A young girl receives a backpack during a giveaway at St. Anthony Foundation August 27, 2009, in San Francisco. St. Anthony Foundation gave away hundreds of backpacks filled with back-to-school supplies to needy children in the city's Tenderloin neighborhood. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Features » August 25, 2010
It’s the Poverty, Stupid
The education reform debate is misdirected.
The close attention, even obsession, with teacher performance distracts from socio-economic obstacles to education.
With America’s public schools struggling to survive slashed budgets and unequal funding, school reform is back on the national agenda–but will the new model of market-based “reform” promote greater educational quality?
Already, schools in low-income areas see abysmally low achievement levels. In many cities, less than half of students graduate from high school.
To combat the crisis of low achievement, the Obama administration, led by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, cobbled together a group of political and corporate powerbrokers, including Bill Gates, to spearhead education reform. Their efforts have been vigorously applauded by major media from the New York Times to the Washington Post to Newsweek.
In her recent book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Undermine Education, Diane Ravitch, education historian and former assistant secretary of education under George H.W. Bush, takes the education reform establishment to task.
Ravitch blasts what she calls the “Billionaire Boys Club” vision of public education. “Three foundations–Gates, Broad and Walton–are now committed to charter schools and to evaluating teachers by test scores,” she told Democracy Now in March. And that’s now the policy of the Department of Education. “We have never seen anything like this, where foundations had the ambition to direct national educational policy, and in fact are succeeding,” says Ravitch.
The close attention, even obsession, with teacher performance distracts from socio-economic obstacles to education.
“The focus on demonizing teachers in the media means that then you don’t talk about poverty,” says Bill Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois in Chicago and a member of the In These Times Board of Editors. Because of the way U.S. schools are funded (mainly through property taxes), wealth disparities directly impact school districts. For example, some Chicago-area suburbs spend about $30,000 a year to educate each child, while inner-city Chicago schools spend about $4,000 per pupil.
Poverty and unemployment contribute to a high rate of transience among students, as their families move from apartment to apartment in search of lower rents or better living arrangements.
Poverty doesn’t affect just attendance. Milwaukee children suffer from one of the highest rates of childhood lead poisoning, which can cause learning disabilities and severe behavioral problems. In one African-American neighborhood, 67 percent of the children age six or under had elevated lead levels. In a primarily Latino area, the rate was 43 percent. On top of that, in the last 30 years Milwaukee has lost 80 percent of its industrial base and nine of its 10 hospitals. In 2006, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported, “An African-American infant in Milwaukee is at a greater risk of dying in his or her first year than an infant in Malaysia, Jamaica, Panama, Costa Rica or Chile.”
Broad and fundamental institutional failures, which directly hinder student achievement, are rarely implicated in the “failure” of public education. Instead, elite reformers highlight anecdotes about incompetent or abusive teachers. The result is a vilification of teachers and teacher unionism.
Bob Peterson, a former “Wisconsin Teacher of the Year” and a founder of the progressive education journal Rethinking Schools, says Obama and Duncan are heightening antagonism toward the public sector. “They’re pushing a general distrust of the public sector. Instead of trying to improve [it], they are abandoning it,” Peterson says. “Duncan and Obama would deny it, but that’s what’s happening.”
To win the battle of public opinion, and the larger battle for education reform, teacher unions and advocates of egalitarian public education must frame the issue in a way that puts educational achievement–or the lack thereof–in its proper context. They must make clear that until society redistributes resources fairly, many schools will continue to fail, and with them, the nation’s schoolchildren.
ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Roger Bybee is a Milwaukee-based freelance writer and progressive publicity consultant whose work has appeared in numerous national publications, including Z magazine, Dollars & Sense, Yes!, The Progressive, Multinational Monitor, The American Prospect and Foreign Policy in Focus. His e-mail address is winterbybee@gmail.com.
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Reader Comments
THANK YOU! Brief history: The economic policies of Reagan required a redistribution of wealth that has been ongoing. Corps demanded an end to welfare for a very good reason: The only way businesses could get workers was to pay decent wages and ensure safe working conditions; people could always fall back on welfare if “worse came to worse.” The Reagan admin began moving public dollars out of public needs (welfare, education, infrastructure) into massive corp tax relief, not raising taxes on the middle, so of course the poor had to pay. Before Reagan, we thought poverty was the result of a lack of money, and the idea of simply turning our backs on our own poor was morally repugnant. But we were re-educated to see poverty as a deviant “lifestyle choice”, and we were taught to see the poor as something subhuman. Empathy was turned into contempt, ending the chance that Americans would object to welfare-reform-as-we-got-it. By the time Clinton ended aid, America yawned with indifference.
The voices of those who knew better were censored out of the media, so it’s understandable that so many are ignorant about the real causes and consequences of poverty. We’ve gone back to the past, when an invisible, impoverished Third World country coexists within our borders. Even our progressive media has ignored today’s poverty, not even acknowledging the existence of all those worse off than “working poor.”
This article indicates that we might be waking up, grasping how poverty impacts us all—and certainly, how it impacts America’s ability to compete in the world market. The degree of poverty/economic disparities we have today historically result in the end of empires. How many of us today are even aware that the international community now considers the US a dying empire, largely because of our appalling social policies?
I sure don’t know which way the country will go from here, but it’s a hopeful first step if we can start to talk about the impact of deep poverty on America’s children (and subsequently, on the odds of this country surviving at least another 50 yrs).
Posted by dhfabian on Aug 27, 2010 at 4:01 PM
I’ll admit I don’t know a lot about the US situation specifically, having lived abroad most of my life, but I suspect the debate about education is mystified wherever you go. Along all too predictable lines, I might add.
The obsession with ‘teacher (in)competence,’ is anything but exclusive to the US. Where I live, the Netherlands, in the past years, media have been rife with the educational scandal, the cumulative impression being that our current generation of teachers is lacking in everything from basic pedagogical skills to an elementary understanding of the curriculum.
Curiously, however, very few have gone on to beg the obvious question why this should be the case. ‘Multiculturalism’ and the lowering of academic standards under the guise of inclusive educational politics is often cited, though no reports exist suggesting teachers of “ethnic” descent are worse of than their white colleagues.
Rather, apart from satisfying the general mood of generalized snarkiness (“look at those stupid teachers, ha ha! We should, like, cut their funding.”), the single-minded fixation on teacher (in)competence serves to obscure a far greater crisis, in education and society as a whole.
Need I point out how, over the past decades, under the banner of ‘free-market enterprise,’ public institutions ranging from preschools to hospitals, have been subjected to mandatory reforms? Educational institutions everywhere have been forced into so-called competitive market-discipline, entailing the instatement of management types who could probably give two hoots about education themselves, reorganizing their “business” along the lines of a Taco Bell franchise, with drastic cuts on staff expenditures equaling kick-ass managerial bonuses. Sad but true.
But yet It’s so much easier to just blame the teachers for falling standards in education, not to mention convenient, with all this protesting of ever more drastic budget cuts. Decades of market-discipline madness have added to the popular sentiment that teachers ought, for some reason, to be poor. Why else would anyone choose such a profession to being with? Yeah, why would they, indeed?
We don’t like to hear about angry, disgruntled teachers, frustrated with how a supposed ‘knowledge economy’ continues to pay peanuts to those in charge of reproducing said knowledge. We don’t want to hear anything of the sort, we want the self-sacrificing inspirational teachers we’ve seen in Hollywood movies, the ones who, despite all odds, succeed in magically ‘making a difference,’ the kind who, without any kind of support or superstructure, succeed in touching the hearts and minds of even the most jaded inner city youths, inspiring them to excel academically, and, hey, maybe even pick up a book of modern verse out of their own volition every now and then.
We have, in other words, as a culture developed a reality-allergy, that is eating our world up from within.
Posted by Don Jia on Sep 1, 2010 at 10:23 AM
First, you need to get the facts straight. Here is a link to Chicago’s budget - $6.2 billion for 400,000 students. That is just over $15,000 per pupil (http://www.cps.edu/SiteCollectionDocuments/Citizen’s Guide Budget.pdf).
Second, you need to ask the question of how you break the cycle of poverty. Those in the education reform community believe that helping students improve their academic outcomes and go to college is the best way to break that poverty cycle. And, schools that apply a whatever it takes - no excuse approach have shown that they can permanently change the achievement levels of the lowest income students. These kids then go on to college, and succeed in breaking that cycle. So education reformers are not proposing these policies ignoring poverty, they are proposing them specifically to address poverty.
Posted by Rob Manwaring on Sep 1, 2010 at 4:43 PM
You can’t get to square one until you address poverty. Hungry kids can’t learn. If they can’t learn, they can’t do well in school. If they can’t do well in school, they don’t have a chance of going on to college. If they don’t go to college, they are increasingly likely to remain locked into poverty until they die. Kids can’t learn when families have to move from place to place scratching for jobs, and they’ll have to keep on moving as long as we no longer have job stability in the US (unions crushed, massive outsourcing to foreign countries, wages that don’t cover the cost of basic needs, etc.) The longer we ignore US poverty, the bigger it grows. Families require a measure of economic stability—even if the only option is to create a legitimate, non-punitive welfare system, like the modern nations have. Children require this stability. As long as America continues to ignore just how extreme poverty in the US has become, the best schools in the world can’t change the road we’re on.
It all keeps going back to square one: Hungry kids can’t learn. The worse conditions have grown for America’s poor, the more the nation as a whole has deteriorated. Did you know that, as a direct result of our chosen social policies since the Reagan administration, the US has actually gone from being #1 in “overall quality of life” down to #11? That’s a stunning decline. This one statistic speaks volumes about where we are and where we’re going, and which way we need to go if we want to save our own butts. As long as we don’t have the will to change this, education is irrelevant.
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