Last week I wrote a post about Bill Gates who, after spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to improve education with minimal success, has begun to learn how much he still has to learn about education. And to his credit, he’s beginning to look at poverty as an underlying problem with lots of moving parts, education being one of them.
Toward the end of that post I wrote a few sentences, almost a throwaway, about the relation between education and poverty.
“Education is not an effective way to fix the country’s problems related to poverty when it’s working by itself. But lessening the burdens of poverty is the best way there is to improve student achievement, and it’s even more effective when schools improve as well.”
Let me pick up that idea and expand on it.
If we’re looking at schools as a primary engine to lift children out of poverty, we’re looking in the wrong place. Education is necessary to facilitate greater economic mobility, but it’s far from sufficient.
You hear a lot of people say, “Failing schools are the problem.” If we just fix our schools, they say — improve the curriculum, get rid of bad teachers, create charters, privatize schools — that’s the best way to lift children out of poverty. But it isn’t. What it is, is the best way to delay dealing with the root causes of poverty.
Trying to address poverty by improving schools is the rough equivalent of seeing a problem, then creating a committee to study it.
Here’s how study committees often work. A group of very serious people get together and spend a few years kicking a topic around. They gather information, call in experts, look at the problem from a number of angles. Then the group publishes a very serious report long after the heat which was the reason the committee was set up has cooled. The report is analyzed and critiqued by some other very serious people, then it’s shelved. That’s it. No action, no results. Study committees are the place where ideas go to die.
Here’s how educational “reforms” which are supposed to help children rise out of poverty usually work. The “reforms” are put in place with fanfare and high hopes, but no one expects to see results right away. It takes a number of years for children to work their way though the educational system before we can measure whether the “reforms” yielded any results. Five years, ten years, twenty years down the line, researchers plow through piles of data and try to measure the effects. Depending on how researchers parse the data and which variables they emphasize, they find students gained or lost a little ground due to the changes. The needle rarely moves very far one way or another in terms of student achievement or improving students’ economic mobility.
So we begin anew with another round of “reforms” which are supposed to fix our “failing schools” and move children out of poverty. We wait a number of years, study the results and start over again. Rinse and repeat, ad infinitum.
No Child Left Behind. Charter schools. Vouchers. Blended learning. Common Core. Changes in methods for teaching reading and math. Education innovations come, educational innovations go, they work a little, they don’t work at all. If poverty and economic mobility rates budge in the interim, it has far more to to with outside economic and social forces than with what’s going on in schools.
Who are the most enthusiastic proponents of those study committees? They tend to be people who want to keep things exactly as they are, people who benefit from the status quo. They measure the success of the committee by how little happens to address the problem it was created to study.
So who benefits most from maintaining that fixing our “failing schools” is the best way to lift children out of poverty, effectively kicking the can down the road a decade or two? I’ll give my answer at the end of the post.
Meanwhile, let’s look at the relationship between poverty and education.
Have studies conducted over the past fifty years shown educational changes in this country have moved the poverty needle substantially? If so, they don’t come readily to mind. But virtually every study looking at the correlation between income and educational achievement in this country and around the world conclude there’s a strong correlation between the two. It’s the closest thing educators have to something we know for certain: children from families with higher incomes tend to do better in school and on achievement tests than students from families with lower incomes. And it’s not just a rich vs. poor thing. It’s incremental. Put family income on one axis of a graph and student achievement on the other, and the result is a line gradually sloping upwards.
So what would happen to student achievement if we took schools out of the equation — left them as they are — and used other strategies to move families out of poverty? I can’t cite a study here, so I’m going to take a small intellectual leap and say, as you remove some of the conditions which make the lives of families living in poverty so onerous, the children in those families will tend to become better students. As incomes rise and problems associated with poverty lessen, students’ educational achievement will increase even if the schools they attend don’t change appreciably. The students will, in a sense, change the schools, making them look more successful.
Poverty is about more than family income. It’s a collection of conditions. Also important, along with living on a limited income, are a family’s lack of access to health care, proper nutrition, a comfortable, stable, toxicity-free living situation and personal safety. For children, it often means growing up in a home without the kind of school-related educational resources and experiences children from higher income families have available to them. Each of those problems adds to the difficulty children have being attentive and learning effectively. As you remove them, you increase the chances of children being more successful in school.
The relation between students’ anxiety levels and their levels of attentiveness in school has been getting a fair amount of academic attention lately. The basic notion is pretty intuitive. When children are distracted, they’re less likely to give their full attention to their teachers or their school work. Teaching a classroom full of children, helping them learn at full capacity, is difficult enough under the best of circumstances. If the students’ minds are elsewhere, it’s close to impossible.
It’s true of any of us, not just children. If we’re hungry or ill or have a toothache or are worried about something that happened this morning or is likely to happen in the future, part of our minds are going to be elsewhere, focused on those other problems rather than on the matter at hand.
If children haven’t slept well or eaten well, have health issues, are worried about the safety and well being of a parent or sibling, or their own safety and well being, school lessons simply aren’t going to be as important to them as they would be if they were less distracted. All childen have heads and bodies filled with distractions to take their minds off schoolwork, but poverty creates its own categories of physical and psychological problems and anxieties which pile up on top of the others. If we lessen or remove some of those poverty-related problems, children will have a better shot at paying attention and progressing in school.
What are some ways to lessen problems related to poverty which get in the way of students realizing their educational potential? It’s a long list.
Raising a family’s income to move them above the poverty level is a big deal. We can raise the minimum wage to a living wage, or we can create a guaranteed income, to name a few approaches. There are lots of possible fixes.
At the same time, we can make sure everyone has access to quality, low cost housing so they can use a part of their income to create a safe, stable living environment for themselves and their families.
We can also focus specifically on the children’s needs. Every pregnant woman should have access to good prenatal care so children begin their lives as healthy as possible. Universal health care should continue the infant’s access to medical attention, and it’s most effective when combined with social services which will make the care readily and easily available. High quality early childhood education should be available for all children so they have the opportunity to develop their educational and social skills before they enter kindergarten. And medical and social services should be embedded into K-12 schools so children continue to have access to the kinds of services more affluent families take for granted.
The more anti-poverty boxes are checked, the better the lives of children and their families will be. I honestly believe children who live in improved living situations will become improved students, raising their school achievement simply because they have the heaviest burdens of poverty lifted from their shoulders. Of course, I could be wrong. I don’t think so, but I could be. Maybe their improved living situations wouldn’t make them better students after all. But they would still have improved living situations, and that would be a wonderful thing all by itself. It is shameful that a society as wealthy as ours has so many people, children and adults, living in poverty. It doesn’t have to be that way.
The problem is, all this would cost a lot of money. A whole lot of money. And that’s a huge problem. That money has to come from somewhere, and the only reasonable “somewhere” is the pocketbooks of the richest among us. We’re talking about an increase in income redistribution on a massive scale, moving money from the top one percent, and especially the top one-tenth of one percent, back to the rest of society. Instead of getting the tax breaks the wealthiest of the wealthy love and have come to expect in recent years, they would have to deal with an increased tax bite. And most of them wouldn’t like that. They can afford it. They’ve never been richer, at least since the gilded age, and making them pay more would only lessen the scandalous and dangerous levels of economic inequality in our society. They’d still have more money than they and their families could spend in many lifetimes. But they wouldn’t like it.
So, back to the question I posed earlier. Who benefits most from pushing the idea that fixing our “failing schools” is the best way to lift children out of poverty? It’s the people who would have to do the monetary heavy lifting to create the programs we would need to deal with the problems of poverty head on. Better to continue pushing the “It’s the schools” meme and kick the can down the road a decade or two, at which time you can say “It’s still the schools” and give the can another kick, than to promote more effective, and far more costly, solutions.
You may have noticed a strange phenomenon, that many hundred-millionaires and billionaires who lean a bit to the left are big “education reform” promoters along with their fellow fat cats on the other side of the political spectrum. It’s one of those moments when billionaires on both sides of the aisle join hands.
When it comes to a battle between politics and pocketbooks, most rich people choose their pocketbooks. The billionaire’s “education reform” kumbaya has less to do with what’s best for the poor children they say they want to help than with protecting their own bottom lines. And the ultra-rich have as much money as it takes to promote their self serving agendas, to convince the the politicians who depend on them for funding (and a sizable part of the electorate) that it’s not poverty that causes poverty. It’s those failing schools.
This article appears in Feb 15-21, 2018.
The American tax payers were promised that more spending on education meant less poverty as they could turn low income students into productive/successful members of society.
But now, after reading this article it appears that will never happen. Educators should return to educating and not parenting and problem solving socio economic realities.
What the home dictates the educational process can not replace. Pray for better parents.
NONE of us benefit from policies that shred social safety nets, not even the billionaires, a topic covered admirably well by Nick Hanauer in Politico…
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/07/18/to-my-fellow-plutocrats-you-can-cure-trumpism-215347
…but that’s a side issue to your main point, David, which seems to be that school choice and school reform are supported by the Dems’ favorite stock villains (RICH PEOPLE BAD GUYS!!!) because those nasty RPBGs are the ones that will have to pick up the tab if we start funding social safety nets as we should.
Then why do people who are not billionaires, people who support most of the items on your poverty-relief policy wish list, support school choice and school reform? Because we have been misled, hoodwinked by billionaires and their media lackeys?
No, David, some of us support choice because we’ve been spending time on public school sites and in public school board meetings in dysfunctional school districts and we are very well aware that with conditions being what they are, thousands of people DO need out. Their prospects in life WILL be impaired if they remain, and that is especially true if they come from poor families that cannot afford to supplement what is available in poorly administered school buildings manned by underqualified teachers. Some of us support school choice because we’ve got children who are or will be attending college, and we know first hand the relationships between College Board scores and AP scores and college admissions and costs. We know that the scores and the competencies they (albeit imperfectly) reflect relate, later, to being admitted to good graduate programs and getting good jobs. Leaving kids in schools that do not prepare them to clear those hurdles is not in anyone’s best interests.
If opposing the school choice / school reform agenda doesn’t actually benefit families that, without choice and reform, will be locked into low functioning schools, whom does it benefit? Such an interesting question. But I don’t think we’ll be finding the answer to it in your blog. We’d get closer to the answer if we started attending political fundraisers and canvassing events with the fellow travelers who are persuaded by the sort of arguments you’ve made here.
As long as we’re importing 1 million poor immigrants every year to compete for wages with the poor, including large numbers of Arican-American and other minorities, we will always have plenty of poverty.
And, interestingly, Cesar Chavez would have agreed with BSLAP on that. But the “Democratic” party is not about effective labor advocacy. It has become a sold-out corporate toady.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/the-democrats-immigration-mistake/528678/
https://theintercept.com/2017/06/25/ralph-nader-the-democrats-are-unable-to-defend-the-u-s-from-the-most-vicious-republican-party-in-history/
The hypocrisy and mendacity in current “Democratic” party discourse and the party’s chronic failures to effectively defend lower-SES families from exploitation in the workplace and failures in the public district school system stink to high heaven.
(Don’t listen to what they say in misleading blogs like this. Look at what they do, and look at the realities people who are the beneficiaries of their PROGRAMS-THAT-DON’T-REALLY-WORK and POLICY-THAT-REALLY-SERVES-CORPORATE-AGENDAS-WHILE-SAYING-IT-SERVES-LABOR-AGENDAS are experiencing.)
When you said poverty is more than family income you hit the nail, but we need to did down deeper to hit the nail on the head. Poverty is a mentality and becomes cultural. More money doesn’t solve the problem. Raising the minimum wage will not bring people out of poverty. The war on poverty, as declared by LBJ, was a failure. The more money that poured in to “help” people created more dependency. The cure to poverty is creating independence and good stewardship of time, resources and money. Folks rise from poverty through traditional education to improve their skills and value to an employer and by learning life skills that will enable them to rise up the ladder.
To “Some who know conditions in the schools disagree.” You read my post as a diatribe against school choice. That’s not what I intended, and I don’t think it’s what I wrote. The point is, changes like NCLB and Common Core, both directed at traditional schools, are reforms which people touted as ways to cut fight poverty by improving poor students’ achievement and reducing the achievement gap. Vouchers and charters are sold using a similar pitch. I want schools to be moved out of the position of a prime mover in our fight against poverty and put them into the position of a supplementary force, where they belong.
I spent most of my teaching career before charters existed and when vouchers weren’t a big part of the education discussion. But the same false arguments were used, that if we fix our schools, we’ll solve our poverty problems (and our businesses’ problems with lagging productivity along with other problems). The forces pushing those arguments tended to be moneyed interests which didn’t want to see substantive changes, which would put more demands on them, challenging their power and wealth.
David, you want “schools to be moved out of the position of a prime mover in our fight against poverty and […] into the position of a supplementary force, where they belong.”
I want students to be moved out of schools that are failing them and into schools that educate them. I don’t know what the lay of the land in Portland was, but from what little I know of politics and public policy in Oregon I would venture to guess that it would be quite, QUITE different from the lay of the land in Tucson, in so many ways that it would be difficult to list them all.
In Tucson we have a public district serving 40-something thousand that, for various complex reasons that include but are not limited to underfunding and over-testing, has descended into deep, intractable dysfunction. No board watcher, no advocacy group, no union, no political party, no well intentioned chief administrator can address it and fix it. Many have tried and all have failed.
We have a well developed, robust alternative system, the Catholic one, that because of the demographic make up of our population and the idiosyncrasies of the history of this region is fairly successful and responsible, and that, if it becomes affordable through public subsidies, is an appealing option to many of the families that are currently locked into TUSD schools on the South and West sides. One relevant feature of the Catholic system here is that it has many master teachers in it that have taught for years, sometimes decades, in the public system and have then chosen to spend the latter years of their careers teaching in Catholic schools. The Catholic system has open seats and capacity to expand. In this context, what serves the COMMON GOOD more, adding appropriate transparency requirements to public funds being applied in that alternative system and allowing the public funds to support the expansion of opportunities there, or a virulent, mendaciously justified SOS campaign aiming to block the application of public funds in schools that are absolutely able to deliver better services to poor students that CHOOSE to attend them than TUSD can deliver?
On a theoretical level, you may be right that schools should not be seen as a “prime mover in our fight against poverty,” at least not in the way that the (corporate-influenced) architects of NCLB and RTTT conceived as them as being, but on a practical, “what real people experience in real local schools locally” level, there are many kids who would receive the kind of education that WOULD give them better chances in life if vouchers (ESAs) became more available.
Can you and I change what’s driving education rhetoric at the national level? No. Can we support policies locally that help hundreds of students now, perhaps thousands of students in years to come receive better educations? Yes. But the “Democratic” party, which is intertwined with the political network that feeds on TUSD, will choose not to, and will insist that the voucher policies it opposes actually benefit RICH PEOPLE BAD GUYS (?!) rather than the poor students they would actually benefit.
Absurd. Dishonest. Irresponsible. And the main reason why, after donating to and volunteering for Democratic candidates for years — and raising tens of thousands of dollars for a TUSD school — I am no longer a Democrat and no longer a donor, volunteer, or fundraiser for the party or for the school system with which it is entwined.
I just finished a comparison of Connecticut and Arizona using the Stanford ranking of all school district data and NAEP.
Devastating for your hypothesis about money, poverty and test scores. Connecticut’s median school district has a median family income of $90,000. Arizona? 46,000. They double us. That’s an eye-popping difference.
According to the NEA stats, Connecticut spends $25,000 per student. Arizona? $8,500. That’s a mind-boggling difference. We’d have to increase spending $18 billion to match them.
On NAEP 8th grade math, Arizona Blacks and Hispanics don’t just outscore Connecticut Blacks and Hispanics, they torch them by a whole year’s worth of Growth, over 12 points each.
Even our White students outscore Connecticut Whites.
Education culture can only represent Connecticut as superior to Arizona because Connecticut has a higher percentage of White students than we do. And, because it spends more. Neither is evidence of better schools.
Arizona did not have a single school district below the 10th percentile. Connecticut had 8. Arizona had 41 districts above the 90th percentile, Connecticut had 13. Our median district was at the 78th percentile in gains, Connecticut: 51st percentile.
Your whole column is more Bill Gates in the box thinking. Bill Gates will never be part of the solution because the only time he can force himself out of the box is when it is on fire. After a decade of ridiculing the internet, it finally dawned on him as to the existential threat to his fortune. He sent people running door to door in his company telling each programmer: whatever you are doing, stop it and start working on the internet.
Only when someone else has completely revolutionized education will Bill Gates become part of the solution and then, we won’t need him. He’ll still be part of the problem.
Poor kids are capable of moving academically at least four times as fast as they are moving now. They are imprisoned in a racist culture.
And, we don’t need to change a thing about their homes to get that times four. Eight hours a day is more than enough.
One of the main things that would pull children out of poverty and help to give them a better life, is….(government presumably) giving their parents a better life??
There are billions of dollars that the government spends on education every year. Yet, we still sometimes can read articles like this. We read about the learners who cannot afford to buy themselves the newest devices for better and faster learning and we read about the teachers who spend their own money on supplies for their classrooms. I think that in this case, the leaners are better off on their own. They can always turn to http://bestofwriters.com/ for help if they want a writer for their essays or a resume in the future.