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ОглавлениеChapter 2
How Schools Have Failed the Children of Poverty
“It took me a while, but I figured it out. It’s all about poverty. All of our challenges and problems center on making our system and schools work for all kids.”
—School District Professional Development Director, Oregon
The greatest challenge facing public education in the United States today is educating all students to proficiency and truly leaving no child behind. The most difficult aspect of this challenge is teaching the underachieving children of poverty. These students live on the other side of the apartheid of despair and represent a huge and growing underclass of Americans who have been locked out of the world of abundance and opportunity that characterizes America.
These students are the children of the “other America.” They live in conditions far more typical of a third world nation than what is typical of the vast majority of children and youth living in the richest nation on earth. These are the “forgotten kids”—the disadvantaged, disconnected, and dislocated. Their parents have little education and often work several low-paying jobs, still unable to make ends meet. They are often without adequate health care, nutrition, housing, and clothing. They experience little educational stimulation outside of school. They do not have computers, calculators, encyclopedias, books, and magazines; most do not have even pencils and paper. Many arrive at school with significant deficiencies in their vocabulary and reading readiness and are far behind their more advantaged classmates. Without enormous attention and intervention, they fall even further behind. Few will ever catch up, and most will drop out of school. The children of poverty often comprise a significant portion of a school’s enrollment, and their only hope for escaping the cycle of poverty is a high-quality education.
The great promise to all U.S. citizens has always been freedom and justice for all and the right to a free public education. Unfortunately, vast numbers of poor and disadvantaged minority students in our nation have not realized this promise. The reality for them is freedom and justice for some and the right to an inferior public school education. Far too often, schools have blamed poor families for their children’s deficiencies and have in effect waged war against our neediest students.
Poverty in the United States
“My high school had over 4,000 students. I couldn’t dress like most of the other students, couldn’t afford to go out to lunch every day … just didn’t fit in very well. I wasn’t just lost in the mob…. I was invisible. No one knew my name. No one cared if I came to school. So I didn’t.”
—Student, Miami, Florida
The number of poor students attending public school in the United States is staggering. Poverty exists in all ethnic groups and in every geographic region; it often plagues many generations in a family and thus perpetuates a vicious cycle of despair for the neediest children. Unfortunately, in recent years, the economic conditions for the nation’s children have further disintegrated. As of 1999, more than 12 million children were living in poverty in America (Payne, 2001). By 2003, the number of children living in poverty had risen to over 18% of all children in the United States—or over 13 million children (U.S. Census Bureau, 2005). In 2003, it was reported that 23% of America’s families lived at or below the federal poverty level of $18,400 for a family of four (Cauthen, 2006). Yet according to the National Center for Children in Poverty, it would take twice that amount to provide food and housing in most parts of the United States (Cauthen, 2006). Of the millions of America’s children residing in low-income families, 64% are Latino, 37% are African-American, and 34% are white (Cauthen, 2006).
In 1990, it was estimated that at least 40% of the children in the United States were minority, poor, and imminently at risk of school failure. These numbers continued to increase into the new century. There has also been a significant increase in enrollment of African-American, Hispanic, and Asian children in public schools: Between 1976 and 1996, the percentages of minority students in U.S. public and private schools increased from 24% to 36% (Goodwin, 2000). By the year 2010, that number could increase to 42%. From 1978 to 1998, enrollment of Latino elementary students increased over 150% (Latinos in Schools, 2001). Most states are projecting 20% to 40% increases in Hispanic student enrollment in public schools during the next 20 years (Land & Legters, 2002). A significant percentage of these minority students are poor (Land & Legters, 2002). Educating these at-risk students to proficiency presents a significant challenge for public schools.
Who Are the Students at Risk?
The children of poverty come from homes with few books and little or no technology other than a television. They too often suffer from poor nutrition, poor health care, and little educational stimulation. Research has documented that they come to school with a limited vocabulary and few reading readiness skills. In recent years, researchers have identified a number of specific factors that place students at risk of failing in school. By the late 1990s, more than 45% of our students were characterized by one or more of these factors:
Being culturally diverse and living in poverty
Having limited English proficiency
Having parents with less than a high school education
Living with a single parent (Land & Legters, 2002)
It is no surprise that being a minority, living in poverty, and speaking a language other than English top this list of critical factors. In 2004, researchers at the Center for Civic Innovation at the Manhattan Institute identified a more complex set of student factors that influence a child’s well-being and capacity to learn (Greene & Forster, 2004):
Readiness
Community
Race
Economics
Health
Family
The researchers used these factors as benchmarks of “teachability” to compare state efforts to teach children who possess these factors. The authors of this study analyzed state data on the factors and then created a “Teachability Index” that compared school achievement with the factors. The Teachability Index provides a far more comprehensive set of variables that may influence student achievement than earlier efforts to analyze the challenges in identifying at-risk learners. The 16 factors each have a documented relationship to student achievement. Since each variable contributes to the challenge of teaching a particular student, the Teachability Index provides a unique approach to developing an individualized profile for each student (Greene & Forster, 2004).
While each factor in the Teachability Index has a stand-alone impact on student achievement, the more factors that a particular student has, the more confounding the challenges of effective teaching and learning will be. For example, a student at the poverty level living in a single-parent family with a mother who is a Spanish-speaking high school dropout and is using a drug will often have a significantly greater challenge in learning than a student from a two-parent, English-speaking family living at the poverty level. Schools are using the Teachability Index to identify as early as possible students who have the greatest learning challenges. The personalized profiles developed for each student can be used as a basis for individualized learning plans. The Teachability Index factors are listed in figure 2.1.
Figure 2.1: The Teachability Index (Greene & Forster, 2004, p. 4)
Researchers have helped schools throughout the United States understand the life conditions that adversely affect student achievement. To ensure that all students learn effectively, schools must stop blaming students for their deficiencies and must develop programs and practices designed to address their needs. This is precisely what high-performing, high-poverty schools have been doing. Unfortunately, many school policies, practices, and programs continue to damage students and “manufacture” low achievement. Often it is not the students who are failing, but the schools who have failed the students.
“Poor Underachieving Children Can’t Catch Up”
The American public school system’s lack of effectiveness in teaching children and youth with low socioeconomic status is our nation’s single greatest educational failure. While there have always been isolated, but remarkable, examples of schools and classrooms with high-poverty, high-achieving students, they unfortunately stand in stark exception to a national tradition of failure and humiliation. The statistics of the failures of our public educational system are sobering:
One-fourth of all American youth drop out of high school. The vast majority of these students are poor or disadvantaged minorities. Few of these students ever achieve middle-class status during their lifetimes, thus perpetuating the cycle of poverty. Most of these students face lives of unemployment, or at best underemployment.
There is a direct relationship between students who are illiterate and those who drop out of school. More than 50% of the 1.8 million men and women in prison in the United States today are illiterate high school dropouts.
One-fourth of all high school graduates who progress to higher education drop out of college.
One-third of all college freshmen take remedial classes. (National Commission on the High School Senior Year, 2001)
In addition, a recent study funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation concluded that only two of every three students who enter high school will graduate (Bridgeland, Dilulio, & Morison, 2006).
A main reason for the failure of public education to educate poor children and youth is the serious misconception regarding poverty that was reinforced by the Coleman study of 1966, which concluded that even a good school will have little effect on the achievement of poor children. This flawed conclusion reinforced the racism and class prejudice of educators and provided a faulty motivation and rationale for decades of disastrous school policies, practices, and programs that helped to impede generation after generation of poor or minority students. Since it was believed that underachieving, poor children could not catch up, few if any were surprised when these students failed, were retained, or were placed in slow-learning or special education classes and ultimately dropped out of school.
Because of the belief that many poor children could not catch up to the level of their advantaged peers, federal, state, and district policies, programs, and practices evolved that have subsequently failed generations of poverty-level youth. Several decades of research have documented the disastrous effects of these ineffective educational approaches. The vast majority of poor children have traditionally been assigned to poor schools and school districts where the per-pupil funding is dramatically lower than in affluent communities. They have often been subjected to less-qualified teachers in less-challenging courses. They have been disproportionately retained, tracked, and assigned to special education or have frequently been assigned to in-school suspension or detention when they act out in frustration or anger. They have been excluded and expelled. In many states, poor, underachieving students have been removed from regular classrooms and placed in pseudo-alternative schools and programs where the goal is behavior modification rather than academic acceleration. The majority of students segregated in these flawed interventions have been poor, male, and minority (Barr & Parrett, 2003; Levin, 2006). Many poor children in the U.S. receive Title I or other pull-out reading support, but until very recently, the majority of these students never learned to read effectively. They have been victims of an insidious bell-curve mentality and, along with their families, have been blamed for frequent mobility, lack of motivation, and low performance.
Scholars have continued to document the disastrous effects these practices have had on low-socioeconomic-status and minority students. The belief that poor children could not catch up has not helped poor students; rather, it has stigmatized, isolated, and abandoned the very students who are in the most desperate need of our help.
Destructive Policies, Programs, and Practices
Many destructive school policies, programs, and practices used for decades in this country have resulted in long-term negative effects on low-performing minority and poor students. These approaches exacerbate and complicate the problems of poor and minority students, and seriously affect their ability to learn effectively, succeed in school, and achieve economic success in later life. Many of these approaches are still used widely in public schools throughout the United States—in spite of research documenting their tragic effects on students (Barr & Parrett, 2001, 2003). Everyone who is committed to ensuring that all students reach proficiency and achieve success in school should be aware of these approaches and work to eliminate them.
Lack of choice
Inequitable school funding
Inexperienced, poorly prepared teachers
Ineffective teaching practices
Retention and tracking
Misassignment to special education
Over-reliance on medication to modify behavior
Pullout programs
Schools that are too big
Suspension and expulsion
Educational neglect
Lack of Choice
Poor students and parents have traditionally been denied choice in the vast majority of public schools. Most students, even today, are assigned to schools, teachers, programs, and educational tracks based on a street address. Many affluent and middle-class parents choose their place of residence based on school performance, or they choose private schools. Poor families are often trapped in underfunded, failing schools (Nathan, 1989, 1996).
Inequitable School Funding
Distressed neighborhoods or communities are usually served by schools with significantly fewer financial resources. Analysis by the Education Trust and others show that many states provide the lowest levels of financial support to their highest-poverty school districts. Students who depend the most on public education for their academic development are often getting the least (Carey, 2003).
Twenty-two states continue to fund high-poverty schools and districts at a lower rate than affluent school districts (Haycock, 2003). Most recently, California has committed $188 million as the result of a class-action lawsuit that contended that the state neglected its low-income students. The money will repair buildings and purchase textbooks for 2,400 low-performing schools (Asimov, 2004). More experienced, better-trained teachers with higher salaries and graduate degrees are more likely to be found in more affluent schools. Funding public education with property tax revenue creates a tragic economic “funding gap” that continues to dramatically separate public schools into the rich and the poor (Kozol, 2005).
Inexperienced, Poorly Prepared Teachers
Low-socioeconomic-status students are five times more likely than affluent students to have inexperienced teachers. In every subject area in high-poverty schools, students are more likely to be taught by less well-prepared teachers. In math and science, only about half of the teachers in schools with 90% or greater minority enrollment meet their state’s minimum requirements for certification (Fenwick, 2001). In Florida, teachers at poor schools were 44% more likely to have failed the basic skills test than those at rich schools. The gap in teacher scores is even more pronounced in predominantly minority schools (Associated Press, 2004). Unfortunately, these patterns can be found in poverty-level and minority schools regardless of the measure of teacher qualification, experience, certification, academic preparedness, or performance on licensing tests. Kati Haycock concludes, “We take the students who most depend on their teachers for subject-matter learning and assign them to teachers with the weakest academic foundation” (Jerald, 2001, p. 1).
Ineffective Teaching Practices
Many schools fail to effectively teach poor and minority students the essential skills necessary for success in school. Many poor and minority students arrive at school unprepared to learn, and without intensive remediation, they fall further and further behind. If students do not learn to read by the end of the third grade, they face a number of unfortunate consequences (Barr & Parrett, 2001, 2003; Karoly et al., 1998). If students do not learn to read—and read well—in their early school years, they cannot do their homework or school work. Many will ultimately drop out of school. Few of these students are any more successful outside of school than they were at school, and far too many will live out their lives unemployed or unemployable.
Retention and Tracking
In too many schools, students who do not master basic skills are required to repeat the grade level again, or they are tracked into basic classes with low expectations. Students who are retained and tracked almost never catch up to their age-group peers, and many fail to ever advance from the slow-learning track (Fager & Richen, 1999; Loveless, 1998). Many children of poverty are also assigned to in-school suspension or expelled. In many states, poor, underachieving students have been removed from regular school and placed in low-performing or failing alternative schools and programs where the goal is behavior modification rather than acceleration. Most of the students segregated into these interventions have been poor, male, and minority, and the results have been tragic. A recent review of a Texas program (Alternative Disciplinary Schools) serving over 100,000 predominantly African-American, Hispanic, and poor male K–12 students found these students were:
Assigned to schools where instruction occurred only 2 hours per day
Undiagnosed for reading levels
Left without basic knowledge
Provided instruction in a multi-grade-level class
Limited to working with textbooks and worksheets
The students were removed from regular classes, assigned to special programs for as little as 10 days, and then returned to their regular classroom. As a result of this educational disruption, the students fell further behind, and large numbers ultimately dropped out of school. This practice, in effect, constitutes a type of racial cleansing of public education in the state of Texas.
Misassignment to Special Education
Far too many teachers and schools are quick to order special education assessments for students who “just don’t fit in.” Unfortunately, the reasons for this poor fit may have more to do with learning environment than with students’ learning deficiencies. Research over the last two decades has documented the unfortunate effects of mismatching students’ learning styles with teachers’ instructional styles. Overused and ineffective strategies that contribute to this mismatch include the drills, worksheets, and lectures that are used so often with poor students (Barr & Parrett, 2003; Haberman, 1991). For the underachieving students of poverty, misassignment to special education can deny them the opportunities and high expectations awarded to regular education students (Barr & Parrett, 2001).
Over-Reliance on Medication to Modify Behavior
During the last two decades, millions of children have been prescribed medication intended to improve their school behavior and achievement. Today, as many as 1 in 10 students in the United States are medicated. Boys are medicated five times more often than girls. While such medication does indeed render many students more passive, less active, and more obedient, questions abound regarding the scope of its effectiveness relating to achievement and the long-term effects of this over-reliance on medication (Barr & Parrett, 2001).
Pullout Programs
Historically, many intervention programs have pulled students out from their regular classrooms to provide instruction in reading. For decades, Title I reading programs used a pullout approach as a primary strategy. But when students are pulled out of their regular classrooms, they miss regular classroom instruction and interaction with higher-performing peers. Decades of study have documented how little success these programs have had with poor children (Barr & Parrett, 2001).
Schools That Are Too Big
The United States has far too many schools that have lost the asset of community due to huge enrollments. For many poor and minority students, a small school with a personalized environment is essential for their educational needs. In big schools, these students often feel “isolated, anonymous, and alienated, and they sometimes become disrupters, bullies, or victims of bullies. Others simply underachieve or drop out. The larger the school, the more student disruptions can be expected. For every additional 600 students in a school, there is a corresponding increase in negative student behavior. Conversely, studies demonstrate an almost total lack of violence and considerably higher student academic success in small schools” (Howley & Bickel, 2002, p. 21).
Suspension and Expulsion
Suspension and expulsion do little to help students. Students suspended from school for a few days will only return to school further behind and may become even more disconnected from school. They also tend to become repeat disrupters. Expulsion is perhaps the most disastrous school policy. Too many students who are unable to cope in a school setting have been turned out into the community without supervision and have gone on to participate in antisocial or even criminal behavior. Expelled students often find themselves arrested and incarcerated (Colorado Foundation for Families and Children, 1995).
Educational Neglect
Recent research has identified yet another practice that has had detrimental effects on the children of poverty: educational neglect (Kelly, 2006). A recent study on educational neglect at the Center for School Improvement at Boise State University found that almost two million (1,708,463) school-aged children nationwide were unaccounted for educationally: It is not known where or if they are being educated, if they have dropped out, been expelled, are home-schooled, or have moved to another school. It was found that 15 states do not even know the number of students being educated through home schooling in their state. This leads to the conclusion that many school districts and states do not care whether or not children are being educated—as long as their poor performance is not counted in school, district, and state No Child Left Behind assessment reports. This raises another issue since many students who are unaccounted for have most likely dropped out. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation report (Bridgeland, Dilulio, & Morison, 2006) found that few students drop out of school prior to their 16th birthday, which is the end of compulsory schooling in almost every state. The report questions why states have not raised the age for compulsory schooling until high school graduation (Kelly, 2006).
Many of these destructive policies, programs, and practices are still used in spite of decades of research that has documented their ineffectiveness. One explanation of the continued use of these destructive activities is that they are so ingrained into the culture of schools in the United States that they are justified, not by thoughtful research, but through unfortunate and widely believed mythologies about teaching and learning—or worse, through racism and class prejudice.
The Pedagogy of Poverty
In addition to these destructive approaches, there are strong indications that poor and minority students also suffer from ineffective classroom instructional practices. Researchers such as Martin Haberman have concluded that public schools continue to use instructional practices that are not effective for poor and culturally diverse students. Haberman and others have come to describe these ineffective instructional practices as the “pedagogy of poverty” (Haberman, 1991; Padrón, Waxman, & Rivera, 2002). These practices include the overuse of the following:
Teacher-controlled discussions and decision-making. Teacher-centered classrooms have a debilitating effect on poor and minority students. Research has shown that students need hands-on, involved learning in order to learn effectively. In addition, teacher attitudes and prejudices have a powerful influence on learning—both good and bad. If a teacher holds low expectations for poor and minority students, and he or she controls the discussions and decision-making in the classroom, poor and minority students are destined for low achievement.
Lecture, drill, and practice techniques. These strategies have been documented as some of the techniques most frequently used with poor and minority students. They have also been documented as some of the most ineffective strategies used with any student.
Worksheets. These tend to be “upgrades” of questions typically found in textbooks at the end of the chapter. Some ineffective classes use these “worksheets du jour” on a regular basis.
Other researchers (Jagers & Carroll, 2002; Barr & Parrett, 2001, 2003) have identified additional ineffective instructional practices:
Cultural aberration. Many public schools reflect middle-class values, thus creating a “collision of cultures” with the value structures of poor and minority students.
Low-quality of education. Observations in classrooms of predominately poor and minority students have found that the lessons and assignments are significantly less demanding than those found in middle-class classrooms. Poor and minority students spend a remarkable amount of time making collages and posters and coloring pictures under the guise of “hands-on learning.” Poor and minority students are often tracked into general education courses in which regular subject matter from the academic disciplines has been replaced with courses like “opportunity math” for students who supposedly cannot learn algebra.
Low expectations. Research has documented that a poor student is five times more likely to have an inexperienced or inadequately trained teacher, and these teachers often focus their instruction on achievement levels that reflect a cultural bias; for example, teachers often do not believe poor and minority students can achieve high academic proficiency, so instruction and assignments are watered down to low levels of expectation.
Classroom practices that are unresponsive to students. Too many classroom teachers focus their energy on what is taught rather than on what is learned. Effective teachers focus their lessons first on the needs of their students.
After visiting urban schools throughout the United States, Kati Haycock and her colleagues were stunned not only by how little was expected of poor students, but also by the low level of classroom assignments that were given to them. Even worse, in high-poverty middle and high schools, Haycock reported a surprising number of coloring assignments, rather than assignments in writing and math: “Even at the high school level, we found coloring assignments. ‘Read To Kill a Mockingbird, says the 11th-grade English teacher, ‘and when you’re finished, color a poster about it’” (Haycock, 2001, p. 8).
Eliminating the Bigotry of Low Expectations
“When I became superintendent, I carefully reviewed data from throughout the school district. I was surprised to see that 800 students in our largest high school had not taken algebra, and they were not scheduled to take algebra in the future. When confronted with the data, [the principal of the school] looked puzzled and shrugged. ‘I guess they just kinda fell through the cracks,’ he explained. I reacted fairly quickly: ‘It must have been a hell of a crack!’ Upon further examination, I learned all 800 students were African American. I directed the principal to immediately schedule all of the students in pre-algebra and then algebra. He shook his head and explained, ‘I can’t do that. The schedule has already been completed.’ I responded, ‘Today is Friday. You have all weekend to make the necessary adjustments. I want the revised schedule in my office on Monday morning.’”
—Superintendent, North Carolina
While the bigotry of low expectations appears to be far less pervasive in recent years, it does linger on. In his closing statement in a recent South Carolina school finance case, an attorney for the state remarked: “The effects [poverty] has are deeply embedded in society and culture in the state. Is altering the effects of poverty something schools can do, or is that something society has to muster? The answer is no, we don’t know how to do this. It’s not happening anywhere” (Richards, 2005, p. 19). In fact, it is happening—in many schools and districts in South Carolina and across the country. Poor children are indeed achieving at high levels.
Evidence abounds to support an immediate expansion of the successful intervention practices currently being employed with underachieving, poor youth (Barr & Parrett, 2001). Despite decades of research regarding the detrimental approaches used in public education, too many educators have yet to acknowledge the proven consequences of these destructive practices and replace them with more effective approaches to educating poor students.
Educators must address the pedagogy and mythology of the past to create schools that can indeed effectively educate the underachieving children of poverty. Critical to reorganizing schools and classrooms for success is the need to support and enhance the capacity of classroom teachers. Without question, it is the child’s teacher who represents hope and promise for our under-performing poor children.
The next chapter provides an overview of the research, evaluation, and data analyses conducted on high-performing, high-poverty schools. It includes a wide variety of classrooms, schools, school districts, and community strategies that have been unusually effective in improving the achievement and school success of the underachieving children of poverty.
