Leadership Matters February 2014

Tackling poverty in education a daunting challenge, but restoring GSA would help This year marks the 50 th anniversary of President 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.”

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

Message from the Executive Director Dr. Brent Clark

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)

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

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