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.
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