The class action lawsuit the ACLU announced last week against both Michigan and a tiny Detroit area school district for failing to educate its own children raises this question: Can schools ever compensate for the ills of poverty?
As poor and minority students increasingly dominate classrooms, the debate about troubled schools becomes polarized around the poverty question. Many urban school teachers say they get blamed for children who arrive in school poorly prepared for learning. School reformers argue that some educators hide their shortcomings behind the cloak of poverty.
Who's right?
Highland Park would seem to be a poster child for the poverty argument. The life has been sucked out of this working class community once home to Chrysler, a city now so poor it had to remove 1,000 of its 1,500 street lights because it couldn't afford to pay the power bill.
Roughly half the mostly African American residents live below the poverty line, compared to less than 15 percent of Michigan residents. Seventy-five percent of the seventh-graders failed to reach proficiency levels on state reading tests.
Blaming poverty here is a powerful argument. But it doesn't tell the entire story.
In writing about former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, I had to determine whether Rhee's brash reforms were justified. Rhee's critics said poverty, not ineffective teaching, explained poor student outcomes. Therefore, her reforms were misguided. But federal data told a different story: Low-income, black students in Washington were as much as two years behind comparable students in some other cities.
Yes, poverty was a major player, but a failure to teach appeared to be an equally powerful player.
In a recent book describing school success stories found in high-poverty neighborhoods, I found many schools, and a few entire districts, that are head and shoulders above their counterparts. A short list of districts: Long Beach, CA., Hillsborough County Public Schools in Tampa and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina.
In San Jose, CA., I found a small-but-growing group of elementary charter schools where low-income Hispanic students turn out test scores that rival the scores seen in middle-class schools in far wealthier neighborhoods in Santa Clara County.
All these school success stories have to be kept in perspective. Even the best of these schools can't replicate wealthy suburban schools. Poverty is not that easily erased.
What matters in places such as Washington and San Jose is that hundreds more students will arrive in their senior year of high school prepared to take on some kind of post-high school education. By contrast, the widespread illiteracy seen in Highland Park essentially dooms even those who make it was far as their senior year.
So yes, poverty makes a huge difference ... but not all the difference.
This post originally appeared in USA Today.
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Richard Whitmire is author of The Bee Eater: Michelle Rhee Takes on the Nation's Worst School District and co-author of The Achievable Dream: College Board Lessons on Creating Great Schools.
The kids in Michigan can't read because the schools use lots of stupid methods, namely Whole Word, sight-words, etc. Fix this, fix the country.
A friend sent me the ACLU's press release and I fired off a piece called: "Just How Bad Is the Reading Crisis in the US???"
It must be REALLY bad if liberals are suing liberals. I see hope here!
It is not just poverty, but it is the culture and community (lack of supportive) that poverty creates that is hard to overcome. Schools cannot overcome this by themselves. We create these islands of poverty, ignore them for years, then whine about the impact on student test scores. We can implement rheas solution--cheat--or try to address the issues of poverty. Break the chain of children having children, gangs, and no hope for the future and no education. But the current ed reforms do nothing to address these issues. And society is not paying attention.
The true cause is much simpler and straightforward than these excuses for black failure in school. About 80% of black kids under age 18 have no father in their house. Adult black males abandon their children at this enormously high rate and these black kids never have the needed guidance, discipline, love and presence of a father in their lives. They don’t have a father who will sit with them at a table and help the kids do homework. These black fathers want nothing to do with their children, and many take fathering illegitimate kids as a game. They have made clear they dont care what happens to their offspring.
Black mothers are mostly uneducated and unskilled and unmotivated to do anything with their lives. They don’t know anything about good parenting and are incapable of doing simple homework with their children at night. They are still running the streets themselves, leaving their kids with grandma. Black kids just don’t have the same basic core values, motivation and instilled desire to want to be successful in school. They are surrounded by that filthy black hip-hop culture and black adults are too stupid to see how it damages their kids.
Why? Because they know that when they get pregnant they are eligible for cash assistance, food stamps, healthcare and section 8 housing vouchers. Thankfully this is changing due to the new laws that limit the number of years one can remain on welfare.
But getting back to the fathers...there are many who would like to be with their children but the barriers that are put up by the Child support system and the mothers are difficult to overcome. There are thousands upon thouands of documented cases where the fathers are fighting the child support system who always seem to side with the women. And times when they don't even enforce visitation rights for the fathers.
Now I'm not talking about the "pookies" who will try to impregnant as may women as possible. And then also the women has to take responbility for their actions -which most do not. It much easier to blame the man. Yet women are in control of whether they get pregnant or if they want to terminate the preganancy.
The black fathers are to blame for their cold and heartless abandonment of their children. I mean, if its not their fault, then whose fault is it that black fathers almost routinely abandon their children? Mine? Yours?
A large part of the problem in black communities is this continued effort to make excused for the very poor behavior of blacks. Excuses and justification for black violence and high illegitimacy has been going on for decades.
Blacks have got to stand up and be held accountable just like all other race groups and individuals are. No more excuses!!
The primary factor is culture and family focus upon education. The schools can be terrible and the parents will still make sure their kids are educated. In the US, the two factors are strongly correlated because the families who place a strong emphasis upon education do not stay poor for long. If your statistics do not measure cultural factors you are likely to get neighborhood by neighborhood variations in educational accomplishment that is driven by the cultural variation but which you are assuming is due to school variations.
I saw the drive for education among poor children of the survivors of the holocaust when I was a child 50 years ago and I saw it among the children of poor immigrants in my daughter's honors courses over the last few years.
And by the way, what is an underfunded school? Let's take Chicago schools or NYC schools as an example. They have schools located in all white neighborhoods attended by mostly white kids and the educational results are usually very good. Several blocks away is a school attended by all black kids. They both are managed by qualified principals selected by the same school board members, and both schools ahve the exact same curriculum and qualified teachers. So tell me why the education results in the black school is so inferior to the results of the white school.