Poverty not all to blame for lousy school outcomes
The class action lawsuit that the ACLU announced last week against Michigan and a tiny Detroit-area school district for failing to educate children raises this question: Can schools ever compensate for the ills of poverty?
In places where poor and minority students increasingly dominate classrooms, the debate about troubled schools becomes polarized around the poverty question. Many urban school teachers say they get blamed for children who arrive in school badly prepared for learning. School reformers argue that some educators hide their shortcomings behind the cloak of poverty. Who’s right? Highland Park, Mich., would seem to be a poster child for the argument that poverty, not poor schooling, is to blame for lousy student outcomes. The life has been sucked out of this workingclass community once home to Chrysler, a city now so poor it had to remove 1,000 of its 1,500 street lights because it couldn’t afford to pay the power bill.
Poor district
In Highland Park, which is nearly all African-American, roughly half the residents live below the poverty line, compared with less than 15% of Michigan residents. School enrollment here is plummeting, while school deficits are soaring. Already, Highland Park is one of three Michigan school districts taken over by the state and now run by an emergency manager. No surprise that Highland Park students turn in awful test scores: 75% of the seventh-graders failed to reach proficiency levels on state reading tests.
Blaming poverty here is a powerful argument. But it doesn’t tell the entire story.
In writing about former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, I had to determine whether Rhee’s brash reforms were justified. Rhee’s critics said poverty, not ineffective teaching, explained poor student outcomes. Therefore, her reforms were misguided.
But federal data told a different story: Low-income, black students in Washington were as much as two years behind comparable students in some other cities. Teacher failure
Yes, poverty was a major player, but a failure to teach appeared to be an equally powerful player.
When researching school success stories found in highpoverty neighborhoods, I found many schools, and a few entire districts, that are shoulders above their counterparts. A short list of districts: Long Beach, Calif., Hillsborough County Public Schools in Tampa and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina.
In San Jose, Calif., I found a small but growing group of elementary charter schools where low-income Hispanic students turn out test scores that rival the scores seen in middle-class schools in far wealthier neighborhoods in Santa Clara County.
All these success stories have to be kept in perspective. Even the best of these schools can’t replicate wealthy suburban schools. Poverty is not that easily erased.
What matters in places such as Washington and San Jose is that hundreds more students will arrive in their senior year of high school prepared to take on some kind of post-high school education. By contrast, the widespread illiteracy seen in Highland Park essentially dooms even those who make it was far as their senior year.
So yes, poverty makes a huge difference — but not all the difference.
Richard Whitmire is author of The Bee Eater: Michelle Rhee Takes on the Nation’s Worst School District, and co-author of The Achievable Dream: College Board Lessons on Creating Great Schools.