"We don't use poverty as an excuse for low achievement." -- Springfield, Ill. School District 186 Superintendent Walter Milton, Jr.
2010 wasn't a very good year for public education -- or public anything, for that matter.
A so-far jobless economic recovery has seen a sharp rise in child poverty and with it, new barriers for schools, teachers and learners. It's a matter of fact that hungry and often homeless children aren't as successful in the classroom as those who are well fed, clad and housed.
The past year has seen a drying up of stimulus funds along with further erosion and selling off and privatization of public space, more public school closings and consolidations. Schools and classrooms are growing in size. Massive tuition increases at both private and public colleges and universities render a college education less accessible to working class families, cutting off one of the few remaining pathways to class mobility.
To make matters worse, the past year was marked by a sharp political swing to the right, with big victories for anti-tax Republicans in the mid-term elections. This swing was accompanied by new calls to stop "throwing money at" public education and for the poor to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Sadly, education leaders within the Obama administration are echoing many of these calls and bending to right-wing pressures.
It was just about a year ago for example, that Education Secretary Arne Duncan began his "no excuses" campaign, announcing in the press that he had "no patience for teachers and schools" that tick off all the reasons why their poor or minority students can't score as high on standardized tests.
Duncan has chosen to ignore poverty's downward effect on test scores and focus entirely on what he calls "bad teachers" and "failing schools." Recently confronted by educators teaching in some of the nation's highest-poverty areas about the need to do something about the living conditions of their students, Duncan cynically responded, "poverty is not destiny."
His "no excuses" mantra, essentially blaming poor students and their teachers for low test results, is now being echoed by many governors, urban mayors and school administrators like Springfield's Milton, all hoping their compliance will somehow be rewarded with federal dollars from Duncan to fill the holes in their shrinking school budgets.
Child poverty has been on the climb in Milton's district and surrounding counties in central Illinois. "It's a sign of the times the past decade in rural American and rural Illinois," said Les Huddle, superintendent of the Jacksonville School District.
In nearby Morgan County, the growing poverty rate and personal financial hardships create a "less-than-stable learning environment for students at home," said Huddle, noting that the Jacksonville district's enrollment dropped by more than 350 students as job losses drove many families away.
Duncan's "lack of patience" has also been taken as a call for tax breaks for the rich, coupled with deep and widespread cuts in social services, public housing, and other anti-poverty measures. The entire burden of his Race To The Top reform has been placed on teachers and their unions, and narrowly focused on schools and on the classroom. In some urban districts, teachers' names are now being posted in the media next to their students' test scores, as if individual teachers are solely responsible for those scores. Inadequate accountability measures, such as value-added, are being pushed as alternatives to collective-bargaining agreements to determine which teachers are to be fired and how much those remaining are to be paid.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports that for the first time since the Education Department started counting, there are nearly a million homeless students in the United States. The Post reports that most drift with their families among motels, shelters and relatives' homes with a growing fraction living completely on their own, unparented, uninsured, ill-fed and surviving by their own devices.
Fairfax (VA) one of only two counties in the nation with median household incomes above $100,000, counts nearly 2,000 homeless students in its school division - about 200 of whom are..."unaccompanied." The latter figure is twice what the comparable figure was two years ago, a surge reflected nationally as the faltering economy has undermined many families. (WaPo)
With a surge in family poverty and a growing homeless student population, public school systems are under even more stress and are being turned into beggars. Schools have increasingly been forced to take on the role a welfare provider, both on and off campus, with few of the necessary resources, personnel, or skill sets.
The notion that rising unemployment, declining real wages, and a shocking increase in family poverty are mere "excuses," with little or no impact on student learning, is unworthy of our nation's top school leaders. It tells me that current school reform policies have little to do with sound social or educational research, but instead are ideologically or politically (in the worst sense) driven. In this political environment, Duncan's chants of "poverty is not destiny" sound downright pollyannish and even cruel in light of current conditions and his own policies.
Follow Mike Klonsky on Twitter: www.twitter.com/mikeklonsky
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Martha Infante: The Affluent, Failing, Public School: Does It Really Exist?
This should work:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMQYClohV0c
nepc.colorado.edu/files/BRACEY-2009.pdf
Does it ever occur to people like Duncan that there is a reason suburban schools typically do better than schools in low-income, urban areas? I guess it is easier to say poverty is an excuse than to stop funding schools based on property tax income. In this ownership/anti-tax society, you can be sure that taking the financial advantage away from their children would not sit well with the affluent and often influential suburbanites.
Almost every "reform" being pushed upon states by Duncan has already been tried and has failed in Chicago where he was CEO of CPS before getting his undeserved promotion. They are not research-based, not community driven, and are just plain counter-intuitive. This market-based "reform" is obviously more about ideology than education and is based on the same principles of privatization, deregulation, and "competition" that brought us our health care and foreclosure crises (thereby compounding the poverty problem). Maybe Guggenheim should make his next movie about Renaissance 2010. He could call it "Waiting for Lex Luther".
I am curious about the Japanese students. How much older than our students are they at the same grade level and when is physics introduced. I have noticed that European schools are at a higher knowledge level in the sciences than we are because they are introduced to the subjects earlier. Perhaps our education system is lacking in building foundational skills? Whatever that means???
http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2010/12/to-starve-beast-we-must-drown-children.html
Here's a snippet from the article:
"In April, 1999, the Wall Street financiers at Merrill Lynch published a 193 page “In-depth Report” titled “The Book of Knowledge, Investing in the Growing Education and Training Industry.” Early in the report they noted: “The K-12 market is the largest segment of the education industry with approximately $360 billion spent annually or over $6,500 per year per child. Despite the size, the K-12 market is the most problematic to invest in today. Entrenched bureaucracies and personal and political interests contribute to the challenges facing this sector.”
Public schools HAVE to fail in order to crack open this egg and give these financiers access to the $360 billion they are after (estimates are that it is around $700 billion today)."
The forces at work to destroy public education most likely are unstoppable. Big money always is.
I created a short digital story ( One Size Does Not Fit All) that tells about my experience with the train wreck of accountability.
http://www.youtube.com/my_videos?feature=mhum
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMQYClohV0c
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMQYClohV0c
http://www.wce.wwu.edu/Resources/CEP/eJournal/v002n001/a004.shtml
http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/apr08/vol65/num07/The-Myth-of-the-Culture-of-Poverty.aspx
http://www.wce.wwu.edu/Resources/CEP/eJournal/v002n001/a006.shtml
http://www.wce.wwu.edu/Resources/CEP/eJournal/v004n001/
Our schools are doing what they were designed to, namely create a legion of mindless who feed the corporate monster.
This has been the case since right before World War II.
You are right. This is not the goal of true education. This is the goal of compulsory education. Research Rocafeller and Andrew Carnagie's roles in shaping schools in the 1930's. Then checkout the dropping literacy levels over the last 50 years. Check the Army recruitment history (less motive to fudge numbers). They used to give literacy tests...the rates fell so fast in the 50's 60's 70's they stopped because it was recruitment suicide.
Let me clarify: The vast majority of schools in America are set up that way. There are a few that allowed real teacher freedom...most is an illusion.
I attended a magnet school. Multiple tests to get in, only honors/gifted and AP classes, "B+" average to stay in. We were taught how to critically think and actually learn. We were one a few in the area.
Didn't you take scantron tests? Standardized tests? It is all the same thing.
NCLB has always existed. Bush just made it official policy. Why do you think repubs wanted to do school reform? To educate their FOXed out citizens?
Question for you: Where did you go to school? What state? What kind of school? Were you guys taught phonics or were you taught whole-word method.
Maybe that's because the only test that it's possible to "teach to" that I've ever had was AP government last year (5 out of 5). I'm in the IB program, a more rigorous program that's intended to be the equivalent of a top-level British high-school diploma. As a junior, I have no such test until the end of next year for any class besides French (because I took the French class that most IB students take as juniors in my freshman and sophomore years) and Computer Science, and I have to wait until next year to take the higher-level exam for those (I have to do at least three of those, and they're restricted to seniors), so teachers tend to do their own things. I've even had to write an essay about math history for my precalculus class.
If all teachers were given the freedom that IB teachers are, students would be much more engaged and motivated to learn. I hear some of my classmates talk about how their US/VA history class is so incredibly boring, while I hear the others talk about how IB History of the Americas is such a wonderful class even though the teachers are merciless graders.
Its time we placed less emphasis on TV video games celebrity and consumer goods and more on education and personal responsibilities.
we blamed the GM workers for poor quality in cars then japan came over to america and made high quality cars with american workers and japanese management.
so we must blame teachers for poor quality education. we always blame those on the lowest part of the pole. bet a lot of teachers blamed GM workers also. wanna bet?
now it is their turn in the barrel of american capitalism where the worker is just a warm body to get profits that can be walked out the door in a moments notice. we learn much by the experience of being in the barrel.
this nation is so ignorant bill gates wants to make all teachers in the top ten per cent. neat trick if you dont care about something like math.
but hey for decades american management has tried to get all employees to work above average when compared with their peers. interesting nation we tell our young they are born into sin and we tell half our workers and even our children they are below average.
our prisons are overflowing wonder why???????????
But I've also got a load of kids who have never been successful at school. They're not all mean. Many of them are actually very nice and cooperative, most of the time. Many will do what you say in the class--but never, ever do homework. They'll take an F first. They won't study for a test.
Then there are other kids (most of whom eventually drop out) who work to disrupt the class--refuse to look up, or take out a paper, or stay in their seats. They come late, miss a day or two a week, don't turn in any work, and don't care if you call home or write referrals.
After 20+ years, I'm better at getting through to the tough kids. I "save" a few. Some of my peers get through to some kids I don't. But I'm not magic, and neither are they.
I've used the economic argument with my students many times, and probably encouraged a few, but you're right that it isn't convincing or even accurate, let alone morally compelling.
I think some students suspect that we're trying to change them--into middle-class white folks or something--and so reject education as coercive. They're not entirely wrong.
We know that knowledge, skills and abilities open doors of all kinds. It's hard to communicate that without distorting the message.
I agree that they are correct to reject an entirely materialistic view of success, but I am still puzzled at the amount of time the same students will put into other high-failure-rate careers like athletics and various forms of mass entertainment when they clearly lack the talent to excel in them.
When asked why they spend three hours a night on mix tapes instead of math homework, they all talk about the fame and money that await them.
I have known three professional athlete, two professional musicians and one professional actress since childhood. It was clear they were head and shoulders above their peers from the very beginning. Even so, they all worked very hard to make it to the professional ranks.
I never heard a single one of them talk about the money, cars, etc. I did hear them talk about being good basketball players, football players, singers, etc.
It's about doing what you set out to do, not money.