Economic Mobility Project Finds Poverty Worse For American Kids

Crita Final
EMP

Why So Few Posts?

I have a new job. Not enough folks have the money to hire me as a consultant, even with my sliding scale of fees, so I took a teaching job. Now that I am working for someone else I have much less time for blogging. It's kind of a bummer, but a steady income is not a bummer.

There does seem to be lots of movement in favor of questioning the current edreform policies and ideas spouted by know-nothings like Rhee, Gates and the rest (yeah, you too Tilson). Rhee's organization, StudentsFirst, is now touting partnerships with teachers because they realize that they need the support of teachers if they are going to get their agenda enacted. What they don't seem to realize is that hiring TFA quitters and former teachers who have chosen to leave kids and become policy gurus does nothing for Rhee and her organization's desire to become loved by actual teachers who have remained inside classrooms despite Rhee's unfounded vitriol against us.

Even Arne Duncan is trying to get on our good side by saying we should double teacher salaries. This sounds nice, but is just more of the same teacher-bashing--this time it's just veiled. There is no money to do such a thing, and even if there was enough money, higher-paid teachers cannot overcome the devastating effects of poverty on our low-scoring students. Hence, offering more money is a veiled claim that poorly paid teachers are slouching on the job. Um, no, we're not. Fuck you.

The movement to opt out of standardized testing is also gaining traction. We have seen some prominent educators publicly claim that they have opted their own kids out of the state test. If my kid's mom is cool with it, we will also opt our son out. The oligarchs don't need or deserve all that data on my kid. They are abusive as it is, and I don't need their abuse aimed directly at my son. Fuck those assholes.

My radio show on BTR is also suffering from my new job, as I can no longer do it in the afternoon. If I am to do more radio I must do it during prime-time, which requires a pro account that I cannot afford, hence the donation widget in my sidebar on your left there. I would love to do more radio, and if you want me to do more, I need your financial help to do it. Consider a donation, won't you? I am in contact with a few interesting education leaders who are interested in interviews, and I think they would be a valuable addition to the counter-reform movement that is gaining steam. Anyone who donates is invited to be a guest on the show!

Remember, poverty is the reason for the achievement gap. We've known it for 60 years, and we've been in denial for that long. The reformers have done a good job defeating this idea by saying poverty is not an excuse. They are right. Poverty is not an excuse, it's a goddamned diagnosis.

CDC Report Indicates Doctors Suck As Much As Teachers

From the new CDC Report (PDF):

¶Babies born to black women are up to three times as likely to die in infancy as those born to women of other races.

¶American Indians and Alaska Natives are twice as likely to die in car crashes as any other group.

¶More than 80 percent of all suicides are committed by whites, but young American Indian adults have the highest suicide rates by far — 25 per 100,000 population at age 21, compared with 14 for whites, 10 for blacks and 8 for Asians and Hispanics.

¶Overdoses of prescription drugs now kill more Americans than overdoses of illegal drugs, the opposite of the pattern 20 years ago. Overdose death rates are now higher among whites than blacks; that trend switched in 2002, after doctors began prescribing more powerful painkillers, antidepressants and antipsychotics — more easily obtained by people with health insurance.

¶Blacks die of heart disease much more commonly than whites, and die younger, despite the availability of cheap prevention measures like weight loss, exercise, blood-pressure and cholesterol drugs, and aspirin. The same is true for strokes.

¶High blood pressure is twice as common among blacks as whites, but the group with the least success in controlling it is Mexican-Americans.

¶Compared with whites, blacks have double the rate of “preventable hospitalizations,” which cost about $7 billion a year.

NYT h/t Teacher Sabrina

Brian Jones Discusses Martin Luther King's Advice For Eliminating Achievement Gap

GRITtv: Brian Jones: Following King's Lessons for Students
Uploaded by grittv. - Up-to-the minute news videos.

The Achievement Gap: It's About Poverty. Still

Hopefully one day, probably long after I am dead and gone, folks will realize what we have (or have not) done to make a better world for our children. We could start by acknowledging simple truths, but this too is a problem.

Left Ed: Race, Income and School Reform

...In 1966, the Coleman Report revealed the Inconvenient Truth that the correlation of low student achievement to race and poverty is so strong that "schools generally can not overcome" the inequalities imposed on them by the society at large. [emphasis mine] Children born to families with socio-economic advantages in our society will continue to have their advantages reinforced in the schools they attend, while children born to families with more challenging circumstances will chronically lag behind.

Today, merely pointing this fact out often gets you labeled by the reformist crowd as "making excuses" for bad schools. But when one wants to understand the weather outside, it makes sense to start by recognizing how clouds make rain. Complex systems such as schools have multiple inputs, which should all be considered in policy making....

h/t Open Left

The Gaping Gap

HuffPo Front Page

I wonder if this gap has anything to do with that other gap?

Poverty And The Achievement Gap: Married

(Reuters) - A murder in the neighborhood can significantly knock down a child's score on an IQ test, even if the child did not directly witness the killing or know the victim, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.

The findings have implications both for crime control efforts and for the heavy reliance on standardized tests, said New York University sociology professor Patrick Sharkey, who conducted the study.

They can also explain about half the achievement gap between blacks and whites on such tests, he reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [emphasis mine]

"It means being more aware of the potential for violence to have a reach that extends beyond just those victimized and those who witness a violent event, to reach across a community and affect all children in a community," Sharkey said in a telephone interview.

Sharkey compared data on crimes broken down to within a few blocks in a neighborhood with school test scores.

h/t AC

The Other Education Gaps

From Ecology of Education

10 Gaps in Education (that don’t get enough press)

Not all gaps are created equal.

The Achievement Gap gets the most press and seems to have the most leverage. But there are a host of others. Read on for a handy dandy guide to 10 Gaps in Education, and then add your own in the comment section.

Legislative Gap

Distance between lawmakers and teachers.

Potential Gap:

Difference between a students’ potential and the tasks they are asked to do.

Stimulant Gap:

Time between the bottom of one cup of coffee and a refill. Often described as “The Unbearable Gap”.

The Rumsfeld Gap:

The schools, teachers, parents, & students we have vs. the schools, teachers, parents, & students we want.

The Billable Gap:

When educators daydream about the money they’d make if they could bill their hours. ”65 hrs this week, times 4 weeks this month, times $125 per hour = Cha-Ching!”

The Arm Chair Gap:

When folks with no teaching experience suddenly become experts on issues in education after reading an editorial or article.

The Restraint Gap:

What a teacher wants to do vs. What a teacher must do when confronted by someone suffering from The Arm Chair Gap.

The Manchurian Gap:

Students who are brainwashed to believe that answering test prep questions actually prepares them for entering the work force.

The Coup d’Gap:

When policy makers seize the reins of the education debate by scapegoating and alienating teachers. Often characterized by language centered on market terms — accountability, input/output, achievement — and rigor with little or no mention of students, vigor, or relevance.

The Back-to-the-Future Delorean Gap:

Often experienced in schools where there is a mix between 19th century teachers/administrators and 21st century technology proponents.

The Other Achievement Gap

From Kevin Riley at Leader Talk:

...

Here's a gap that's deep and growing deeper by the day:

It starts in schools that struggle to keep pace. For whatever reason. Maybe it is the leadership, maybe it's the teachers, maybe it's the kids or the parents or the books or the pedagogy or the water or the facilities or the lack of light. In the end, it doesn't matter. Because schools that don't keep pace with AYP have to circle the wagons and teach harder. More reading. More math. Then more reading still. More math still.

And while reading and math crowd out the rest of the curriculum-- as schools eliminate science and social studies and the arts and physical education to make way for more focussed/rigorous/aligned instruction in basic skills (aka "test prep")-- something big goes missing:

Creative thinking, innovation, critical thinking, problem solving, application, play, self-discovery. Joy. Learning.

...the skills our kids need to compete for jobs. For economic growth. For America. For global survival.

...

Child Hunger Is A Complex Problem (It's More Than Just Food)

The hunger problem, like the achievement gap, is more complicated than one might think due to multiple factors that Americans are not equipped to deal with; unequipped due to consumerism, selfishness, and an inability to hold 2 thoughts in one's head at a time. Life is complicated, lots of grey. Complexity is not bad, just harder than simplicity. Americans are good at simplicity.

Missing more than a meal
Child hunger, called the 'silent epidemic,' is an increasingly complex problem

Even when children are not hungry, studies have found that slight shortages of food in their homes are associated with serious problems. Babies and toddlers in those homes are far more likely to be hospitalized than children in families with similar incomes but adequate food. School-age children tend to learn and grow more slowly, and to get into trouble more often. Teenage girls are more prone to be depressed or even flirt with thoughts of suicide.

Solving the problem is further complicated by its subtle nature. "Most people who are hungry are not clinically manifesting what we consider hunger. It doesn't even affect body weight," said Mariana Chilton, a Drexel University medical anthropologist who is part of Children's HealthWatch, a network of pediatricians and public health researchers in Philadelphia and four other cities. Hunger cannot be solved by food alone, their work shows, because it is one strand in a web of pressures that trap families, including housing and energy costs.

A nuanced problem

This more nuanced picture is emerging as the problem has become more widespread. With the economy faltering, the number of youngsters living in homes without enough food soared in 2008 from 13 million to nearly 17 million, the Agriculture Department reported last month.

Dubious Claims Are Usually Dubious

Sherman Dorn questions the claim that the HCZ has eliminated the achievement gap.

"The gap is gone"

If Aaron Pallas's report is correct, and Roland Fryer did tell Anderson Cooper bluntly in reference to the Harlem Children's Zone and Promise Academy, "The gap is gone," Fryer committed an understandable but all too common sin of education reformers across the centuries: overpromising. I've been in the room as one or more program directors and the like have promised the sky, the moon, and a few thousand stars to stakeholders and potential funders. Every time it's happened I've winced, because I've seen the storyline play out many times before: do something good, overpromise, and then see the program never be able to fulfill the more grandiose claims.

To me as an education historian, this is not an issue of whether we're adjusting for social class and other variables. Nor is it whether Geoffrey Canada is a good person (go read Paul Tough's book if you doubt that). Or whether Canada himself is overpromising: "it's worth about an hour of celebration" is his comment about the test score reports. It's about a persistent dynamic in education reform of being so desperate for something that works that you see more than is there.

I don't get that sense from Canada, who strikes me as driven and gritty and tied to what is happening to the kids in the area he's working. I'm worried about the talk around Canada and the HCZ, of taking Fryer and Dobbie's recent paper on the Promise Academy (which strikes me as fine work, but just one paper) and seeing that one paper as definitive. I've read Paul Tough's work (assigned it to my summer class), and I want HCZ to do everything Canada wants it to.

But I also want someone to look at it judiciously. And here's the irony: while it's common for a program head to be enthusiastic and a professional evaluator to be jaundiced, what is clear in the 60 minutes segment (and everything else I've read about Canada) is that the roles are reversed here. Canada's driven enough to be skeptical, to have changed school and program leaders when he doesn't see the progress he wants. Fryer? Well, check the CBS video of the segment between minute 10 and minute 11 (while watching the whole 14-minute segment). He said "the gap is gone" as baldly as Aaron Pallas claimed.

Yes, you're hearing me wince.

Project Censored: Schools More Segregated Now

Here is more evidence that what we are doing today to attempt to close the achievement gap is actually making things worse, as so many have said for so long.

We know that poverty is the biggest roadblock to achievement, yet all the education reformers seem to be able to do is blame teachers and find ways to further segregate kids while the reformers themselves make millions. Disgusting.

US Schools are More Segregated Today than in the 1950s


The Civil Rights Project, UCLA, January 2009
Title: “Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge”
Author: Gary Orfield


Student Researchers: Melissa Robinson and Rena Hawkins
Faculty Evaluator: Sangeeta Sinha, PhD
Southwest Minnesota State University

Schools in the United States are more segregated today than they have been in more than four decades. Millions of non-white students are locked into “dropout factory” high schools, where huge percentages do not graduate, and few are well prepared for college or a future in the US economy.

According to a new Civil Rights report published at the University of California, Los Angeles, schools in the US are 44 percent non-white, and minorities are rapidly emerging as the majority of public school students in the US. Latinos and blacks, the two largest minority groups, attend schools more segregated today than during the civil rights movement forty years ago. In Latino and African American populations, two of every five students attend intensely segregated schools. For Latinos this increase in segregation reflects growing residential segregation. For blacks a significant part of the reversal reflects the ending of desegregation plans in public schools throughout the nation. In the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education, the US Supreme Court concluded that the Southern standard of “separate but equal” was “inherently unequal,” and did “irreversible” harm to black students. It later extended that ruling to Latinos.

The Civil Rights Study shows that most severe segregation in public schools is in the Western states, including California—not in the South, as many people believe. Unequal education leads to diminished access to college and future jobs. Most non-white schools are segregated by poverty as well as race. Most of the nation’s dropouts occur in non-white public schools, leading to large numbers of virtually unemployable young people of color.

Schools in low-income communities remain highly unequal in terms of funding, qualified teachers, and curriculum. The report indicates that schools with high levels of poverty have weaker staffs, fewer high-achieving peers, health and nutrition problems, residential instability, single-parent households, high exposure to crime and gangs, and many other conditions that strongly affect student performance levels. Low-income campuses are more likely to be ignored by college and job market recruiters. The impact of funding cuts in welfare and social programs since the 1990s was partially masked by the economic boom that suddenly ended in the fall of 2008. As a consequence, conditions are likely to get even worse in the immediate future.

In California and Texas segregation is spreading into large sections of suburbia as well. This is the social effect of years of neglect to civil rights policies that stressed equal educational opportunity for all. In California, the nation’s most multiracial state, half of blacks and Asians attend segregated schools, as do one quarter of Latino and Native American students. While many cities came under desegregation court orders during the civil rights era, most suburbs, because they had few minority students at that time, did not. When minority families began to move to the suburbs in large numbers, there was no plan in place to attain or maintain desegregation, appropriately train teachers and staff, or recruit non-white teachers to help deal with new groups of students. Eighty-five percent of the nation’s teachers are white, and little progress is being made toward diversifying the nation’s teaching force.

In states that now have a substantial majority of non-white students, failure to provide quality education to that majority through high school and college is a direct threat to the economic and social future of the general population. In a world economy, success is linked to formal education. Major sections of the US face the threat of declining education levels as the proportion of children attending inferior segregated schools continues to increase.

Rural schools also face severe segregation. In the days of civil rights struggles, small towns and rural areas were seen as the heart of the most intense racism. Of 8.3 million rural white students, 73 percent attend schools that are 80 to100 percent white.

Our nation’s segregated schools result from decades of systematic neglect of civil rights policy and related educational and community reforms.

According to the UCLA report, what is needed are leaders who recognize that we have a common destiny in an America where our children grow up together, knowing and respecting each other, and are all given the educational tools that prepare them for success in our society. The author maintains that if we are to continue along a path of deepening separation and entrenched inequality it will only diminish our common potential.

Two Charts That Say It All

Schools Matter and SmallTalk both have charts today showing how the achievement gap seems to mirror socioeconomic status. This is not surprising; we have known this for generations. We have known that poverty is the cause of the achievement gap, not its most egregious symptom.

When will all those reformers who claim to want to use research-based curricula and pedagogy to close the gap actually look at the data? Here is some...

Why Is There An Achievement Gap?

Diane Ravitch on the McKinsey report:

But Klein and Sharpton use it [the McKinsey Report] to say something that the report itself does not say, which is that the only reason that the gap exists is because of subpar teachers and principals. Thus, if a school system can change its teachers and principals, the gaps should close. Klein has been in charge of the New York City public school system for the past seven years. He has replaced 80 percent of its principals during this time; the number of teachers he has replaced has not been reported. Yet according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, there has been no decline in the achievement gap among racial and ethnic groups in New York City since Klein took charge. [emphasis mine]

All data points to poverty as the main reason for the achievement gap. But when moneyed interests get to pay for biased research, anything can be the cause of the gap!

Resist the temptation to blame teachers and schools. Blame poverty. Then end it.

The Achievement Gap Has Been Narrowing For 35 Years!

Here are a couple graphs that show the narrowing of the achievement gap since 1973. All the talk about the horrors of public schools, and teachers, and the rest is just manufactured hysteria. I am not saying that the gap is something we should be fine with; I have argued many times that we need to address the reasons for the gap because the gap is unacceptable. I have talked about ending poverty, and stuff like that. You know, stuff that could work, instead of finding a way to ruin public schools and teachers like we have apparently decided to do now.

Asked And Answered: Why Is There An Achievement Gap?

SAT Scores 2002 from the College Board

Family Income Verbal/Math Scores

Less than $10,000/year-----417/442
$10,000 - $20,000/year-----435/453
$20,000 - $30,000/year-----461/470
$30,000 - $40,000/year-----480/485
$40,000 - $50,000/year-----496/501
$50,000 - $60,000/year-----505/509
$60,000 - $70,000/year-----511/516
$70,000 - $80,000/year-----517/524
$80,000 - $100,000/year----530/538
More than $100,000/year---555/568

h/t Schools Matter

Daily Howler Chimes In On Obama's Education Nonsense

Here is the real scoop on most of the nonsense my President mentioned in his speech. People, please! Read this and learn. We do the teaching, you do the learning. Now for the Daily Howler!

DAY FOR NIGHT: Scott Wilson’s report of Obama’s speech appears on the Washington Post’s front page. With an unerring instinct for error, Wilson begins with Obama’s remarks about the decay and decline of our schools:

WILSON (3/11/09): President Obama sharply criticized the nation's public schools yesterday, calling for changes that would reward good teachers and replace bad ones, increase spending, and establish uniform academic achievement standards in American education.

In a speech to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, Obama called on teachers unions, state officials and parents to end the "relative decline of American education," which he said "is untenable for our economy, unsustainable for our democracy and unacceptable for our children.”

When Big Pols gives speeches about public schools, does some unwritten law forbid them from telling the truth? Does some law restrict the press from noting their vast overstatements? So it sometimes seems. Obama’s statements about that “relative decline” are very hard to square with the facts. But they’re written from a Familiar Old Script, a script which continues to lead us.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at Obama’s (interesting) remarks about the need for higher standards. But is there some unwritten law requiring Big Pols to make misstatements? Obama turned day into night with his remarks about that “decline.” And the press corps has twiddled its thumbs today, staring off into air.

Wikipedia always says it best: “Day for night is the name of a cinematographic technique to simulate a night scene.... [O]utside scenes can instead be shot during the day, with special blue filters and under-exposed film to create the illusion of darkness.”

Ah yes, the “illusion of darkness!” We thought we saw some “day for night” at the start of yesterday’s speech!

Let’s look at what Obama said about that “relative decline.” This extremely gloomy passage came early in his speech:

OBAMA (3/10/09): Let there be no doubt: the future belongs to the nation that best educates its citizens...

And yet, despite resources that are unmatched anywhere in the world, we have let our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall short, and other nations outpace us. In eighth grade math, we’ve fallen to ninth place. Singapore’s middle-schoolers outperform ours three to one. Just a third of our thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds can read as well as they should. And year after year, a stubborn gap persists between how well white students are doing compared to their African American and Latino classmates. The relative decline of American education is untenable for our economy, unsustainable for our democracy, and unacceptable for our children—and we cannot afford to let it continue.

That came quite early in yesterday’s speech. In this passage, Obama makes a string of Standard Complaints about “the relative decline of American education.” Let’s consider two parts of his presentation. Was he constrained by an unwritten law which forbade him from telling the truth?

Educational decay: First, Obama painted a Gloomy Picture of educational decline and decay. “We have let our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall short, and other nations outpace us,” he gloomily said. “In eighth grade math, we’ve fallen to ninth place.”

Obama painted a gloomy picture. But were these claims accurate?

Consider the claim about eighth grade math, the most specific claim he made. Presumably, Obama refers to the Trends in International Math and Science Study (TIMSS), the widely-ballyhooed “gold standard” for such international comparisons. (An exceptionally useless White House “fact sheet” fails to explain this statement, and others.) The TIMSS was last conducted in 2007—and American eighth-graders did finish ninth in math, just as Obama said. (Among 36 nations. For the relevant table, click here.) The U.S. scored far behind five Asian tigers, marginally behind three other nations. On the other hand, the U. S. scored slightly ahead, even well ahead, of quite a few countries you’ve probably heard of. The U.S. outperformed countries like Australia, Sweden, Scotland, Italy and Norway by significant margins. And we massively kicked Kuwait’s *ss.

(How representative are various national samples? We can’t tell you. Journalists should.)

None of this contradicts what Obama said in yesterday’s speech. But have our eighth graders fallen to ninth place, as the gloomy chief executive told us? Sorry. Before 2007, the TIMSS was last given in 2003; U.S. eighth graders finished 15th that year (out of 45). In the previous testing (1999), the U.S. had finished 18th. Indeed, U.S, eighth graders have steadily gained against the rest of the world since at least the mid-1990s, at least if we are going to judge by the measure Obama selected.

Have U. S. eighth graders fallen to ninth, as the gloomy president said? This table shows the twenty countries which participated in eighth-grade math in the TIMSS in both 1995 and 2007. Of the nineteen other countries, only three showed more improvement in average scores than the U.S. did. Sorry! In eighth grade math, the U.S. has risen to its current ninth place. We may feel that rank isn’t good enough. But must we persistently trade day for night? Does some sort of unwritten law require these gloomy misstatements?

A stubborn achievement gap: According to the gloomy president, it isn’t just that American kids have “fallen to ninth place” in math. Obama also based a gloomy observation on a purely domestic measure. “[Y]ear after year, a stubborn gap persists between how well white students are doing compared to their African American and Latino classmates,” he said. But that claim doesn’t quite seem accurate either. Maybe it all depends on what the meaning of “stubborn” or “persists” is.

Again, we’ll refer you to the ballyhooed “gold standard” for such declarations, the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). As we recently noted, long-term results in this federal program show those achievement gaps narrowing in reading and math, though significant gaps remain. For example, this chart shows reading results from 1971 through 2004 in the part of the NAEP called the Long-Term Trend Assessment. The gap between white and black scores has substantially narrowed in all age groups, though significant gaps still exist. And the same sort of narrowing between white and Hispanic scores can be seen in this table. “Year after year, a stubborn gap persists?” Gaps persist, but they seem to be somewhat less stubborn than Obama suggests.

No one’s a bigger grouch than we about educational topics. But we’re also prepared to defer to the record; Obama’s statements about that “relative decline” seem derived from Famous Old Scripts, not from real observations. Gerald Bracey has long been The Man when it comes to critiquing these Standard Old Claims. This morning, we see that Bracey has posted about Obama’s speech at The Huffington Post. Go read it; Bracey goes into more detail about Obama’s statements than we have. (Please note: Bracey has persistently claimed that the NAEP sets an unrealistically high standard for “proficiency.” This doesn’t undermine use of the NAEP as a measure of progress over time.)

Tomorrow, we’ll look at what Obama said about the need for higher standards. But first, a note about the political uses of Gloomy Scripts.

Why do politicians paint this Gloomy Portrait of American schools? In some cases, they may not know what they’re talking about; everyone has heard these Standard Claims, and people tend to believe them. But yes, there can be political uses for such gloomy misstatements. As Bracey has noted, gloomy claims have long been used by educational “conservatives” to undermine faith in the public schools; vouchers and charters are more appealing if you believe that the public schools are a wreck. On the other hand, a president can set himself up to be a star if he overstates the mess which predates him.

Then too, a president may not want to admit that progress occurred under those before him. That said, we of course have no idea why Obama said what he did.

But:

Obama’s statement about U.S. math score seems to be simply inaccurate. His statement about those achievement gaps would seem to be misleading. Is it true? “Despite resources that are unmatched anywhere in the world,” have we really “let our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall short?” Have we “let other nations outpace us?” And have we “fallen to ninth place” in math? That’s a very gloomy picture—a picture that’s largely inaccurate.

This morning, that picture appears on the Post’s front page. In some ways, Obama traded day for night. Wilson doesn’t notice.

Poverty Is The Reason For The Achievement Gap

I know I have said this before!

Another Report on Effects of Poverty You Will Never See Reported in Corporate Media

As Arne and the Disruptors prepare to unload their billion-dollar bribes to cash-starved states that are willing to buy the Business Roundtable's antiquarian reform agenda of national high stakes tests, teacher pay based on test scores, and the deprofessionalization of teaching, another piece of research from David Berliner adds to the mountain of data that points to the reason for low achievement that the Business Roundtable and Achieve, Inc. continue to ignore: POVERTY. But, then, without poverty, how could the BR and Achieve, Inc. continue to demonize the schools and to offer their own solutions that serve no one besides their own corporate interests. Poverty, in fact, keeps the Business Roundtable in the business of educational control initiatives operated by the education industry.

From EPRU at Arizona State:

New policy report explains how poverty's effects are the real culprit

Contact: David Berliner -- (480) 861-0484; berliner@asu.edu
Kevin Welner -- (303) 492-8370; kevin.welner@gmail.com

TEMPE, Ariz. and BOULDER, Colo., March 9, 2009 - A new report issues a fundamental challenge to established education policies that were promoted by the Bush administration and are likely to be continued by the Obama administration. These policies are based on a belief that public schools should shoulder the blame for the "achievement gap" between poor and minority students and the rest of the student population. But the new policy report argues that out-of-school factors are the real culprit--and that if those factors are not addressed, it will be impossible for schools to meet the demands made of them.

"Schools are told to fix problems that largely lie outside their zone of influence," says David Berliner, Regents Professor of Education at Arizona State University, and author of the report, Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success. The report is jointly published by the Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU) of ASU and the Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC) at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Berliner's report comes as debate continues over the renewal of the No Child Left Behind Act, which imposed stiff accountability measures on schools in return for federal aid. NCLB requires public schools to demonstrate "adequate yearly progress" toward the eventual elimination of gaps in achievement among all demographic groups of students and imposes a variety of sanctions if they fall short.

"This report provides exactly the type of information that should guide policy," says EPIC director Kevin Welner of CU-Boulder. "It clearly and concisely explains why poverty must be directly addressed by anyone who hopes to close the achievement gap. Just as importantly, it explains why just tinkering with NCLB is a fool's errand."

Last week, Education Secretary Duncan told the Washington Post that those who would use the social ills of poor children as an excuse for not educating them "are part of the problem." Welner agrees. "But," he says, "those who point to schools as an excuse for failure to address social ills are equally at fault."

Berliner explains that NCLB "focuses almost exclusively on school outputs, particularly reading and mathematics achievement test scores." He says, "The law was purposely designed to pay little attention to school inputs in order to ensure that teachers and school administrators had 'no excuses' when it came to better educating impoverished youth."

Yet, as explained in the new report, that position is not merely unrealistic, but certain to fail. Berliner says that NCLB's accountability system is "fatally flawed" because it makes schools accountable for achievement without regard for out-of-school factors.

Berliner reviews a half-dozen out-of-school factors that have been clearly linked to lower achievement among poor and minority-group students: birth weight and non-genetic parental influences; medical care; food insecurity; environmental pollution; family breakdown and stress; and neighborhood norms and conditions. Additionally, he notes a seventh factor: extended learning opportunities in the form of summer programs, after-school programs, and pre-school programs. Access to these resources by poor and minority students could help mitigate the effects of the other six factors.

Because of the extraordinary influence of the six factors that Berliner identifies, "increased spending on schools, as beneficial as that might be, will probably come up short in closing the gaps." Instead, he calls for an approach to school improvement that would demand "a reasonable level of societal accountability for children's physical and mental health and safety."

"At that point," he concludes, "maybe we can sensibly and productively demand that schools be accountable for comparable levels of academic achievement for all America's children."

Find David Berliner's report, Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success, on the web at:
http://epicpolicy.org/publication/poverty-and-potential