Bad Education in America: Stop Blaming Poverty

_{In this Dec. 20, 2013 photo, students use the entrance for Success Academy and Opportunity Charity schools, both of which share space inside Harlem's P.S. 241, in New York. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)}

RCEd Commentary

Dig into the pile of today’s hot button education issues, everything from testing to teacher evaluations to charter schools, and at the bottom you’ll find a common denominator: poverty.

Every time, the same question gets asked: Does poverty absolutely predict school performance?

On one side of that issue are the teachers unions and progressive/left political leaders such as New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. You can’t blame schools for poor performance, they argue when it’s clear that rising poverty is the source of the problem.

For this group, the solutions include better health care, jobs in the inner city, preschool for all low-income parents, wrap-around social services within schools, more school counselors and social workers, and “promise zones” surrounding schools that try to boost family incomes and stability.

On the other side of the issue are the so-called school reformers, who acknowledge the impact of living in poverty but insist that better schools can make a serious dent in that damage. For this group, solutions include charter schools, tougher teacher evaluations, rigorous school accountability and teacher pay tied partly to effectiveness.

This split is most obvious when it comes to charter schools. To the progressive left, claims that top charter schools can nearly level achievement gaps are untrue -- and scary. Scary because if proven true, the entire can’t-blame-schools argument collapses. (The same holds true for the other side; if charters can’t make a big dent, their argument collapses.)

That’s the heart of the controversy over Success Academy, recently profiled in The New York Times. True, the writer acknowledged, the mostly minority and low-income students in those charters often best middle class students on state reading and math tests -- but at what price? The memorable anecdotes cited: kids peeing in their pants because the test prep was too intense.

Not only are kids wetting their pants, but the teachers there can’t stand the stress either and depart in unsustainably high numbers. Add it up and you reach the seemingly inescapable conclusion: Charter schools that claim to have cracked the poverty code haven’t. Score one for the unions and the progressive left.

No surprise, then, that Success founder Eva Moskowitz cried press bias and said the Times article was an “attack.” (A radically different profile of Success Academy schools was just published in Education Next).

So who’s right in this split over poverty? For years, most of the evidence has favored the progressives who insist that poverty explains all. When counties release school achievement results, the line-up is predictable: wealthy schools at the top, poor schools at the bottom.

The same holds true even among urban school districts. When the federal government ranks urban school districts by performance, the districts with lower poverty, such as Tampa, Charlotte and Dallas rank at the top, while higher poverty districts such as Cleveland, Philadelphia and Dallas anchor the bottom.

Those who champion the poverty argument offer powerful data to explain why student performance isn’t getting better, despite millions more dollars getting poured into K-12 schools  Poverty is getting more concentrated, they rightly point out.

As documented by the Century Foundation, 12.4 million people lived in “economically devastated neighborhoods (2008-12 Census),” where at least 40 percent of the residents are at or below the federal poverty. That’s a 72 percent increase since the 2000 Census.

The data pinpointing poverty – including recent research on small brain sizes among children living in poverty -- are compelling.

But the exceptions to the poverty rule are equally compelling.

Success Academy is not the only charter group demonstrating that high academic performance needn’t be connected to high income. Roughly the top fifth of the 6,440 charters add a year-and-a-half of learning for every year a student attends that school. Charter groups such as KIPP have matured to the point where they can track students into and through college, where the graduation results aren’t ideal -- but vastly superior to similar students who didn’t attend KIPP.

Then there are the really high fliers, such as Success Academies in New York and Brooke Charters in Boston, where the mostly low-income and minority students routinely rival students in some of the toniest addresses in Massachusetts. Lots more of these kinds of charters are emerging: In Denver, the Denver School of Science and Technology runs the top two high schools and top three middle schools in the city.

 Plenty of traditional public schools beat the poverty odds as well. But the real standouts are the top charters, which has prompted a bitter campaign to prove that these charters somehow “cheat” by cherry picking good students and shoving out the low performers. To date, however, the independent research into those accusations favors these top charters. They really are making huge dents in poverty.

All these examples, however, don’t make the reformers right and progressives wrong. They merely make the case for a two-pronged strategy: Do everything possible to reduce poverty, but never give up on making schools radically better.

The best of the best schools truly can succeed with all students.