Poverty: The Factor Educational Reformers Don't Want to Consider

Amidst all the debates about charter schools and Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind, educators may have missed the latest report that 22% of children are now living in poverty--the highest figure since 1993.  But that is a shame, because that fact is likely to have more of an impact on student test scores than all the policies enacted by all the politicians put together.

At the end of last year, there was a whole hullabaloo about the fact that US students only scored around average or below on the international PISA test scores.  YIKES!  AMERICAN SCHOOLS ARE FAILURES!!!!!

Except, on further analysis of the data, it doesn't really reflect poorly on American schools.  Instead, our poor showing internationally doesn't really seem to be based on our school system at all.  Rather, it speaks to the shocking fact that in a country of such abundance, one out of every five children lives in poverty....one of the highest levels of poverty among the OECD countries with whom we have been compared.

How can I say that?  Because the National Association of Secondary School Principles analyzed the data by separating it by the level of poverty in the schools (as measured by the number of students eligible for free or reduced lunch programs).  IN EVERY CASE,  the US students came in FIRST when compared to countries in the same poverty range (in many cases, the other countries has MUCH lower poverty rates, but at least fell into a comparable range).

So, for American kids who went to school in relatively rich schools (defined as schools where less than 10% of students had incomes low enough to qualify for lunch programs)....well, they kicked the butts of the top-ranked Finnish students (with a mere 3.4% of poverty level) by scoring 551 to the Finnish 536:

Country	Poverty Rate	PISA Score
United States	<10%	551
Finland	3.4%	536
Netherlands	9.0%	508
Belgium	6.7%	506
Norway	3.6%	503
Switzerland	6.8%	501
France	7.3%	496
Denmark	2.4%	495
Czech Republic	7.2%	478

OK, so that include all those Ivy League feeder prep schools and such... but what about just those middle/upper middle class schools, where, say, 10-24.9% of students qualify for lunch program?

Country Poverty Rate PISA Score United States 10%-24.9% 527 Canada 13.6% 524 New Zealand 16.3% 521 Japan 14.3% 520 Australia 11.6% 515 Poland 14.5% 500 Germany 10.9% 497 Ireland 15.7% 496 Hungary 13.1% 494 United Kingdom 16.2% 494 Portugal 15.6% 489 Italy 15.7% 486 Greece 12.4% 483

Source for all figures:  NASSP

OK, well, how about our poor schools and our REALLY poor schools?  Even compared to the OECD countries that have a higher than 50% poverty rate (Austria, Turkey, Chile, and Mexico), the US students still did better.   So, when you compared apples to apples, the US students always came up on top, no matter how sweet or sour the apple selection was.

So according to the data, US education is doing an exemplary job at all levels--high income through low income student populations.  Why, then, is "school reform" so fixated on blaming bad teachers and their "gang," the EVIL teachers' unions, for all of our educational woes?

My answer?  It's back to my educational days as an existentialist.  Existentialism argues that people will do anything to avoid facing up to their own responsibility.  It is so much easier to blame uncaring and inadequate teachers, and one-sided teachers unions, and regulation-bound public school administrators, than to ask ourselves:  How is it, that in a country that has so much, and so many live such abundant lives, that somewhere between one-fifth and one-quarter of our children live in poverty?

Hey, rather than admit that I'm part of the systemic poverty problem, I would rather blame those uncaring teachers and inflexible administrators myself.  The thing is, I don't actually know any educators like that....

New Research Supports Critics of Wake County School Board Neighborhood Schools Policy

A new research study released on October 15, 2010 by The Century Foundation gives additional ammunition to the critics of the Wake County School Board's new efforts to move from economic diversity to neighborhood proximity as the basis for assignments to schools.  The report, "Housing Policy is School Policy," shows that students from low socioeconomic backgrounds achieve significantly higher scores on standardized tests if they attend schools with low percentages of poverty when compared to their peers in high poverty schools, even though the latter students are targeted with much greater resources. 

The study spent seven years following the educational progress of 858 elementary school students living in public housing in Montgomery County, Maryland.  Montgomery County, a suburb of Washington, DC (where I used to live), is generally a very affluent and educated bedroom community for the Nation’s capitol; its demographics are very similar to the average population in Cary, NC, the affluent and educated bedroom community for the state’s capitol (which is where I live now).  However, Montgomery County does one thing very differently; it requires developers to include public housing units along with all its middle/upper-middle class, or even elite development projects.  Families applying for public housing are assigned to the different projects on a lottery basis.  

Therefore, about half of the students in the study ended up going to a neighborhood school (possible because the neighborhoods themselves were socioeconomically diverse, due to the Montgomery County housing policy) where less than 20% of students qualified for the free school lunch program.  The other half went to schools considered to be high-poverty because up to 60% of all students qualified for subsidized meals.  This case is also special because since the housing is done by lottery, the students are distributed randomly between the two groups (as opposed to, for example, most charter schools, who enroll students of parents who motivated enough to jump through the hoops necessary to get their children into such special programs).

At the end of seven years, the poor students in the low-poverty schools has narrowed the gap between them and middle class or higher students by 50% in math and by 30% in reading.  They achieved these gains even though the county gave the high-poverty schools an additional $2,000 per student for supplemental educational resources.  Or, looking at it from the other perspective, an estimated $858,000 or so in additional funds targeted for high-poverty school students produced no effect, at least compared to simply sending them to low-poverty schools.

In truth, this is not a surprising discovery for professional educators.  The original groundbreaking study of school inequality, the 1966 “Equality of Educational Opportunities” publication known as the Coleman Report, showed that the best predictors of student success in school were:

#1--Parental Income (of course, homeschoolers are an anomaly sub-popular in that regard) and

#2--Socioeconomic Status of the School attended. 

In the nearly 45 years since that report, the data on the family’s socioeconomic status has not changed.   Parental income still makes the biggest difference, statistically, in a student’s success than any other demographic feature--race, age, gender, etc.  This study suggests that the second one has not changed either.

So the School Board can say what they like about ensuring the success of low-income students.  But the research says that they are dismantling the system that has proven to be most effective is supporting those students.  And even if there is extra money available to support additional resources for the high-poverty schools that would be created in high-poverty neighborhoods, it doesn't seem like it will produce any increase in educational achievement, at least in comparison to allowing them to remain in economically diverse schools.