Leadership Matters February 2014

Poverty in the public education classroom

Poverty & achievement gap: Teachers can be most important factor

By Dr. Peter Flynn Every school district in Illinois and our nation is concerned about improving student achievement for all students. To help all students we must examine the results of sub-groups, where we see the most startling differences invariably emerging among racial minorities and students of poverty. Are these differences just a “fact of life” or is it a challenge that we can overcome? From research on the national level we know that there is a high correlation (as high as .97 and .98) between students scoring lower on high-stakes tests and their parents’ income level. The same statistics emerge when looking at children in Illinois. In a February 2011 article in Catalyst Chicago Magazine titled “More Illinois children living in poverty, at risk of school failure,” it reported: “ Among the 10 largest states, Illinois had the second-widest achievement gap between students in poverty and other students. In the 2010 Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT), only 60% of low -income 8th grade students met state standards, while 88% of other students did so.” Poverty in and of itself is not necessarily a debilitating factor. Some families in poverty lack resources for such important skills as language development. For example, a lack of books, magazines or conversations with children by the adults puts children of poverty at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to the opportunity to hear and learn words. We can safely draw the conclusion from the research on poverty and achievement that there is a strong likelihood that children from conditions of poverty will not score as well on state assessments or nationally standardized tests without some intervention. The intervention that is required to overcome any anticipated disadvantage for the condition of poverty is usually a combination of three or more elements such as: lower class size (especially with K-3), a developmentally appropriate curriculum, and the consistent use of research-proven best practices. In the interest of time and space, let us deal with instructional practices, and for that we turn to the

Dr. Peter Flynn served as superintendent of schools in four states for a total of more than 33 years, including 12 in the Freeport School District until his retirement in 2012. His previous experience included 21 years as a superintendent of

Dr. Peter Flynn

research of Marzano, Pickering and others. Robert Marzano, based upon his many years working for the Mid-Continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL), conducted a meta- analysis of more than 1,200 experimental studies on instructional strategies that had high success as evidenced on more than 100,000 student achievement scores. Through this analysis, Marzano developed a way of notating the potential success of specific classroom practices with “effect size,” or the strength of a phenomenon. A classroom strategy with an effect size of 1.0 could yield as much as a 34 percentile gain on a standardized test. For example, if a teacher were to faithfully and consistently use the practice of helping students to see the similarities and differences between the new skill or knowledge they are learning with something that they already know, this could have an effect size of 1.6 or an impact that is far greater than that of (Continued on page 16) Superintendents Association of America and a current member and Past President of the Century Club (100 Superintendents in the United States). Dr. Flynn was honored by IASA as the 2012 Illinois Superintendent of the Year. schools in Kentucky, Iowa and Pennsylvania. Prior to that, he was a central office administrator, college professor and a classroom teacher. Dr. Flynn for the past 13 years has co-chaired a poverty working group in Stephenson County. He is a current member and past president of the Urban

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