.

Unfortunately, helping poor kids succeed doesn’t seem to compare to concern about the Soviets as a national crisis, and yet we know that those in poverty are more likely to drop out, which leads to a whole host of issues from higher incarceration rates to lower employment earning.  But there seems to be a desire on the side of conservatives to blame the poor for their lot, suggesting it is easy to escape the cycle.  Most of these suggestions, of course, are made by people who have never had to worry about paying the rent or feeding themselves.

So, while we say we value education, we have all sorts of excuses for why we don’t show those values in both access and funding.  It’s a simple, but powerful question: what are our values?