5
Poverty: Elephant in public education classroom
By Michael Chamness
IASA Director of Communications
Poverty. It’s the elephant in the classrooms of
public schools across Illinois. Generational poverty is
a vicious cycle. Many children in poverty are at a
distinct disadvantage when they start school and that
learning gap grows. If they fail to get a college degree
or good education and they can’t find decent jobs to
support their families, then their children start school
behind other children. The cycle repeats.
Ask front-line educators about the greatest
predictor of school success and many will tell you
that it is what happens or doesn’t happen in the
home. Standardized tests simply confirm the
prognosis.
Consider the words of Diane Ravitch, a research
professor at New York University and author of “The
Death and Life of the Great American School
System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining
Education.” In a column published by the New York
Times in May of 2011, Ravitch wrote:
“The achievement gap between children from
different income levels exists before children enter
school…
Families are children’s most important educators.
Our society must invest in parental education,
prenatal care and preschool. Of course, schools must
improve; everyone should have a stable, experienced
staff, adequate resources and a balanced curriculum
including the arts, foreign languages, history and
science.
If every child arrived in school well-nourished,
healthy and ready to learn, from a family with a stable
home and a steady income, many of our educational
problems would be solved. And that would be a
miracle.”
How prevalent is poverty in Illinois schools?
Using the federal eligibility guidelines for the free or
reduced lunch programs, almost half (49.9 percent)
of the K-12 students in Illinois were considered to be
from low-income families in 2013, up 33 percent from
2002 (37.5 percent).
Theories abound as to why kids from low-income
families struggle in school, from middle-class
teachers not understanding how to reach children
from poverty-stricken backgrounds to the more
obvious notion that children who are hungry, scared
or without family support systems may be thinking
more about survival than English or math.
“Illinois’ proportion of low-income students has
grown from 37.5 percent of the enrollment in 2002 to
(Continued on page 6)
