Chicken, Egg and Academic

One of the great “truisms” of major cities is that public education suffers from the poverty of its surroundings.

Speed Gibson notes that it may just be the other way around:

Nothing beats an involved parent when it comes to getting a quality K-12 education for a child. It works everywhere, from Minneapolis North to Wayzata, the big difference being in the number (percentage) of involved parents.

I was about to write what I believed to be a tangent – that the schools’ concern for “parental involvement” was a sham, that the schools wanted “involvement” in the sense of “collating handouts” and “setting up tables”, but would just as soon parents keep their mouths shut about problems with the schools.

But then I realized – it’s not a tangent to this particular story.  We’ll let Speed carry on:

This is then extrapolated by equating low involvement with low incomes to say that poverty itself is the big explanation for the “achievement” gaps between “rich” and “poor” districts.

Once again we must remember that correlation is not causation, that if A and B rise and fall together there are multiple possibilities. A might affect B, B might affect A, both may be affected by a third factor C, or the whole thing may just be coincidental. To that end, consider a recent article from US News & World Report article by the Chancellor of the New York Department of Education, Joel I. Kline. He thinks poverty is a symptom, not a problem, saying that “America will never fix poverty until it fixes its urban schools.”

After citing how Washington D.C. schools spend the most and achieve the least, he challenges the conventional wisdom of poverty (and race) explaining poor results.

As a side note; the urban schools that spend the least, and perforce depend the most on parental involvement, the urban parochial and charter schools (as well as the parents who get involved by pulling the kids out and enrolling them in a public school in the ‘burbs, which takes a lot of involvement,not the least of which involves compensating for the loss of school transportation that goes along with the move) are the ones getting the best results, measured on a kid-by-kid basis.

Joel Kline:

If the academic achievement of poor black students varies substantially from district to district, the mere fact of being black and poor cannot explain why low-income black students in Washington are years behind their peers in some big cities. By contrast, if extra spending and additional resources really were the antidote for the achievement gap, black students in D.C. should handily outstrip most of their urban peers.

I don’t have the figures handy – I have at the moment no idea how to look for them, although I believe I’ll poke around and figure it out – but I’d just about bet money that poor, black kids in the few remaining one-room schools in Mississippi do better than kids in DC, for (I’d suspect) about a third the cost.  Ditto with poor Latino kids at tiny schools in New Mexico, or for that matter white kids in small schools in Minnesota.

But Kline’s – and Gibson’s – larger point is a good one; the tragic failure of our urban public schools is perpetuating the cycle of poverty; the system is raising generation after generation of kids to be nothing other than poor – financially and spiritually.

Kline’s larger point is that “socio-economic status” is too often accepted as an excuse not to work harder, as if that would be throwing good money after bad. Yet, some Charter schools seem to be able to do so, obtaining spectacular results in some cases, and for less money that Washington D.C. is spending.

14 thoughts on “Chicken, Egg and Academic

  1. While you’re at it, Mitch, see if you can find the test scores and per-pupil spending in, say, rural North Dakota.

    The old saw was that if you wanted to improve your student’s test scores, move North. Don’t know if that’s related to spending as much as work ethic, but the figures would be interesting.

    .

  2. For most kids an involved parent is nothing more than ensuring that they do the work. I had a troubled student, after about two years of daily reviews of homework assigned and confirming it was completed I no longer needed to. My efforts amounted to 10 minutes per day, I never helped complete the homework. The biggest factor is his behaviour change was he got tired of me being a pain is his backside and finally stepped up. Grades are now mostly A’s as well.

    Of course along the way privileges where restricted when needed. Praise and rewards (including cash) when they where earned. The saying around the house was “with good grades you get more privileges”.

  3. Are charter schools and magnet schools the same thing? If not, how do they differ.

  4. Magnet school – a school run by a public district whose program is supposed to attract students from across the district; often they are specialized programs like Math and Science, Language Immersion, Talented and Gifted and the like.

    Charter schools – Independent schools “Chartered” by a district and sponsored by an organization with an interest in education, but not run by the district’s board. They elect a site-specific board that does all the hiring and firing and curriculum work. They get their students’ basic per-student allotment from the state (although not local referenda) for each student. They are functionally independent of the public school district.

  5. Teachers in poorly performing schools often blame the parents for a student’s bad performance. Of course their isn’t much the government can do politically to make parents put more effort into their kids’ education.
    So why do we pay teachers so much? If the kids are going to do lousy anyway, there isn’t any reason to require that the teachers have degrees in education, or any kind of degree at all. Baby sitters shouldn’t expect to make $50k/year & retire at 55.

  6. Ya don’t have any figures handy! Well! Good thing you wrote about it then! No accountability for you, mister. lol

  7. Mitch says:
    Magnet school – a school run by a public district whose program is supposed to attract students from across the district; often they are specialized programs like Math and Science, Language Immersion, Talented and Gifted and the like.

    Charter schools – Independent schools “Chartered” by a district and sponsored by an organization with an interest in education, but not run by the district’s board”

    Ok, that was what I had thought. Lately I have heard the two words used interchangeably, so I was wondering if I was the one who had the distinction wrong – that I hadn’t kept up with current usage. The distinction is worth a repeat here – thanks!

  8. Baby sitters shouldn’t expect to make $50k/year & retire at 55.

    I’m no fan of teachers’ unions and support (true) merit pay, but there is quite a bit more involved in teaching than there is in simply “babysitting”, Terry, like:

    1) preparing semi-interesting lesson plans that will last you nearly an hour (each) and improvising when they don’t last the hour, or your students lose interest

    2) literally “performing” for 1 hour intervals- no time to daydream in your cubicle

    3) grading your students’ work with (what you hope is) some kind of uniform standard

    4) keeping track of ALL your students’ names (and not just your home room’s) for calling on them in class and tracking their performance (both for their grades and for parent-teacher conferences)

    …and this is just from someone who “got their feet wet” with teaching- I haven’t yet formally entered the field as a career.

  9. Ya don’t have any figures handy! Well! Good thing you wrote about it then!

    Not to grant unwarranted respect to your little brainfart by asking for clarification – that’s not my intention! – but what the hell are you talking about?

    No accountability for you, mister. lol

    Well, if you had actually caught me in a mistake and shown us some reason to believe that you had caught me in some sort of error, it would be accountability.

    But all you did was babble and drool.

    Do try to do some thinking next time. You bore me.

  10. Uncle,

    While I don’t have the numbers immediately at had to support my assertion that small schools perform better on less money than big schools, the numbers ARE out there.

    But here’s an idea – while you’re waiting, feel free to find the numbers to prove me wrong.

    You can’t of course, partly because they don’t exist and partly because you’re a gutless anonymous crank who doesn’t actually do or know anything, but I thought I’d ask.

  11. The short version: “As every student of education research knows, the relationship between student achievement and socioeconomic status (SES) is well-established in the empirical literature: All things equal, as student SES increases, so does student achievement.”

    That doesn’t mean school size and resources don’t have some effect, too. Some research indicates that smaller schools may modestly mitigate the effects of socioeconomics, but the jury’s still out on whether the apparent positive outcome is the product of something else. For example, smaller schools attracting and being able to select better students with more motivated families.

    A bigger point, though, is it’s silly to reduce educational success to any one magic variable.

  12. “A bigger point, though, is it’s silly to reduce educational success to any one magic variable.”

    Like money? I just ask because that “magic variable” gets a lot of attention.

  13. Charlie,

    On the off-chance you’re reading this, how is it that North Dakota schools get better results than MN schools for about 70% of the money? And before you answer “fewer social problems”, a) not really true, and b) the “social problems” in MN get most of the money.

    Also; why do one and two-room schools get better results than big consolidated, better-funded schools, to say nothing of urban schools?

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