By Tom
A few years ago I found myself on our school’s Mission Statement Task Force. After our first meeting, we were each told to return with a suggestion. I came up with “We’ll do what we can.” It seemed like the perfect blend of steel-toed optimism and existential dread. And weighing in at only five one-syllable words, it seemed likely that most of us could remember it.
Alas, it failed to gain any traction and was soundly defeated by a long string of edu-blather with enough mumbo-jargon to make Robert Marzano blush. And I’ll bet my next pay raise that you couldn’t find one person on staff that could recite our mission statement at gunpoint.
I was thinking about my tenure on this task force last week while exploring the Center for Education Data and Research’s (CEDR) new web-based tool that compares Washington State school districts using every imaginable statistic. But there’s a twist: acknowledging that poverty has a profound effect on academic achievement, CEDR’s Dan Golhaber and his research team use complicated math to “control for the percent of students receiving free or reduced priced meals in a district to provide a more balanced comparison of district performance.” The result is an interactive tool that lets you see how well a district is doing, independent of their level of poverty.
I had fun with it. And after an hour or so, I was able to conclude that there are vast differences in the performance of districts, even when you control for the level of poverty. That was clear. My own district, for example, doesn’t fare so well. And I’m sure this will lead to a lot of soul-searching within our leadership, followed by a few well-placed phone calls across the state to see what we could be doing better in regards to professional development and curriculum acquisition. Their first call might well go out to the Highline School District.
Highline lies noisily under the SeaTac Airport flight path, and according to the data, they perform well above what would be predicted, given their demographics. Highline serves cheap lunch to over 65% of their students, many of whom are still learning English. When the Michelle Rhee’s of the world talk about how “some people in education are climbing mountains every day,” They’re talking about the people who work for Highline Public Schools.
But when I hear this, I often wonder what would happen if you applied the same effort put forth by those mountain climbers towards a population that wasn’t so needy. Instead of mountains, what would happen if hard-working teachers only had to climb a few low-lying hills?
I can stop wondering. Ten miles north of Highline lies the Mercer Island School District. Mercer Island sits in Lake Washington, just off the coast of Seattle. It’s a world away from Highline; a place where people drive from their eight-figure homes to their seven-figure jobs in their six-figure cars. According to the data, their schools perform very well, just like the schools in Highline.
But when you compare the achievement scores between Highline and Mercer Island, you see that, low and behold, nearly twice as many students in Mercer Island pass the state tests as they do in Highline. Let’s be clear: Both school districts are performing at a high level when you control for poverty. Both school districts have hard-working, effective teachers. But the students in Mercer Island do far better on the state-wide achievement tests. We can talk all we want about teachers “climbing mountains,” but at the end of the day, Gershwin had it right: If your daddy’s rich and your mama’s good looking, you’ve got nothing to cry about.
I see the same thing in my classroom, where about 40% of the students live in poverty. Last year 82% of my kids met the state standard in reading. Not bad, but let’s drill deeper: 65% of my kids “exceeded the state standard,” and of those students, not a single one was on free or reduced lunch. Not one. Same story in math: 82% met standard, and of the 21% who exceeded standard, not a single one lives in poverty. On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of the students in my classroom that scored “well below standard” were on free and reduced lunch.
Too anecdotal for you? Then consider this: When the recent Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores came out, the United States fared poorly; somewhere in the middle of the pack of developed countries. However, as Mel Riddile points out in this blog post, when you compare affluent US schools to countries with comparable poverty levels, the US consistently comes out on top. The real crisis in this country, concludes, Riddile, is poverty; not the education system.
We can talk around the issue all we want, pretending it isn’t there. And with CEDR’s fancy new tool we can even have fun doing so. But if we’re serious about improving the educational system in this country, we’re going to have to confront the real problem: poverty.
What do we do? I’m not sure. The Socialist Party has never been able to field a viable candidate in the past, and I’m not too optimistic about 2012. The two major parties seem to just take turns kicking the can of economic disparity down the road. But someday they’re going to run out of road; the Highlines are going to get tired of looking up at the Mercer Islands. And when that happens, I’m going to try to stay inside.
Meanwhile, I’ll do what I did last year and the 25 years before that. I’ll teach my butt off.
I’ll greet those kiddos when they show up in two weeks and treat each one of them like they’re the most important person in the world. Because they are. I’ll set realistically rigorous learning targets for every lesson. I’ll plan those lessons using the best curriculum I can get my hands on and the best strategies I can get my mind around. I’ll teach those lessons with enthusiasm, humor and creativity. And I’ll reflect on those lessons with data and objectivity, so that I can get up the next day and do even better.
In other words, I’ll do what I can.
Well, I guess we could argue that every time we shop at Old Navy (Target, Walmart, Forever 21, Gap etc. etc.) we’re contributing to poverty too, since all of that stuff is imported.
Or when Seattle’s city council supports business owners and refuses to allow street food vendors for fear of competition.
Or when Seattle libraries started taking furloughs and pay cuts about five years ago, and no one made a fuss, but teachers lose 1.9% and have the clout to have delayed it and minimize it.
I agree that poverty’s a huge issue, and you’re right that schools are being expected to solve it, but I don’t see my fellow Washingtonians doing too much about poverty when it comes to making sacrifices.
More money for schools is a start, but I still think there’s a fundamental and growing problem in this country concerning economic disparity. And I believe it’s the root cause of the achievement gap. I think schools are unfairly blamed for the symptoms of the growing problem of poverty in this country.
Kristin, I don’t disagree that we could be using our resources more wisely. However, no matter how we slice it, I do not believe that schools in the US have enough funding. More money is a first step, wise use of that additional money is of course the second.
Mark, “steaming pile of teacher”? That was awesome.
I think early education is key, too. And for our kids who enter the system older than pre-K, we need enrichment programs. Boys and Girls club, for example, does a superb job of helping kids break the cycle of poverty. What is their model, and what can schools learn from it?
Here’s one place schools (Seattle) are dropping the ball: testing for advanced learning opportunities in kindergarten and first grade, and if a child doesn’t pass muster on the school test, allowing parents to pay for private testing. First, it eliminates a low-income family from playing the same game. Second, which private child psychiatrist is going to fail a kid? Only the private child psychiatrist who doesn’t care about getting more clients, that’s who, because parents ask each other for references.
The other place we drop the ball is by making the test so totally dependent on English language skills, something that makes it less likely a capable bilingual child has access to the “you have to test in” advanced learning opportunities.
And I don’t know about your argument that throwing money at schools will solve the problem. We could be smarter with what we have, and we could start by spending a smaller percentage at the administrative level and more at the classroom level.
Heading off on a bit of a tangent here…the most asinine argument I ever hear is that throwing money at schools will not solve the problem. Bullpile. I guarantee you that if school funding were increased by double–with that money going straight to teachers, classrooms, technology and physical infrastructures–we would absolutely see a revolution in education. Double the number of teachers employed and I guarantee you would see our problems diminish. Eliminate poverty? Impossible in our economic system. Eliminate failure? Impossible when competition is central to our society and American identity. Increase the skills and abilities of the kids who are churned out of school each year? Absolutely possible, but it requires an investment in more teachers, more facilities, more tools to do the job the right way.
My district is more like Mercer Island, but the three districts I was in prior to this job (including where I student taught) were more like Highline… in one place it was more cost effective to just give 100% of students meal assistance because the need was nearly 100% anyway.
Where I am now is about 20-22 free/reduced meals, and that’s probably underreported in secondary.
I have no illusions that my job is as easy as the job of a teacher in an impoverished urban district (or rural district, for that matter, since that’s where I grew up). Sometimes, when I’m feeling bad about myself, I wonder if I could still cut it in a “tougher” assignment…or what my colleagues call a “real” teaching job. This all makes me think of a post Kristin put up a while back about her own daughter’s jump in test scores. In my situation (and I’m sure it is the same everywhere) I have kids who are going to ace the Big Test no matter how much of a steaming pile of a teacher I am. But that doesn’t change the fact that I have kids who really actually need what I have to offer. Every year I have kids who end up side by side in the seating chart–one woke up in a million-dollar home by the lake. The other woke up across the lake under a tarp.
Unfortunately, sometimes it feels like some people in my district forget that we need to serve the latter, even though it is the former whose parents will be breathing down our neck when kiddo’s grade slips from an A to an A-.
I wish I knew the answer to all this. Honestly, as I mull it over, my mind seems to settle on two things: tougher academic tracking (more on that later, maybe) and smaller class sizes. If we can really focus on a kid’s skill, address their needs, and move them forward when they are ready, not when they have a birthday, I think we’ll be serving those in poverty better (…all our students will be better served, maybe). It doesn’t eliminate poverty, but in capitalism, poverty simply must exist, so that is a problem we can at best respond to intelligently.
Who’s not doing anything about it? Glenn Beck? Rush Limbaugh? Ann Coulter?
I mean, a big part of the situation is politics and legislation, and budgeting.
We can do what we can. We can vote.
You’re doing something about it every day, by teaching and voting. So am I.
Getting into Boehner’s head and making him more aware and compassionate, that’s beyond my powers. Unfortunately.
As long as we’re wishing, Kristin, I wish that one out of five kids in this country didn’t live in poverty. I was at a benefit auction this week at the home of a guy who parks a helicopter in his backyard. Seriously. But on the way there, I drove past apartments smaller than my college dorm room. That’s the basic problem with our education system, and it frustrates me that we all know it, yet do nothing about it.
Tom,
as always, your passion gives me a boost of energy for facing the task ahead. Thank you. I wish my daughters could have you for a teacher.
And if I was on your staff I would have loudly and intensively supported your mission statement. My father’s parents lived by the mission statement of “Do the best you can with what you have.” I just don’t think you can ask more of a person than that.
It’s poverty, sure, but a good education can move a person out of poverty. And I think there’s ample evidence that a good education doesn’t necessarily need the perfect storm of small class, plenty of funding, and perfect parents. This is a chicken and egg dilema.
I am never confident I’ve spelled “dilema” right.
On NPR the other morning there was a woman shamelessly pitching a book she wrote as a guide to help parents pick schools. I don’t remember her name (so much for the sales pitch – and, by the way, despite being an educator I think I really picked my daughter’s school because its cafeteria has a gorgeous ceiling and I liked the cot in the nurse’s office), but I do remember that she said something like “the test scores of a school mean nothing.”
And I think we all know that. The test themselves keep changing. Half the teachers take them seriously, half don’t. Parents can (and sometimes urge each other to) boycott. We don’t have tests that work as good markers of anything other than a child’s performance at that particular time, on that particular test – privilege or poverty or migraine or parents with PhDs or ELL or goofball kid who flops the test for fun or whatever.
They don’t measure much, even though I keep wishing they could.
But here’s another wish: I wish the debate wasn’t this repetitive volley of “It’s poverty’s fault” or “It’s the teacher’s fault.” And I’m not saying you do that here, just that it reminds me of how common these two explanations for our current “crisis” (and whether that’s true or not is worth its own post) are.
Instead, I wish the debate started moving in a higher, more juicy teacher-brain direction. What if we ignored all the negative press and all the fear mongering? What if we took the position of, “Yes, it’s poverty that’s causing the achievement gap. DUH.” And then turned to more exciting superhero-type things, like if there’s a teacher out there who had a kid who showed up on the first day of school without anything in her favor except the teacher in front of her, and that kid made huge strides during the year – by whatever measurement device you want to use – I want to hear about that. How did that happen?
That’s what I’m hungry for these days. I’m feeling like the test scores / unsolvable poverty dilema (dilemma) / negligent parents / union vs. ed reformers snarl is a big nasty rash I wish would just heal up and go away. While they’re all over the media, and sometimes test scores reveal some bad administrative or instructional decisions, ultimately all of this excitement/paranoia/marketing will end, and there will be a teacher, and some carefully sharpened Ticonderogas, and some college-ruled, and a kid, and something beautiful will happen. Every day.
What is that something?