3
Tackling poverty in education a daunting
challenge, but restoring GSA would help
This year marks the 50
th
anniversary
of
President
Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on
Poverty.” Statistically, not much
has changed in those 50 years
with regard to poverty. Whether
it’s talking to those on the front
lines of public education or
studying the wealth of research on the topic, there
can be no denying that poverty is the biggest
obstacle facing students, teachers and school
administrators. It is, as the theme of this month’s
edition of
Leadership Matters
suggests, the elephant
in the classroom.
Presidents from both parties as well as many
education reformers have taken the approach that
schools must simply overcome the problems
associated with poverty, no excuses accepted.
President George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind”
law set unrealistically high standards that have
resulted in most schools failing to meet them.
President Obama’s approach has been to emphasize
evaluating teachers based on test scores and
encouraging the creation of charter schools as an
alternative to public schools though there is no
consistent research that shows charters fare any
better than public schools overall.
Consider a paper written by Helen F. Ladd,
professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy at
Duke University. The paper was titled “Education and
Poverty: Confronting the Evidence,” and the abstract
said:
“Current U.S. policy initiatives to improve the U.S.
education system, including No Child Left Behind,
test-based evaluation of teachers and the promotion
of competition, are misguided because they either
deny or set to the side a basic body of evidence
documenting that students from disadvantaged
households on average perform less well in school
than those from more advantaged families. Because
these policy initiatives do not directly address the
educational
challenges
experienced
by
disadvantaged students, they have contributed little --
and are not likely to contribute much in the future -- to
raising overall student achievement or to reducing
achievement and educational attainment gaps
between advantaged and disadvantaged students.
Moreover, such policies have the potential to do
serious harm. Addressing the educational challenges
faced by children from disadvantaged families will
require a broader and bolder approach to education
policy than the recent efforts to reform schools.”
The paper goes on to cite research conducted by
Sean F. Reardon of Stanford University, who studied
more than 50 years of data and concluded that the
achievement gap between high-income and low-
income students now far exceeds the gap between
white and African American students.
There are, Ladd writes, several possible public
policy responses to this problem, including:
1.
Reducing the incidence of poverty.
We’ve had the “War on Poverty” that dates
back to the 1960s and various other
programs, but the poverty rate just keeps on
climbing.
2.
Denying the issue and expecting
schools alone to deal with any adverse
effects in the educational context.
This
essentially is the approach taken by NCLB
and many education reform groups. Some
truly believe in the “no excuses” approach,
while others might subscribe to the theory
that we need to avoid what President Bush
called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”
Of course, there are outliers -- schools that
have overcome great odds -- but even those
are few and most have had trouble sustaining
their success. A fourth possible reason Ladd
says for policymakers to ignore the evidence
linking poverty to low achievement in school is
one she labeled as “more nefarious”: to
discredit public schools in order to generate
pressure for greater privatization of the
education system.
3.
Setting the poverty context aside and
focusing on improving school quality by
reducing inefficiencies.
Ladd includes under
this heading the use of high-stakes testing for
the evaluation of teachers, and providing
competition for public schools through the
creation of charter schools and the use of
school vouchers. She acknowledges that this
approach actually could do harm by draining
resources from public schools.
4.
Directly addressing the challenges
(Continued on page 4)
Message from the
Executive Director
Dr. Brent Clark
