Building on Success
The correlation between education, poverty and health is so tight that I sometimes think we need to address the three simultaneously. Often this just isn’t feasible. But there are places in our society where the three problems come together in a way that invites a battle on all three fronts. Consider, for example, our nation’s poorest public schools.
In part 1 of this post, I talked about President Obama’s plan to rebuild our crumbling public education system. While the president’s blueprint defines an excellent beginning for the project, Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, points to one element that is missing: a program that would take poor children out of the ghetto, away from the environment that is undermining both their education and their health..
The notion of plucking children out of their neighborhood may seem elitist. Why not rebuild the schools in their neighborhoods?
Because, experience shows, it is very, very hard to turn a poor school into a school where children flourish and learn. It can be done—and has been done many times. But usually only one or at most two schools in a neighborhood are saved. The rest remain broken.
Why is it so difficult to rescue a school? Begin with the physical plant. Imagine a first-grade classroom in the Bronx, just a few blocks from Yankee stadium. (The details that follow describe an actual classroom; this is not a composite.) Windows that haven’t been washed for years don’t open. Often, the room is hot. The blackboard can’t be used because it is charred—two or three years earlier some children set the room on fire. The custodian’s cat cannot keep up with the mice; their droppings and their decaying corpses pollute air that, in the Bronx, is already contaminated with black carbon (soot). Respiratory infections are commonplace. The number of miscarriages among teachers is startling.
The children cannot use the playground in front of the school because, too often, the residents of nearby buildings throw bottles and garbage from their windows down onto the children. In the classroom, supplies are sketchy. The teacher buys crayons, pencils, construction paper and books to read to her students– and a rug to cover the filthy floor.
Substitute teachers refuse to come to this school, so when a teacher is out sick, other first-grade teachers have to divide his or her 24 children and add them to their classrooms. Many children need special attention.
Because there are too few special education classes in the district, a first-grade is likely to have three or four children suffering from severe emotional or mental problems. Often these children have been held back for one or two years so they are bigger and stronger than the other children. For example, in this classroom one eight-year-old throws chairs and even desks when he becomes agitated. One outburst can ignite the rest of the room, and pandemonium ensues. Often the police come to the school, and on more than one occasion an emotionally distraught child is taken away in an ambulance. And this is first grade.
What I have described is an environment that is hostile to learning. Even if you could lure the finest teachers and administrators to the school (and there are, in fact, a number of dedicated educators working in this school) there is be a limit to what they could do. Too many children coming from unsettled homes that lack consistent rules and routines are packed twenty to twenty-four to a classroom
The Statistics on Learning in Poor vs Middle-Class Schools
The numbers confirm that this classroom is far from unique. In “Can Separate Be Equal: The Overlooked Flaw At the Center of No Child Left Behind,” Richard Kahlenberg observes that in our cities and suburbs our public schools are segregated by income. And concentrations of poverty in some schools create a setting where children are far less likely to learn than in middle-class schools. Consider this statistic: “the reading level of the average, low-income twelfth grader is the same as that of the average, middle-class eighth grader—regardless of race.”
Overall, Kahlenberg reports, a middle-class school is twenty-two times as likely to be consistently high performing as a high poverty school (a school in which at least 50 percent of students qualify for free or reduce-priced lunches) “High-performing” is defined as a school “in the top third in the state in two subjects, in two grades, and over a two year time period.”
There could be many reasons why low-income students lag middle-class peers, beginning with a lack of parental involvement in the child’s education at an early age. Kahlenberg acknowledges that “Low-income students, on average, come to school less ready to learn. But the concentration of poverty in certain schools has an independent effect.” In other words, while the home is important, the environment where the child is educated also plays a key role.
When Do Poorer Child Outperform Middle-Class Children?
How do we know? “While research finds that low-income students do worse than middle-class students, on average,” Kahlenberg explains, “there is one exception to this rule: low-income students attending middle-class schools perform higher, on average, than middle-class children attending high-poverty schools.
The figure below demonstrates this phenomenon. The top line tracks the score of middle-class students on the fourth grade National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) in math, and the bottom line shows the scores of low-income students. Students from both groups do better on the left side of the figure (in middle-class schools) and do worse as they move to the right (in high-poverty schools). Strikingly, low-income students in middle-class schools score better than middle-class students in the highest-poverty school.” Clearly, the school environment makes an enormous difference, both for middle-class and for poor children.
How Are Middle-Class Schools Different?
The problem with “No Child Left Behind” is that “it does nothing directly to address America’s long-standing problem of separately educating poor and middle-class children,” Kahlenberg writes. “More than fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, NCLB is an effort, like most education reform, to make separate but equal work.
“But this approach is likely to fail,” he continues, “because research finds that what all students need most is the good learning environment found in majority middle-class schools. Specifically:
“Middle-class schools have an adequate financial base (as measured against student needs) to provide small class size, modern equipment, and the like. Most studies find that low-income students need considerably more spent on their education than middle-class students do in order to produce high levels of achievement, yet affluent districts spend a cost-adjusted $938 more per pupil, compared to high-poverty districts.
Middle-class schools are more likely to spend money on the classroom than on bureaucracy. One reason for this difference is that there is less pressure in middle-class areas to make education a jobs program for adults in the community, because plenty of well-paying private sector jobs are available
for middle-class parents.
Middle-class schools provide an orderly environment. Indeed, middle-class schools report disorder problems half as often as high-poverty schools, and low-income schools are about three times as likely to report the presence of street gangs as more affluent schools.
Middle-class schools have a more stable student population, which makes it more likely that learning will occur. For example, in one study the percentage of students who transferred two or more times between schools in a two year period was 23 percent in high-poverty schools, compared with just 12 percent in affluent schools.
Middle-class schools have strong principals and well-qualified teachers trained in the subjects they are teaching. Research shows that teachers in middle-class schools are more likely to be licensed, less likely to teach out of their fields of expertise, less likely to have low teacher test scores, less likely to be inexperienced, and more likely to have greater formal education
Middle-class schools have a better curricula and higher expectations. For example, middle-class schools also are more likely to offer Advanced Placement classes and high-level math.
Middle-class schools have active parental involvement. For example, middle class parents are twice as likely to volunteer in the classroom or serve on a school committee and are much more likely to participate in fund raising.
Middle-class schools have motivated peers who value achievement and can encourage excellence among classmates. Peers in middle-class schools are more likely to do homework, less likely to watch television, less likely to cut class, and more likely to graduate—all of which have been found to influence the behavior of classmates. Moreover, high-achieving peers in middle-class schools share their knowledge informally with classmates all day long. For example, a child who attends a middle-class school is likely to be surrounded by peers who have a much richer vocabulary than students in high-poverty schools.
Looking at these facts, Kahlenberg’s recommends integrating schools, not by race, but by income, moving low-income students into middle-class suburban schools, transferring a few students into each classroom.
The idea sounds radical. Wouldn’t the low-income students disrupt classrooms, interfering with the middle-class students’ education, pulling down the quality of the entire school? How would suburban parents feel about children from the ghetto being bussed into their neighborhood? How would teachers cope with students who suffer from the emotional problems that so often accompany poverty?
The answer, the program can work when poor children are integrated into suburban classrooms in small groups. Young children do not like to be “different.” For this reason, they tend to model themselves on their peers. When very young low-income students find themselves in a classroom where students rarely shout out and no one runs around, they are likely to imitate the majority.
We know this because the initiative Kahlenberg recommends already is working, in .St. Louis, Hartford, Boston, Milwaukee, Rochester, and Indianapolis–cities that, for years, have enabled several thousand minority students to attend suburban schools on a voluntary basis.
Building on What Works
In a recent report titled “Education: Building on Success,” Greg Anrig, vice-president for Policy at The Century Foundation observes that both during his campaign and during his early months in office, “Barack Obama has defined his policy goals in pragmatic rather than ideological terms. For example, President Obama said in a recent interview, ‘Our challenge is going to be identifying what works and putting more money into that, eliminating things that don’t work, and making things that we have more efficient’”.
Anrig then goes on to describe the Voluntary Inter-District Transfer Program in St. Louis, Missouri, as an idea that works: “The St. Louis program was originally included as part of a 1983 school desegregation order, and has allowed as many as 13,000 African-American students to attend public schools in sixteen participating suburbs.. Even though the federal judge who presided over the court case recently said that the program was no longer required, all sixteen communities agreed to continue it, and thirteen decided to accept new students even though state funding for each transfer student was reduced. The superintendent of the affluent Clayton School District said after the vote endorsing continuation of the program, “You all know how I feel about this program. . . . It’s a very special thing.”
Anrig explains that “In The Century Foundation’s newly published volume, Improving on No Child Left Behind, Jennifer Jellison Holme and Amy Stuart Wells synthesize research that has been conducted over the years on these cross-district initiatives. Because the St. Louis program was the largest and most closely studied effort, it makes sense to focus on that model.
“Overall, the main findings from the St. Louis research show that African-American students from the city who transferred to suburban schools did not show significant gains on academic tests in the elementary grades; but in the long run, those who stayed in the program until they reached the tenth grade, displayed levels of achievement that far surpassed that of their peers who either remained in neighborhood city schools or attended magnet schools created as part of the court order.
“One study found that, by middle and high school, African-Americans able to attend suburban schools were scoring about 10 percent higher in reading and math than African-Americans in city middle and high schools. In addition, graduation rates were twice as high for the transfer students compared to counterparts who remained in the city schools.
“Research into the other cross-district programs consistently found that transfer students performed better on tests and other measures than those who remained in city public schools. Indeed, a multitude of studies going back to the Coleman Report in the 1960s have shown that students from low-income families who attend predominantly middle-class schools do much better than those who go to high poverty schools.
“ For example, on the 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress given to fourth graders in math, lo
w-income students attending more affluent schools were almost two years ahead of low-income students in high-poverty schools.
“Concentrations of poverty create a confluence of dynamics that make it vastly more difficult for schools to provide a quality education. But when low-income children have an opportunity to go to middle class schools—where parents are more likely to be engaged, classroom disruptions are less pervasive, teachers are better qualified on average, buildings are in better repair, instructional materials are higher quality, and peers are more likely to value learning—they have a much better chance of succeeding.
“The pending reauthorization of NCLB presents an opportunity to create new incentives and support systems to encourage much more widespread implementation of the sort of cross-district transfers that were so successful—both educationally and politically—in St. Louis and elsewhere. Holme and Wells argue for changes in NCLB that would target and support meaningful school choices for the most disadvantaged students, create strong incentives for significant participation of suburban districts, and further the goals of diversity and equity in public education.
“ Among the specific changes to NCLB that they recommend:
- Students enrolled in schools that consistently fail to achieve “adequate yearly progress” and who meet other criteria, including residency in a neighborhood with a high concentration of poverty, should become eligible for voluntary transfers to suburban schools.
- Support services, including transportation and coordination of services and information, would be provided to such students with federal funding.
- Financial incentives would be provided to help suburbs more than cover the cost of educating transfer students; “safe haven” provisions would assure the suburban districts that the test scores of students theyaccept from the city would not, for an extended period of time, be counted in assessing their adequate yearly progress in connection with NCLB.
- Funding also would be provided for support and training for educators in suburban public schools that agree to participate in the program.
“Although political resistance remains strong in many suburban communities against allowing the admittance of low-income minority children into their schools, the history of cross-district programs demonstrates that, over time, such communities evolve beyond grudging acceptance to valuing those programs as an important asset to their town—as well as beneficial to their own students. One role the federal government can play is to make the case actively that socioeconomic integration demonstrably improves the performance of schools and students.
“That bottom-line result can help to overcome concerns and fears about the idea. Considering how many other reform strategies have failed year after year, it is time for the federal government to campaign energetically for different approach that has proven to work.”
I would add that, given what we know about the link between education and health (see part 1 of this post), children who have the opportunity to study in integrated, middle-class schools are likely to benefit not only by being able to secure better jobs, but by enjoying better health for years to come. They are less likely to smoke. They might even be less likely to become obese simply because suburban schools usually offer much better athletic facilities. And all of this can be accomplished, without spending an extra penny on their health care–but simply by taking them out of an environment that was hazardous to their future in every way possible.
Maggie- Thanks for writing about education and schools.
Yup! It’s ALL connected.That is why I disagree with critics of our new President who say he is trying to do too much on too many fronts.
That is why, when the economic meltdown started, I personally began using the phrase that “JOBS was my recommended “health care plan”
Dr. Rick Lippin
Southampton,Pa
Maggie,
I think Richard Kahlenberg’s concepts are likely to work best with children of elementary school age. To abruptly transfer children of middle school or high school age from inner city schools to high performing suburban schools would likely be a tough sell to put it mildly. Even at the elementary school level, it doesn’t seem that the concept could be implemented on a large scale even if receiving districts were willing to do their part. Limitations include the number of available slots in receiving districts and the sheer distance as measured by transportation time to bus students from their homes to the suburban school.
It is certainly useful, I think, to hear an expert on the subject write about how incredibly difficult it is to turn around an inner city school almost no matter how much money is spent trying. About 10 or 15 years ago (I can’t remember exactly) I saw a television report about a state of the art high school complete with an Olympic size swimming poor that opened in a poor neighborhood in Kansas City. I never heard anything more about it after that. Presumably, it didn’t have the intended effect on student achievement.
I wonder if inner city schools, and the children who attend them, would be better served if it were much easier to remove disruptive children from the classroom and put them in an alternative setting instead. I note that private schools have the luxury of being able to expel students who are disruptive to the point where they interfere with the ability of the rest of the class to learn and the teacher to teach. I personally approve of school vouchers, not as a cure but as one tool in the tool kit to help inner city students escape dangerous and failing schools. More charter schools that can be run without a lot of the burdensome bureaucracy that contribute to the dysfunction of underperforming schools might also be helpful as would more streamlined procedures for removing poor teachers and principals. The leadership of teachers unions at both the local and national level continue to oppose vouchers and, to a lesser extent, charter schools as well as merit pay and premium pay for scarce skills like math and science teachers. They always seem to call for more of the same – more pay without accountability and salary guides driven by seniority and accumulated post graduate education credits. I think we can do better. To do so, the Obama administration will have to ruffle some feathers of one of its core constituencies, the National Education Association. I wish the president well and I hope he (as well as his Secretary of Education) are both up to the job.
In suburban districts the school funding mainly comes from local property taxes. In a wealthy district this means ample funds, and vice versa.
My local (wealthy) school district has just started to clamp down (again) on kids who give an address in the district so they can go to school here. This means that they usually use a separated parent’s or a relative’s address. The number of kids is never large, but just shows how parochial parents can be. They don’t want their taxes spent on “outsiders”.
I can’t image how one could overcome this by trying to mingle students from poorer districts. When actual busing was mentioned awhile back riots almost broke out.
The example cited above came from NYC which is all one school system and it still has wide disparities in funding and services between neighborhoods. Bloomberg and Klein talk a good game, but haven’t done anything to offend their mostly white middle class supporters.
Goals are admirable, but one needs to focus on implementation. (I seem to have said that before in a different context…)
Some nice maps which illustrate the problem:
http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=12371
Robert, Barry
Robert & Barry– you
seem to be suggesting that
this could never work, at least not on a large scale.
Did you read this sentence in the post : “initiative Kahlenberg recommends already is working, in .St. Louis, Hartford, Boston, Milwaukee, Rochester, and Indianapolis–cities that, for years, have enabled several thousand minority students to attend suburban schools on a voluntary basis.”
It’s already happening.
Americans are not as racist as some ssume. (Note: we do have an African-American president. I don’t think that could have happened 20 years ago. We have been making some progress . . .)
And Barry, this includes kids in junior high and h.s. AS I mentioned low-income kids who go to suburban schools are twice as likley to graduate from high school.
Granted, initally there is resistance. As Greg writes: Although political resistance remains strong in many suburban communities against allowing the admittance of low-income minority children into their schools, the history of cross-district programs demonstrates that, over time, such communities evolve beyond grudging acceptance to valuing those programs as an important asset to their town—as well as beneficial to their own students.”
How do the suburban kids benefit? Having contact with people coming from very different backgrounds is broadening. The suburban kids may even begn to realize how luck tghey are to have been born into a middle-class family–and to realize that it has nothing to do with their talent, or their parent’s hard work–it was just dumb luck. This is how people develop empathy, mand begin to recognize “There but for fortune . . .”
Education is about socialization as well as learning from books. Kids who go to schools where everyone looks like them are being socialized to live in a gated community.
I’ve known kids like that. When they got to Yale, they were, in a word, clueless. Naive, and often very immature.
They had not been prepared to live in the world.
The transfer of low-income kids into suburban schools might, in some cases, have to start with a court order, as it did in St. Louis, but with time, the parents began to recognize that this was good for their children.
It is striking that when the order was lifted, all 16 suburban communities wanted to continue the program and some wanted to take in more children.
This makes me feel good about this country; people can learn.
Robert– You’re right about NYC. Bloomberg and Klein have never stepped foot in the school I described. And different schools are treated very differently in terms of supplies, keeping up the physical plant, having gym classes, etc
My children went to public schools in NYC and their grammar school, on the Upper-west-side was clean; teachers had supplies and most of them were good.. Teachers vied to get a job in this school.
During the time they were in grammar school the neighborhood changed, and the school went from being a mix of white kids, Latinos and black kids to being 90% white.
But since then, shools lke this one have been opened up. Kids are bussed in from poorer neighborhoods, so it’s once again a mix of kids–and still a very good school
Some affluent parents in my neighborhood are upset becasue living in the neighborhood does not guarantee your child a spot in the school. (I think there’s a lottery that determines who gets in– but there are only so many spots for kids from this neighborhood.)
These parents feel that they paid for some very expensive real estate, s that should mean that they “bought” a place in the school.
But N.Y. is trying break the link between education and real estate.
Unfortunately, there are not enough good upper-middle-class schools to take all of the low-income kids who need to go to a better school.
This is because so many middle-class,upper middle-class and wealthy parents send their kids to private schools. Many just don’t realize what a good education their kids could get in NYC public schools. .
(I knew this becaue when I taught at Yale, some of my best students came from NYC Stuy and Bronx Science-two very good public high schools. They tended to be brighter, livelier minds than the kids who went to the “best” private schools.
The private schools had them reading Shakespeare, but they really didn’t know what they were reading. Few had any feeling for irony . . .And rather than asking questions, they took notes.
With the recession, I’m told that more relatively affluent parents will be sending their kids to public school. Some private schools are closing.
This could be good for the school system.
But ultimately, I think NY needs to start bussing kids from the Bronx and the poorest parts of Brooklyn to suburban schools (or to wealthier schools in Brooklyn and Queens).
I very much like the idea of intergrating by class rather than by race.
Barry–
A voucher system simply skims the kids whose parents have it together, and are able to find better schools for their children.
This leaves the neediest children even more isolated in a hopeless situation.
Leaving children behind is NOT the answer.
As for the teacher’s unioins–public school teachers work far harder, for less money, than any other professionals. They should be paid more. And they should not be held
“accountable” for test scores.
Goerge Bush’s testing program was all tied up withmaking money for certain publishers who were his croies.
“Teaching to a test” is a terrible idea. It doesn’t teach children how to thin, how to analyze. It doesn’t teach them to be curious, it doesn’t allow them to be imaginative.
And for a teacher . . .it is SO Boring that you drive intelligent teachers out of the profession.
There are many good ways to reach children. Teaching to a standarized test is not one of them.
Barack Obama is very intelligent man. I suspect that we’re going to see some enlightened changes in our public schools–including more bussing to the suburbs.
Dr. Rick–
Yes, it is all connected.
Maggie, Thanks for including my research on Healthbeat. Health and education do indeed both benefit from some cross-fertilization.
Barry, You raise a number of interesting points. Kansas City was a failure because they spent more money on an inner city high school (with Olympic size swimming pool etc) but didn’t bother to poll suburban parents to find out what sort of curriculum would interest them.
There is a lot of evidence that families will send their children quite long distances if what’s at the end of the bus ride is considered desirable. In Boston, minority students are willing to take very long rides (as much as a couple of hours) because they know they can get a much better education in the suburbs. Likewise, there is a long waiting list of white middle class suburban families for a Montessori school in a tough neighborhood in Hartford CT because the school is so good.
I agree with your point about discipline. Integration will never work if families with options think they kids won’t be safe. I wrote a biography of Albert Shanker a few years ago, and he made the point repeatedly that if there is not order in the classroom, little learning will go on.
Where we strongly disagree is on the issue of vouchers. There is no evidence that vouchers produce superior outcomes to giving students a chance to attend good suburban schools. And I’m not ready to give up on the public schools which remain one of the few institutions providing glue in our diverse society.
Rick–
Thansk for the comment.
Yes, a great many low-income parents understand the importance of education, and will put their children on a bus –even if it’s a long ride–to get that education. They
understand that this is the only way out of the ghetto.
On order in the classroom–it is possible to keep order even in a classroom like the one I described in the Bronx. It took my daughter a year to learn how to do it (from very kind and experienced teachers in her school.)
She now has one of the quietest classrooms in the school–very rarely even raises her voice.
And if one student erupts, the others just look at him–they know enough not to react. Admittedly, these are 6-8 year olds, but other very good teachers can handle older kids.
More importantly, if there are only a handful of potentially disruptive
kids in a suburban classroom, an experienced teacher should be able to keep order.
As for the safety of the surburban children–unless they are going to spend their lives in a gated community, at some point they need to learn how to see trouble coming–and how to avoid it.
A school setting, where there are lot of teachers, and administrators watching out for them is a good time to learn this–
The alternative is to wait until they get to college and are mugged and shot coming out of a bar because a) they didn’t see the guy coming and b)they hesitated about giving up their cell phone.
Maggie and Rick,
Thanks for your responses.
When I referred to implementing Rick’s approach on a large scale, I was thinking about the ability to serve the vast majority of poor children who would like the chance to attend a high performing school either in the suburbs or elsewhere in their city. Perhaps Rick can provide some numbers around how many children are participating in these programs now on a nationwide basis as a percentage of the total that could potentially benefit. To what extent might that number grow over the intermediate term (3-5 years)?
Regarding the vouchers, I think the name of the game here is to get as many children as possible out of underperforming schools, especially in the inner cities, into better alternatives. While charter schools, magnet schools and better performing public schools within the district are fine as far as they go, adding vouchers that would enable some children to attend, say, parochial school, would augment the choice mix. While I haven’t seen it discussed in the media, it seems that even if achievement (however measured) doesn’t improve vs. what it would have otherwise been, just giving children and parents a choice and a feeling that they have some control over their destiny as opposed to being stuck in the school to which they were assigned is, in itself, a good thing. To be clear, to me, the voucher discussion relates to choices for inner city children attending low quality or failing schools. It’s a somewhat different debate in the suburbs, I think.
I was interested in Maggie’s comment about her daughter learning from other teachers how to control her class. If this is something that can be taught relatively easily, why isn’t it a formal part of teacher training, especially for teachers just starting out and for those who are entering a more difficult environment than the schools they previously taught in?
Finally, I’m not a fan of teaching to the test either, but I do think we need a reasonable way to evaluate teachers and to reward them on some basis other than the one size fits all criteria of years in the system and post graduate education credits. Over the years, my work has exposed me to many different industries, companies, managements and people. I’ve worked for four different companies over the last 37 years, all with somewhat different cultures. At the end of the day, in dealing with professionals, the performance evaluation process includes, by its nature, a hefty dose of subjectivity, but overall, the system works reasonably well. The key benefit of the current system for determining teachers’ compensation from a union leader’s perspective is that it is absolutely objective and, in their view, “fair.” Yet, some skills like math and science teachers and special education teachers are in short supply. Some teachers are excellent and some are mediocre at best. I think good teaching is a bit like love. We know it when we see it or experience it but we can’t precisely reduce it to contract language or prove it in court. I think the union leadership does both its members and the students a disservice by resisting premium pay for scarce skills and merit pay as well as a more streamlined process for removing (tenured) teachers who are not performing despite warnings, and efforts to provide training and coaching.
Barry–
Thanks for your response.
Re: my daughter being able to control a class.
I’m afraid this cannot be taught easily. The two people who taught her–
a 30-something African-American woman whose mother was a teacher (and so she heard about teaching at the dinner table while growing up) and a white male in his late 50s who has spent years in the system are extremely gifted individuals.
They spotted my daughter because she, too,
has a special gift with children and is passionate about what she does.
They have taught her some very creative strategies like holding a “trial” when one child steals from another or hits another. Emily is the judge; one student is the plaintiff, the other the defendant, and the rest of the class is the jury.
At the end of the trial the defendant has to elocute. (Emily only holds a trial when she is certain that the defendant is guilty.)
And these are six-year-olds! But her confidence that they will understand all of this means that they do.
The point of the exercise: actions have consequeces.
She is particularly good
with very angry, very bright boys (they are angry because they are bright, looked around at age 4 or 5 and realized they had been dealt a bad hand. And that it isn’t fair.)
These are boys most teachers don’t want, but she has the ability to make them feel loved (because she actually does love them) and to gring them into line, with a combination of irony (they are smart enough to eappreciate irony), and letting them know when she is disappointed. (Since she is one of very few adults who has ever singled them out and made them feel valuable, they feel terrible when they disappoint her.)
This is all very complicated psychologically and intuitive. While her mentors were able to give her confidence and guide her, this is just not simply that you could “teach” to someone who wasn’t very attuned to children and their emotions.
On vouchers– we don’t want to take some of the better low-income students out of public schools and send them to parochial schools (which, as you say, have the luxury of expelling disruptive kids.)
The public schools need the low-income students whose parents are invovled. That’s why public school teachers (including Emily) are against vouchers–they undermine the public schools.
On how many children could be helped by bussing to the suburbs If children and parents are willing to be bussed long distances–and Rick says that they are– then the subuurbs in Westchester, on Long Island, Fairfield County, Connecticut and the affluent parts of New Jersey could absorb thousands of low-income kids from NYC,
Washington D.C. (one of the poorest school systems in teh country) could bus both to suburban Maryland and to Virginia . . .
And if you bus a great many low-iincome students out of inner cities, those who are left could be in much smaller classes . . .
Maggie,
I think you (and Rick) and I will have to agree to disagree on vouchers. The core of the controversy, if I interpret you correctly, boils down to what seems to be best for the individual versus the group, though it’s not quite as simple as that. Let’s say we have a parent with a child stuck in a low performing dysfunctional inner city school. If there is an opportunity for that child to attend a high performing suburban school, local publicly funded charter school or magnet school, we both say go for it. However, if the child can attend a low cost (vs. the public school alternative) private or parochial school but needs some public dollars to pay for it, I say go for it but you and Rick want to keep the child in the low performing school in the hope that his or her motivation and the parent’s possible involvement might eventually improve the quality of the school. In other words, we need to keep the child who wants to leave stuck in the low performing school for the “greater good” even if the potential improvement never materializes. If we could educate low income kids in parochial schools for half the cost of public education, the other half of the money would stay in the public schools even though the children have left which should make it possible to offer the same smaller class sizes that would be possible if thousands of kids decamped for the suburbs.
I don’t see why we can’t offer both alternatives, especially since surveys show that 63% of Hispanics and 65% of Blacks support vouchers for children from low income families. I do understand the Democratic politicians’ perspective, however. If the National Education Association is a generous donor and supplier of people power at election time while Blacks can be counted on to vote Democratic 90% or more of the time no matter what, supporting the NEA is rational if the objective is to maximize the probability of reelection.
Fantastic post and discussion, thank you! Both parts remind me of the outstanding documentary PBS ran exploring how inequality making us sick. And I believe there is much interdependence between with health, education and inequality that complicates many of the grand healthcare reform ideas circulating that seem to gloss over the host of other enduring factors preventing a responsible and cooperative healthcare agenda, as you allude to. Factors, that seem to perpetuate the very practices and systems that are in need of change or at least re-organizing. You discuss why is it so difficult to rescue a school and also about how, in fact, it is happening in particular places. I wanted to underscore Laurie Thorp’s PhD, director of the Residential Initiative on the Study of the Environment program for Michigan State University, work (and work-in-progress answer) about transforming the environment, the health and education of low-income families struggling daily to make sense of impoverishment and deprivation of many sorts. It is an ethnography of both “difficult knowledge” and lovely knowledge” and asks some important and rigid questions that matter and can inform this discussion here. Furthermore, it sheds light on how the hidden benefits of disorder might be a productive way to extend our understanding of the interdependent relationship between health, education and inequality. Again, thank you for the insightful post(s) as well as the conversation it has generated…
Carey–
Thank you for the kind words. And I would be interested in seeing Laurie Thorp’s work
If you have time, please e-mail me and send nm something at Mahar@tcf.org.
Barry–
I agree that you and Rick and I have to diagree on vouchers. Rick knows the topic much better than I do so I may not have explained the downside very well.
If I can find something that he has written about
vouchers I will send it to you.(He is the Foundation’s education expert and very, very good.)
I agree that the education is the base of country’s growth as it is directly related to the problems like poverty and health of the people. If the education is improved as per the real requirements, both of the related problems will be eradicated automatically.