The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives (42 page)

It may still be possible, through creative charter school curricula, and inspiring environments, to improve the classroom setting and students’ participation within it. Tennis star Andre Agassi, for example,
created an extraordinary academy for low-income children in Las Vegas. The campus is a pastel-hued, airy, architectural masterpiece—built at a cost of $40 million; the students learn music on concert-quality instruments; they travel to places such as Paris on school trips; experience school visits from local Cirque du Soleil troupes; and are all, without exception, expected to attend college after graduation. The results, to date, have been a grand success.
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Networks of strong charter schools exist in Harlem, in Sacramento—where former basketball star, now mayor, Kevin Johnson was instrumental in creating high-achieving inner-city schools—and in many other locales. But doing all of this takes massive financial investments and, usually, the backing of a celebrity figure such as Agassi or Johnson, or a well-connected business executive with a passion for change, capable of marshaling the support of a network of donors and other supporters.

With more than two million students enrolled in charter schools nationally, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, and hundreds of new schools opening each year, such institutions
have
earned their place at the table as one part of a broader attempt to improve the educational setting for poorer children. But replicating the successful charter school experience in deeply impoverished communities on a mass scale would be hugely difficult—and would come with an implausibly high price tag.

Moreover, because of all the external problems left untouched, such successes are peculiarly vulnerable to derailment. Navigate a virtuous circle counter-clockwise, and one dysfunction butts up against another. If you’re born into wealth, you will have available to you the most cutting-edge educational facilities. But if you’re born into poverty—and, increasingly these days, into middle-income families—your options, unless you are one of the lucky few to live near a thriving charter school or a good local public school, are far more limited. Your family will be unable to afford quality preschool—which makes it far less likely that you’ll succeed academically once you do enter school. You will suffer the consequences of buzz saws having been taken to
programs like Head Start that subsidize early learning opportunities for lower-income kids. You will all too likely attend overcrowded schools reeling from teacher and staff layoffs as a result of endless local and state budget fiascos, in which you use out-of-date textbooks, no longer have access to non-core-requirement courses, and rarely are exposed to music, art, and other vital, culturally enriching, aspects of life. Your school year will be shorter than that students experience in most every other wealthy democracy. And, if and when you manage to get into college despite these obstacles, you will end up heavily indebted and working an array of jobs in a vain attempt to keep up with soaring tuition costs and make up the shortfalls from inadequate Pell Grants.

At every stage of the educational journey, in short, we make it harder on those at the bottom of the economic pyramid. It’s as if we set up a one-hundred-meter race, some of the participants in which get to sprint down open lanes, while others have to jump a series of hurdles. No guesses for which group of racers will tend to finish ahead of the pack.

Libraries’ worth of books have been written, and reports issued, on how to improve the teaching environment in schools mainly populated by children from poor backgrounds. And that is, of course, a worthy project. It isn’t, however, my project.

Not that I don’t think it critical that schools give urgent attention to developing ways of improving the education they provide their students. It should, at this point, almost go without saying that schools themselves must be focused on, so as to get the best teachers possible working in the best school environments possible, utilizing the best textbooks available, and holding students to the highest plausible standards. It should go without saying that schools need good, motivated, enthusiastic teachers; they need ways to bring in fresh blood and to get rid of do-nothing teachers on occasion. They need ways of measuring students’ academic success that go beyond a series of multiple choice tests, that take into account students’ economic backgrounds, their immigration and linguistic status—in
California, for example, according to
Mother Jones
reporter Kristina Rizga, immigrant children still learning English tend to score badly on tests yet often do well on nontimed essay assignments, and frequently respond well to engaged, creative teachers.
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Anyone thinking about how to tackle poverty has to have in mind innovative ways to improve the classroom experience for American kids, coming from a multitude of economic, cultural and linguistic backgrounds and too often short-changed by their local schools. They might want to think about expanding programs like the federally funded Race to the Top, in which states compete to create templates for new learning environments that merit the infusion of extra dollars from the feds. They might want to push legislation such as that championed, so far without success, by Denise Juneau, Montana’s energetic superintendent of education, mandating that all students remain in high school until they turn 18. They might want to argue the merits of charter schools, or school vouchers, both of which have engendered spirited, frequently overheated, debate in recent years. They might want to emulate Oregon’s recent efforts to create an all-encompassing education strategy that goes from preschool to higher education, with an oversight board empowered to shift resources into particular settings as the need demands.

In poorer communities, in particular, they might want to supplement property taxes, which provide a core part of the funds for education in most states, with additional state and federal grants; or intervene with federal emergency funds, as was done in the two years following passage of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, to stop teachers from being pink-slipped during recessions. They might want to think about new funding mechanisms, similar to Medicaid, that mandate more federal spending goes into education in poorer states, while requiring richer states to maintain their own higher spending levels on schools.

But all of this must occur in a way that recognizes that schools, and school problems, are anchored in the broader community.
While taking dollars away from schools is a surefire way to reduce the quality of the learning experience, raising the money spent on schools, while leaving the broader social conditions unchanged, can’t in and of itself guarantee improvement.

In recent years, many reform movements, from federal ones such as No Child Left Behind to state efforts such as Louisiana’s ill-starred takeover of the New Orleans school system in 2006—when the state tried to fire all the Big Easy’s teachers, rehire some of them on different contracts, and convert the system into a network of charter schools—have focused exclusively on teachers and school administrations: those who don’t generate good standardized test scores amongst their students are fired, their schools taken over—or, in some cases, even closed.

Such measures sound good, tough, no-nonsense. But in reality, taking the country as a whole they’re likely to be as effective as trying to empty a swimming pool with a teaspoon.

Yes, schools need educators in the classroom willing to go the extra mile; but they also need students with at least some community and family resources to fall back on outside of the classroom. They need, for example, parents who care when kids miss school—which is why Kamala Harris, back when she was San Francisco’s District Attorney, had set up truancy courts to hold accountable the parents of elementary school kids who routinely failed to show up for school. After all, Harris reasoned, fully 30 percent of homicide victims in her city were high school dropouts; and the kids who weren’t finishing high school were, disproportionately, ones who had never had a regular school attendance in the first place. Threaten the parents with fines, even in extreme cases with jail time, and you could nip much of this problem in the bud; back it up with drug treatment programs for addicted, disengaged parents, and you could start making a profound difference. San Francisco’s district attorney’s office reported, in 2012, that truancy had been reduced by more than 20 percent in one year, as the city moved more aggressively to enforce its anti-truancy initiative.
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An anti-truancy program in Milwaukee has reduced truancy rates, amongst those kids who go through the counseling program by nearly half, while also reducing daytime burglaries and other crimes associated with teenage truants.
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Trying to fix a school’s woes, or the great web of poverty that so many students are trapped within, simply by firing mediocre teachers is destined to only achieve partial results. It might be necessary, but in few instances will it be sufficient. Recall Principal Kuzman’s discussion of how hundreds of his North Las Vegas students didn’t have homes to call their own; how they came to school without having eaten breakfast and left school knowing there would be no dinner; how many of them had never even been downtown to see the sights let alone on a trip out of the city or out of state; how their worlds had been constricted to a few square blocks in a mean, and violent, enclave.

So long as the broader conditions limit children’s learning potential—so long as kids are homeless, coming to school hungry, living in communities broken down by drugs and gangs, attending schools so short of funds that class sizes are soaring and textbooks become a luxury rather than a necessity—good teachers alone will not be sufficient.

“No nation in the world has eliminated poverty by firing teachers or by handing its public schools over to private managers,” wrote New York University research professor of education Diane Ravitch in the
New York Review of Books
. “Nor does research support either strategy. But these inconvenient facts do not reduce the reformers’ zeal. The new breed of school reformers consists mainly of Wall Street hedge fund managers, foundation officials, corporate executives, entrepreneurs, and policy makers, but few experienced educators.”
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Ravitch, a onetime assistant secretary of state for education under president George H. W. Bush and author of the book
The Death and Life of the Great American School System
, felt that wealthy reformers were setting up charter schools that, because they could cherry-pick
their students, weeded out those who did badly on tests. They provided the illusion of better education while, in reality, oftentimes they were simply being more selective in which students they accepted than could the regular public schools with which they were in competition. “Charters would be fine if they focused on the kids who were the lowest-performing kids. And then [they could] come to the public schools and say, ‘Hey, we’ve learned something new, we want to share this with you because we’re part of the same system we want to help,’” she told the
American Prospect
’s Abby Rapoport in the fall of 2012. “Instead, charters have become a competitor to see who can get the highest test scores.”
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It was one thing improving test scores, Ravitch and fellow critics of the testing mania argued; it was quite another genuinely improving educational opportunity. For Helen Ladd, professor of public policy and economics at Duke University’s School of Public Policy, poverty was the elephant in the room all too often ignored in discussions about education reform. “Current policy initiatives are misguided,” she told a Washington, D.C., audience in November 2011, “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 they do not directly address the educational challenges experienced by disadvantaged students, these policy strategies 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.”
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Instead, Ladd urged legislators to fund pilot programs and block grants that could be used to develop after-school programs for the children of working parents that would be continuations of the classroom experience rather than glorified babysitting operations. Like Richard Rothstein, who believed putting opticians in schools and helping low-income kids get spectacles would serve as one of the
most effective education reforms yet developed, Ladd advocated integrating schools into local health and mental health service networks, as was being done by several charter schools in New York’s Harlem district and as had been done in the greater-Omaha area in Nebraska. There, a public-private partnership, started in 2006, named Building Bright Futures had created a network of health centers in schools. In the few years they’d been open, thousands of kids had received medical care they otherwise wouldn’t have gotten. Not surprisingly, there were large declines in the numbers of kids missing ten or more days of school each year. A similar program had also been started by the Oyler School in Cincinnati, where a medical center and vision clinic provided services to the mainly low-income kids who attended the school. It was, proponents explained, a new model, a “community learning center,” intended to bring social and health services into the educational setting, and, in so doing, to expand kids’ educational horizons.
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Ladd also wanted to build on a Durham, North Carolina, program, in which schools distributed large numbers of books, tailored to students’ individual needs and abilities, to low-income children at the end of each academic year, so as to overcome the infamous “summer reading gap,” when poor kids, not exposed to books on a daily basis, routinely regressed several months in their academic abilities.