Required Reading

• Mel Riddile (2014). PISA: It’s Still ‘Poverty Not Stupid.’ National Association of Secondary School Principals. In this blog post, former Virginia state principal of the year and National Principal of the Year Mel Riddile compared each country’s poverty rate to its score on the PISA, demonstrating that countries with low poverty rates, like Finland, tend to score higher. Riddile then compared US schools by free and reduced lunch rates to their PISA scores and found a correlation between poverty rate and test scores. When he adjusted scores by taking into account student poverty, the result was a major boost in US scores, prompting him to suggest that in order to raise PISA scores in the United States, we should address poverty.
• “Equity in the Distribution of Learning Opportunities.” In Viewing Education in the United States through the Prism of PISA (2010), pp. 32-38. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. This report compares the country’s share of socio-economically disadvantaged students and its PISA reading scores. The United States is one of only four countries (along with Israel, Slovenia, and Turkey) that favor socio-economically advantaged schools with more teachers, driving an unequal allocation of resources. The OECD reports that US students who scored the lowest on PISA were from lower socio-economic backgrounds. It also explores other factors that influence scores, such as single-parent families, community size, immigrant students, and students’ level of resilience.
• James Harvey, Charles Fowler, John McKay, Gary Marx (2015). Iceberg Effect. National Superintendents Roundtable and Horace Mann League. The study employs data on inequality, support for schools, social stress/violence, and support for families to compare inputs to education across nine countries as well as assessing student and system outcomes among them to determine how they rank in each category. The United States showed poor results for three of the four inputs — economic equity, social stress, and support for families — when compared to the other countries, prompting the authors to conclude that our education system should address these issues in order to substantially improve outcomes.
• Too Many Children Left Behind: The US Achievement Gap in Comparative Perspective. 2015. Bruce Bradbury, Miles Corak, Jane Waldfogel, and Elizabeth Washbrook. Russell Sage Foundation. Chapter 1 (introduction) and Chapter 2 (Meaning and Measurement of Equal Opportunity). This rigorous analysis of comparable data from the United States and three politically and economically similar countries – the UK, Canada, and Australia – enables the authors to assess how a variety of factors at specific points in students’ lives influence their academic achievement. Their troubling conclusion is that the combination of higher levels of inequality in the United States and a weak social safety net compared to the other nations puts American students at severe disadvantage (much of it in place before kindergarten) and limits schools’ abilities to substantially improve those students’ prospects.
• Tienken, Christopher (2014). “PISA Problems.” AASA Journal of Scholarship & Practice, v10 n4 p4-18 Winter. Tienken asserts that PISA test scores are not an important indicator of economic success and should not be used by policymakers as meaningful insight to future economic outcomes. He argues that there are many factors that affect test scores, such as parent educational attainment and poverty, and these factors vary by country. Tienken urges Americans not to focus on PISA scores because other measures indicate that the United States is successful in preparing students to compete internationally, regardless of the scores its students are receiving on PISA.
• Martin Carnoy, Emma Garcia, and Tatiana Khavenson (2015). Bringing it back home: Why state comparisons are more useful than international comparisons for improving US education policy. Economic Policy Institute. This paper’s authors argue that policymakers should not draw conclusions about the United States’ level of educational success based on international tests, and, that US education reform should not be based on other countries’ education systems. Carnoy, Garcia, and Khavenson use scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to illuminate major differences across states that are closely tied to student, school, and state poverty levels and that change over time. Based on these trends, the authors assert that the best way to improve education in the United States is to use information on states’ progress rather than across high-scoring countries, given the much-larger differences between the United States and these countries across the broad range of hard-to-manipulate factors that influence scores.

Optional Reading

• William H Schmidt and Nathan Burroughs (2015). “Puzzling Out PISA: What Can International Comparisons Tell Us About American Education?” American Educator. In keeping with the conclusions of Carnoy, Garcia, and Khavenson, Schmidt and Burroughs discuss why it makes more sense to explore variation in student performance within countries than among them. The United States has a high rate of within-country variation in formal mathematics compared to other countries that participate in the PISA. For example, US students from disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to receive poor quality mathematics instruction. And while the United States is not the only country that systematically disadvantages low-income students in mathematics, the authors suggest that making instruction more equitable across schools would help raise PISA scores.
• Improving Teacher Quality Around the World: The International Summit on the Teaching Profession (2012). The Asia Society Partnership for Global Learning. This paper suggests that the countries with the highest PISA scores have the most professional outlook on teachers. The authors point to evidence demonstrating the need for teachers to be highly professionalized and to have mentors and ample professional development opportunities. They urge the implementation of deliberate policy strategies that promote high-quality teaching, rather than attempting to change the nation’s cultural perception of teachers. School and curriculum reform must also be prioritized to improve the system as a whole, as teacher improvement is only one piece of the puzzle.
• Eric Hanushek and Ludger Wöβmann (2003). Does Educational Tracking Affect Performance and Inequality? Differences-in-Differences Evidence Across Countries. National Bureau of Economic Research. In this study, tracking is defined as hierarchically structuring students by performance level. Hanushek finds that countries that track students result in larger achievement gaps, and that the younger tracking begins, the larger the inequalities on the country’s PISA scores.
• Sahlberg, Pasi (2012). “A Model Lesson: Finland Shows Us What Equal Opportunity Looks Like.” American Educator, v36 n1 p20-27, 40 Spring. Finland has some of the highest PISA scores among tested countries, and Sahlberg, a Finnish teacher and researcher, asserts that his country’s success is the result of enhanced equitable opportunities through the development of a more comprehensive public school system. Since 1945, Finland has abolished student tracking, limited standardized testing, and professionalized teachers to a degree virtually unparalleled across the world. That said, the most reliable predictors of success in Finland’s educational system may be the country’s low poverty rates and a strong welfare system that supports the whole family, as per Linda Darling-Hammond in What we can learn from Finland’s successful school reform. She also emphasizes, however, the major impact of the education policy changes, which she finds reflected in Finland’s high-quality teacher training, equitable resources for students of all income levels with added supports for students with special needs, effective evaluation systems, and healthy balance of national control and decentralization.
• Kuan Chen Tsai and Osman Ozturgut (2013). “PISA and Beyond: What Can We Learn from Asian Education.” Pacific-Asian Education, v25, no. 2. This paper examines the test-taking culture in Asia, and suggests that students across that region conform to a rote learning style that reflects their collectivist societies in contrast to the Western emphasis on individualistic and engaging learning. So while it is true that Asian countries outperform the United States on the PISA, Tsai encourages policymakers and educators to look at each country’s cultural climate before comparing their scores.
• Chudgar, Amita; Luschei, Thomas F. (2009). “National Income, Income Inequality, and the Importance of Schools: A Hierarchical Cross-National Comparison.” American Educational Research Journal In this study, Chudgar finds that family background is a better indicator of student performance than schools. However, this only proved to be true in economically advanced and equitable countries. In poorer and less equitable countries, in contrast, schools had more significant impacts on student performance.

Slides/Graphics:

This graphic showing PISA scores by socioeconomic status/SES level across 14 countries illustrates that, across these wealthy nations, high-SES students consistently score much higher – roughly twice as high – as their lowest-SES peers. That said, at each percentile level, the United States scores among the lowest, while Canada, Finland, and Korea consistently outperform their counterparts.

The Children Left Behind: A league table of inequality in child well-being in the world’s rich countries. While it is true that, across wealthy nations, high-income students far outperform their lower-income peers, the United States stands out for having many more poor students. Indeed, this is a major reason for middle-of-the-pack PISA scores; our high share of poor students drags our average down more than is true of other countries. As this table illustrates, US levels of inequality put us at the bottom among our developed counterparts, a parallel drag on scores (and students’ odds of academic and life success).

Mel Riddile (2014). PISA: It’s Still ‘Poverty Not Stupid.’ As summarized above, Riddile compared US schools with less than 10% student poverty to other countries with similar poverty rates. In this comparison, the United States ranked first, showing that US students who attend low-poverty schools easily compete with – and indeed, far outperform – their Finnish counterparts.

 

Required Reading

• Janet Currie “Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise? Socioeconomic Status, Poor Health in Childhood, and Human Capital Development,” Journal of Economic Literature, 47 #1, March 2009, 87-122. Currie links together various data on family consumption of goods, leisure, income, and others to illustrate how socioeconomic status affects child health, and then relates health to educational and labor outcomes. Evidence suggests that fetal health is one of the most important drivers of child health, leading her to highlight the need for better pre-natal care and to assert that such investments would lead to better education and labor outcomes.
• Neeta Thakur, Sam S. Oh, Elizabeth A. Nguyen, et al (2013). Socioeconomic Status and Childhood Asthma in Urban Minority Youths. American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine 188(10): 1202-1209.  Rates of asthma are particularly high among Latino and African-American children. Moreover, as the authors of this study document, children with asthma tend to have lower annual household incomes and lower socioeconomic status compared to children without asthma, due in part to those children’s their heightened exposure and their lack of access to medical care, which make it more likely for asthma to be undiagnosed. Low-SES children and families also tend to struggle more with stress, another driver of asthma, which is covered in Mirra and Rogers’ The Negative Impact of Community Stressors on Learning Time: Examining Inequalities between California High Schools.
• Students in need of vision, hearing, and speech/language support, and poverty related barriers to accessing these services (2016). BCTF Research/Committee for Action on Social Justice. This survey was designed to help researchers understand the challenges teachers face when students in their classroom suffer from vision and hearing problems.  When asked how many of their students are in need of vision care, teachers report gaps between low income and high income students of 33% with respect to vision and 27.3% for hearing. The survey also found that teachers felt their effectiveness was impeded by “long wait-lists for diagnostic and treatment services” when teaching low-income students, and by a lack of resources to help families address these problems. According to Jaggernath, Overland, Ramson, Kovai, Chan, and Naidoo in a separate report, Poverty and Eye Health, those with poor eye health are more likely to have lower literacy levels, to be unemployed and have lower annual incomes, so it is important for teachers and schools to be equipped with proper resources to address eye health.
• Immunizations: Early Childhood (2014). U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Health Resources and Services Administration, Maternal and Child Health Bureau. Child Health USA 2014. Substantial increases in the percentage of children who are immunized represent important progress in public health since the early 1900s, yet there is a racial gap existing today in those who are vaccinated. Black children are less likely than their white counterparts to receive the full set of recommended vaccinations. Still, children of families living below the poverty level and Hispanic and black children have lower rates of vaccination than white children. This report by the US Department of Health and Human Services suggests that reducing the costs to families of vaccinations and linking immunization to Women, Infants and Children services and to home visiting programs will increase rates of vaccinations among these populations.
• Anna Aizer, Janet Currie, Peter Simon, Patrick Vivier (2015). Lead Exposure and Racial Disparities in Test Scores. Unpublished/Work in Progress. This study explores another possible cause for low test scores among low-income and minority students – lead exposure. After analyzing the test scores of roughly 57,000 students in Rhode Island, the authors found that the highest lead levels were present in students on the lower tail of the distribution. The study also reveals that lead exposure was disproportionately common in black neighborhoods and among children of less educated mothers. Even though lead levels overall have fallen in recent decades, children growing up in poverty, and especially racial and ethnic minorities, continue to suffer from lead exposure. Given that lead can substantially impede a child’s education, with lead exposure in preschool having a negative effect on future academics; it is a concern that must be addressed by targeted environmental regulations.

Optional Reading

• Ana B. Ibarra (2016). California’s Glaring Shortage of School Nurses. Kaiser Health News. A new recommendation by California pediatricians has raised public awareness regarding the need for more school nurses. School nurses can help manage chronic diseases, assist in obesity prevention, participate in emergency preparedness, and prevent chronic absenteeism. And as per Rodriguez, Rivera, et al, “School Nurses’ Role in Asthma Management, School Absenteeism, and Cost Savings: A Demonstration Project,” student attendance improved and family visits to the emergency room declined with the employment of school nurses.  The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that each school has at least one school nurse on campus, but the shortage of nurses in California makes it hard to meet these standards.
• Stephanie L. Jackson, William F. Vann Jr., Jonathan B. Kotch, Bhavna T. Pahel, Jessica Y. Lee (2011). Impact of Poor Oral Health on Children’s School Attendance and Performance. American Journal of Public Health 101(10), 1900-1906. Children with dental pain – which is an indication of an untreated oral health problem, such as a cavity or abscess — are more likely to be absent from school, which is linked to poor school performance. This study suggests that increasing students’ access to dental care would help improve academic achievement among children experiencing dental pain.
• Dana Charles McCoy, C. Cybele Raver, Patrick Sharkey (2015) Children’s Cognitive Performance and Selective Attention Following Recent Community Violence. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 1-18. This study finds a link between children’s exposure to community violence and their ability to make good decisions. The authors discover that witnessing community violence can cause students to be more impulsive, which results in negative school performance. The impacts of community violence are influenced by the physical distance the student is to the crime; the closer the student is to the crime physically, the more likely he or she will perform negatively on assessments. McCoy and her peers thus point to community violent crime as one driver of income- and race-based disparities in school achievement.

• Nicole Mirra and John Rogers (2015). The Negative Impact of Community Stressors on Learning Time: Examining Inequalities between California High Schools. Annenberg Institute for School Reform: Voices in Urban Education (40). Community stressors in low-income schools can reduce instructional time by up to two weeks of the academic year. These stressors can include students’ need to care for family members, economic hardship, lack of medical care, hunger, immigration issues, community violence, and others. Students who experience these stressors are more likely than their less-stressed peers to lose focus or cause disruption during instruction. Time lost due to these factors contributes to gaps in educational opportunity.

Graphics/Data

• Mental Health Chart book: Tracking the Well-being of People with Mental Health Challenges (2012). National Center for Children in Poverty. This publication outlines the state of mental health in the United States among both children and adults, including the prevalence of mental health problems, prescriptions to treat them, emergency room visits, hospitalizations, health insurance coverage, and more. Data show income-based gaps with respect to mental health problems and access to care/treatment that grew between 2003 and 2008.

• Young Children in Deep Poverty Fact Sheet (2016). National Center for Children in Poverty. These data, which compare basic health status among children living in deep poverty (defined as half the Federal Poverty Level or below), poverty (100% of the FPL) and above-poverty households, show that children classified as deeply poor are nearly twice as likely to be obese as are children who are classified as above poor. Other statistics show race- and poverty-based disparities in lead levels, stress, developmental delays, and other important indicators of health and well-being.

• Jane Koppelman and Rebecca Singer Cohen (2016). Dental Health is Worse in Communities of Color. The Pew Charitable Trusts: Dental Campaign. These statistics illuminate the racial gaps that exist in dental treatment in the United States. Specifically, children of color are more likely to suffer from tooth decay but less likely to visit a dentist and receive preventive dental service and sealants.

Movie

• Rich Hill. This Sundance award-winning documentary, which tracks a year in the lives of three high school boys in the town of Rich Hill in the Missouri Ozarks, shines a harsh spotlight on the connections between their families’ and community’s poverty and resulting health problems. Among health-related challenges that can impede academic achievement are the dearth of available nutritious options, the prevalence of smoking even among young teens and, in perhaps most visible, triggers of mental health problems combined with few supports to address them, which is exacerbated by the kids’ and town’s isolation. Several scenes depict these problems playing out in the school and the teachers’ and principal’s lack of resources to address them.

Book club

• Social Injustice and Public Health (2013). Barry S. Levy and Victor W. Sidel (editors). Oxford University Press. As the authors of this scholarly compendium on the many connections between poverty and health note, we live in the richest nation on earth, yet 15% of the US population live below the poverty line, and nearly one in four children is growing up in poverty. These children and their families have less access to medical care and are less informed about health threats and how to counter them or to navigate our increasingly complex health care system to get the services they need. For these and many other reasons, poor children growing up in the US – more so than in other Western countries — are much more likely than their non-poor counterparts to be injured, to develop illnesses, to become disabled, and even to die early. Poverty is driving a public health crisis in America that urgently demands policy action.

Discussion Questions

• Poverty has clear influences on health-related factors from children’s earliest years, even before birth. What are key strategies the US could adopt, including legislation we could enact, that would help reduce these impacts? Which would you prioritize?
• The BCTF Research study on teachers’ perspectives on their students’ health issues documented the challenges they face when working with low income students who have vision and hearing problems. Numerous other studies have shown that these problems affect student performance in school. Should teachers and schools be responsible for addressing student’s health needs? If so, how to balance that with parents’ responsibilities? How can schools better support families facing health issues?
• Many of these studies point to health factors directly or indirectly affecting test scores and educational outcomes. How do these factors legitimize (or fail to legitimize), the push for standardized testing and accountability in education?

Required reading

• William Julius Wilson (1987), The Truly Disadvantaged. Chapter 2, Social Change and Dislocations in the Inner City. This seminal book, which documents the impacts of millions of African Americans living in ghettos of concentrated poverty and racial isolation, brought this critical issue to the public’s attention. It also sparked a new body of scholarly research on inter-generational poverty and the mechanisms that sustain a stubborn American underclass. In the chapter “Social Change and Dislocations in the Inner City,” Wilson examines the complex factors associated with racial discrimination. In addition to direct discrimination, urban minorities are affected by changes in the economy and by population shifts, including global migrants. Indeed, Wilson also discusses the impacts of migration on poverty, hypothesizing that the migration of middle-class and working-class families is one factor driving concentrated poverty.
• Patrick Sharkey (2013). Stuck in Place. Chapters 4 and 5. This book, by a former student of William Julius Wilson, continues that line of research to explore how ghetto families have fared and changed over forty years. Sharkey finds that many remain stuck in the same violent, isolated, resource-weak contexts. And in Chapters 4 (Neighborhoods and the Transmission of Racial Inequality) and 5 (The Cross-Generational Legacy of Urban Disadvantage), he illustrates how those circumstances severely limit their life prospects, including substantially reducing children’s academic achievement, above and beyond the impacts of individual student and family poverty.
• Schott Foundation for Public Education (2015). Black Lives Matter: The Schott 50 State Report on Public Education and Black Males Multiple interacting systematic problems drive longstanding achievement gaps, including the gap in high school graduation rates between black and white males. Only nine states reported graduation rates of 70% and above for black male students, while 19 states have a graduation rate of 59% or lower. Data also reveal higher suspension rates and fewer advanced placement opportunities for black males, and thus less opportunity for these students. Data from The Educational Testing Service’s symposium, in the recommended reading of this session, enable the exploration of key factors that reduce black male graduation rates, including poor levels of parental education, high rates of foster care, hunger, and suspension/expulsion, and more.
• Amy Stuart Wells (2014). Seeing Past the “Colorblind” Myth of Education Policy. National Education Policy Center. This article explains how purportedly colorblind policies have led to outcomes that are anything but: from systemic under funding of schools serving students of color to weak and inexperienced teachers in those same schools, lack of access to high-level courses, harsh disciplinary policies, and more. We need to acknowledge and explore how minority racial status affects minority students and work intentionally to counter those forces. This same argument applies to many test-based education policies that have been in vogue for the past decade.

Recommended reading

• Gary Orfield (2013). Closing the Opportunity Gap: Housing Segregation Produces Unequal Schools. Orfield asserts that lack of progress on school desegregation is linked to social inequalities in housing. The lack of affordable housing for low-income families near the best schools further limits opportunity for minority families in particular, as per Rothstein. Data show that the United States will soon have a nonwhite majority, and that its public schools already do, which makes a focus on equal housing and educational opportunities increasingly urgent.
• Jeremy E. Fiela (2013). Decomposing School Resegregation: Social Closure, Racial Imbalance, and Racial Isolation. American Sociological Review. Fiela attempts to explain desegregation efforts in schools through the lens of social closure – the exclusion by some societal groups of others in order to gain a perceived advantage – by exploring the links between segregation, population change, and school racial composition. He asserts that the declining presence of whites in minority schools feeds into the racial imbalance, further isolating minority students, and that the biggest barrier to desegregation today is the uneven racial distribution of students across school districts.
• A Strong Start: Positioning Young Black Boys for Educational Success: A Statistical Profile. Educational Testing Service’s Addressing Achievement Gaps Symposium. These data provide a snapshot of the disparities that young black males face in their lifetime. The report compares data on teacher quality, reading achievement, high school dropout rate, educational attainment, school segregation, grade retention and employment for black male versus white male students. These disparities help explain the graduation rate gap discussed in the Schott Foundation report.
• Richard Rothstein (2013). “Misteaching History on Racial Segregation.” School Administrator. Rothstein gives an overview of the legal history that led to housing, and thus school segregation, including court rulings and regulated housing, and its impact on achievement gaps. He argues that the best way to bridge the achievement gap is through an intensive renewed national focus on integration.

Graphics

EPI Web Articles: Unfinished March.  Richard Rothstein and others. In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. called for legal rights, including jobs and a living wage. This infographic shows the inequalities that poor black children still experience today in schools, over 50 years later, limiting their chances of climbing out of poverty and into circumstances of greater opportunity.

Elizabeth Kneebone (2016). Concentrated Poverty in the wake of the Great Recession. Brookings Institute. Poverty has become both more widespread and concentrated since the recession. Neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, in which 40% or more of the population is living below the federal poverty line, have especially increased since 2009. While concentrated poverty has overall increased for every racial group since 2009, it has always been especially prominent among black communities.

While this report finds that the suburbs have the smallest percentage of residents in high poverty and extremely poor neighborhoods, the percent change from 2005-2009 to 2010-2014 is almost double the change in cities over that period.

Emma Garcia and Elaine Weiss (2014). Segregation and peer’s characteristics in the 2010-2011 kindergarten class. As the notes indicate, this bar chart illustrates the degree to which students of color – both black and Hispanic – begin school with peers who are low-income, while white students overwhelmingly attend low-poverty schools. Race- and income-based gaps that children bring to kindergarten are thus exacerbated, rather than compensated for, by their school contexts.

Film

The award-winning 2013 documentary The New Public chronicles the daily experiences of a group of high school teachers and their students in their first and fourth years in an alternative small high school in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Director Jyllian Gunther’s powerful film illustrates in stark relief the uphill battles facing teens living in poverty, many in situations of racial and economic isolation and with single parents, as they try to make it to graduation. The students and their parents, teachers, and school leaders highlight the influence of so-called “non-cognitive” skills on the academic outcomes sought, and on particular challenges to school improvement at the high school level.

Study questions

• According to Wilson, Sharkey, Rothstein, Wells and others, race and concentrated poverty have long been associated with each other and posed barriers to student (and family) success. What do you think it will take to end the cycle of concentrated poverty? Is integration in schools and/or housing feasible, and if so, which strategies are most likely to be effective?
• This session discusses various factors – political, social, legal, and economic – that have contributed to problems we face today related to concentrated poverty and its racial aspects. While several solutions have been proposed, some, such as school integration, would take many years to put in place. What can individual schools or school districts do to reduce concentrated poverty, and its impacts, today? Which other partners will be most critical to this work?
• Wells and Orfield are among many to document that minority students are disadvantaged because of the schools they attend. Proposed fixes include various strategies to integrate low-income students into higher-income schools. There is also substantial evidence that such strategies can benefit low-income and minority students. At the same time, do you also see potential downsides to such efforts? For example, might it lead to exclusion or hostility among children? (i.e. students’ different values and backgrounds preventing socializing, bullying, etc.) How can we counter these forces?

• Bruce D. Baker, David G. Sciarra, and Danielle Farrie. Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card. The Education Law Center publishes the nation’s most comprehensive state-by-state assessment of the degree to which schools are funded sufficiently and equitably, using four distinct metrics: funding level (per-pupil), funding distribution (degree to which funding is equitable relative to student poverty), effort (share of state GDP devoted to education), and coverage (proportion of students in public schools). The most recent full report (and executive summary) show that states have not restored funding to pre-recession levels, and that only a minority of states fund schools progressively – providing added funds for schools serving higher-poverty, and higher-needs, students.
• National Public Radio. Why America’s Schools Have a Money Problem. The debate over whether money matters in education is sufficiently big to capture the attention of NPR, which covered the issue in excellent detail in this recent series. Starting with a depiction of two tiny Illinois school districts that are just a few miles apart geographically but worlds apart in other ways – driven by a per-pupil disparity of $9,794 vs. over $28,000 – the series illustrates in stark detail the consequences for low-income students. Examples include small classes and experienced, well-paid teachers for wealthy students versus large classes with too few textbooks taught by novices in schools with broken toilets and no nurse or librarian for those with less money.
• Michael Rebell. 2009. Courts and Kids: Pursuing Educational Equity Through the State Courts. U of Chicago Press. (Chapters 1 and 2). Since there is no federal constitutional mandate for fair or sufficient public education, one response to this systemic inequity has been lawsuits brought by low-income districts in states across the country. Rebell, a Teachers College professor and one of the nation’s preeminent education equity litigators, presents the core historical issues around these lawsuits in the book’s first two chapters. (In recognition of the many cases that have been litigated, appealed, and decided since the book’s publication, Rebell prepared a supplement that provides an overview of developments since 2009. Up-to-date summaries of developments in adequacy cases in all 50 states are also available on the website of the National Access Network, schoolfunding.info.)
• Richard J. Murnane and Frank Levy “Evidence from Fifteen Schools in Austin, Texas” in Does Money Matter? Gary Burtless. 1996. While it seems intuitive that more money can help improve schools, there are studies finding otherwise and scholars who argue that more resources do not, in fact, improve education. This book, which grew out of a Brookings conference, brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines to discuss the evidence on the link between school resources and educational and economic outcomes. Murnane and Levy assert, based on evidence from AISD, that money does matter. Eric Hanushek is among the most prominent of those arguing the opposite, drawing scholarly critiques like this one.

Optional reading:

• Sarah Almy and Christina Theokas. 2010. Not Prepared for Class:  High-Poverty Schools Continue to Have Fewer In-Field Teachers. One consequence of funding disparities is the challenges low-income schools face in trying to attract and retain the best teachers. Indeed, despite a provision in No Child Left Behind that every classroom have a highly qualified teacher by 2006, which was designed to ensure that low-income students and students of color had access similar to those of their higher-income peers to strong teachers, students in high-poverty schools are still twice as likely to be taught by out-of-field teachers (those without certification or a major in the core academic subject they are teaching) and disproportionately taught by rookies – teachers who are in their first year, and thus least effective at instruction.
• Noelle Ellerson and Elaine Weiss (2014). Rich Hill: The Gap between Student Needs and School Capacity. This white paper jointly produced by AASA and BBA as a companion to the documentary Rich Hill explores the unique challenges facing rural schools serving low-income students. In particular, it explains how nation-wide funding mismatches that afford fewer resources to high-needs schools are exacerbated in Rich Hill High School and others like it by their physical isolation and difficulty accessing the student and family supports that enable effective classroom teaching and learning.
• Campaign for Funding Equity, Alliance for Quality Education, Education Law Center, and the Public Policy and Education Fund of New York. January 2014. A Tale of Two States: Equity Outperforms Inequity. Taking advantage of natural variation in how these two high-spending states distribute their education dollars, the report makes a strong case for why equitable funding, in particular, affects student and school outcomes. As the authors state, “On opposite sides of the Hudson River, New York and New Jersey stand only a mile apart. But when it comes to how they fund their public schools, the yawning gulf between these two states is wide and deep. Unfair describes school funding in New York [while]. … [i]n sharp contrast, New Jersey school funding is fair. [And] The bottom line is that New York’s academic performance, as measured by high school graduation rates and test scores, trails New Jersey’s by wide margins.”
• Ognibene, Richard, Ed. A Persistent Reformer: Jonathan Kozol’s Work to Promote Equality in America. Peter Lang New York Teacher, journalist, and prominent education policy critic and activist, Jonathan Kozol has been calling attention to structural inequities in the US education system since 1967 when Death at an Early Age, his book about racism in Boston’s schools, was published and won a National Book Award. He has since written eleven more books that focus on segregation in schools and society, poverty, inequitable school funding, and many more. In this book, various scholars analyze Kozol’s perspective and proposed solutions with an eye toward their relevance today.

Graphics:

As reported by the Education Law Center in both its annual report card and a separate paper comparing two neighboring states, New Jersey’s per-pupil funding has been progressive in recent years — channeling more dollars to low-income students — while New York’s is the opposite:

One impact of this different between the two demographically similar and high-spending states can be seen in New Jersey’s much larger gains in NAEP scores in both reading and math during this time period, and its greater progress in closing achievement gaps between higher-income and lower-income students:

Video: In this December 2015 interview, Jonathan Kozol asserts that decades after he began to document the fact, “we still are running an apartheid education system [in which] funding for schools and resources for schools are savagely unequal.”

Book club: Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities. 1991. Over two decades old, this vivid description of disparities between schools serving students of different races and social class unfortunately holds truer than ever. Based on Kozol’s observations of classrooms in public school systems in some of the nation’s poorest cities, he describes what takes place in both the lowest- and highest per-capita spending schools, ranging from just over $3,000 in Camden, New Jersey to $15,000 in Great Neck on Long Island. The book illustrates the overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, understaffing, and lack of such basics as textbooks, despite high tax rates levied on poor, minority communities to try to compensate for low tax bases. The book touches on both successful and unsuccessful lawsuits waged by plaintiffs in these poor districts and calls for an end to the racial segregation that he argues is alive and well in the American educational system.

Study Questions:

• Why do Americans tolerate, accept, and even defend a system that produces such a sharp mismatch between schools’ (and students’) needs and their abilities to meet them? What do you think it would take to affect a shift in that attitude?
• While overall, there is a close correlation between funding level and student achievement, that is not the only factor, and there are several major exceptions/outliers. For example, Washington, DC (DCPS) has one of the highest per-pupil funding levels in the country, but also one of the lowest levels of achievement and the largest race-based gaps, whether measured by NAEP scores,  high school graduation rates, or others. How do these exceptions to the rule affect the debate around this issue? What do you think accounts for them?
• If you were to design a system for funding American schools from scratch, what would your priorities be, taking into account our preference for a high degree of local control, the reality of state and federal political priorities, etc.? (or, to what extent would you be willing to bypass those? What changes do you anticipate this new system might bring about?

Required Reading

• National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. 2007. The Timing and Quality of Early Experiences Combine to Shape Brain Architecture. Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. This working paper explains how brain architecture is formed in the early months and years of a child’s life, factors that improve development and put it at risk, and broad policy implications based on these findings.
• Taylor Robbins, Shannon Stagman, and Sheila Smith. October 2012. Young Children at Risk: National and State Prevalence of Risk Factors. National Center for Children in Poverty.  This report uses national and state data on established factors that put young children at risk for early gaps and subsequent failure to document the scope and scale of problems facing US children.
• Bruce Bradbury, Miles Corak, Jane Waldfogel, and Elizabeth Washbrook. 2015. Too Many Children Left Behind: The US Achievement Gap in Comparative Perspective. Russell Sage Foundation. Chapter 3, Resources for Children (pp.40-66): This chapter sets out the various resources and factors that drive, and impede, healthy child development and the links between inequitable resources and early achievement gaps among US children compared to their peers in Australia, Canada, and the UK.
• Emma Garcia. June 2015. Inequalities at the Starting Gate: Cognitive and Noncognitive Skills Gaps between 2010-2011 Kindergarten Classmates. Economic Policy Institute. This paper documents in detail the large gaps across social class groups and, to a smaller extent, racial groups, in achievement in both reading and math and in such social emotional skills as self-control and persistence. It concludes that these gaps, which are not driven by schools, are also very difficult for schools to close, and that public investments in early supports for children and their families are critically important.
• National Women’s Law Center 2015. Set up to Fail: When Low-Wage Work Jeopardizes Parents’ and Children’s Success. This comprehensive report from the National Women’s Law Center, which combines quantitative data on low-wage families’ situations and input from interviews with those families, including child care workers themselves, demonstrates the market failure that puts quality child care out of reach for many US families while also providing very low pay and little support for those who care for and educate our youngest children.

Optional Reading

• Hart, Betty; Risley, Todd R. The Early Catastrophe. The 30 Million Word Gap. American Educator, v27 n1 p4-9 Spr 2003. This much-cited study involved intensive work in the homes of 42 professional, middle, lower-social class and welfare families that explored how and how much parents talk with their children. Results at age three and from follow-up at 3^rd grade with some families indicate the strong influence of early interactions at home on young children’s vocabulary and other language development.
• Moore, Kristin; Manlove, Jennifer; Richter, Kerry; Halle, Tamara; Le Menestrel, Suzanne; Zaslow, Martha; Greene, Angela Dungee; Mariner, Carrie; Romano, Angela; Bridges, Lisa A Birth Cohort Study: Conceptual and Design Considerations and Rationale. Working Paper Series.  (NCES US Department of Education 1999)  This paper by some of the preeminent ECE scholars, sets out the complexity of studying young children and introduces a key dataset for such work – the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth cohort (ECLS-B).
• Elaine Weiss and Emma Garcia. June 2014. Segregation and Peers’ Characteristics in the 2010-2011 kindergarten class; 60 years after Brown v. Board. Economic Policy Institute. This paper uses data from the ECLS-K data set to document the disparate types of classrooms in which children of color begin school, in contrast to those of their white peers. It finds high levels of segregation by minority racial and ethnic status and social class, such that even poor white students are more likely to land in low-poverty classes than are their middle-income black and Hispanic peers. It also reports a range of associated disadvantages for children of color, including differences across schools in parents’ education status and changes in achievement gaps during that kindergarten year.
• Paul Tough, Whatever it Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America. 2008. Chapter 2, Unequal Childhoods, explores Canada’s growing recognition of how limited Harlem parents’ access is to the kinds of information and other resources that he and his wife can take for granted regarding child development and how to enhance it through specific activities. Indeed, this inspired much of his thinking around the development of the Harlem Children’s Zone Baby College and other HCZ programs.

Graphics: 

In the proliferation and pruning process, simpler neural connections form first, followed by more complex circuits. The timing is genetic, but early experiences determine whether the circuits are strong or weak.

Harvard Center on the Developing Child. Brief: The Science of Early Child Development.

Inequalities at the Starting Gate finds that the most socioeconomically disadvantaged children lag substantially in both reading and math skills, and that these skill levels rise along with social class. As such, poor children face substantial obstacles to school success. For example, children in the highest socioeconomic group have reading and math scores that are significantly higher—by a full standard deviation—than scores of their peers in the lowest socioeconomic group.

A combination of greater income gaps across social classes, much less support for parents from both workplace and government, and disparate access to quality early education, which would narrow them, leads to larger gaps both between low- and middle-SES children and also between middle- and top-SES US kids compared to their peers in similar countries.

Too Many Children Left Behind (2015). Bradbury, Corak, Waldfogel, and Washbrook

Book Club: The Youngest Minds, by Ann B. and Richard Barnet. Simon and Schuster 1998.  In their exploration of research on child development, this husband-wife, policy analyst-neurologist team translates important evidence on brain science, psychology, and parenting into accessible, readable terms that also can help guide policy action. The authors explain how disadvantaged circumstances stand in the way of healthy development for too many American children and also how those poor odds can be overcome with the right policies and interventions. The latter includes an overview/summary of the impacts and benefits of quality early childhood education programs.

Video: Brain Hero (This three-minute graphic video from the Harvard Center for the Developing Child illustrates the complexities of brain development, early obstacles infants and toddlers must overcome, and consequences when they don’t, as well as policy implications to enhance young children’s healthy development.

Study Questions:

• Given the critical importance of laying a strong foundation for early brain development, why is there such a lack of investment in young children and their families in the United States? How might we learn from other countries – in particular, those with similar economic and political systems – in order to narrow this gap?
• How do race and poverty interact in these early years to create early achievement gaps? And which interventions might be most helpful in mitigating those impacts and narrowing (or even averting) the gaps?
• Based on what you have read here, how much of the achievement gaps we see in elementary school, middle school, and even at high school graduation are likely due to school influences versus the persistence of gaps already accrued when children entered kindergarten?

Like the other sessions in this MOOC, BBA thanks Andy Donlon for his helpful contributions.

Required Reading

Optional Reading List

Graphics and Data

Video

Book Club Recommendation

Study Questions

Required Reading

• Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein and various school superintendents. Rhee and Klein, former chancellors of the Washington, D.C. and New York City public school districts, respectively, released a 2010 Manifesto outlining how to fix schools by championing a “no excuses” mindset (i.e. avoiding blaming poverty-related factors for poor student performance) and focusing on teacher quality as the single most important factor determining student success.
• Paul E. Peterson. (2012). Neither Broad Nor Bold: A Narrow-Minded Approach to School Reform. Critiquing the APPAM Presidential address by Helen Ladd that was featured in last month’s MOOC, Peterson vigorously challenges the premises and policies of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education by disputing the asserted links between social and economic disadvantage and low student achievement. Citing research identifying other factors, including parents’ education, family structure, and effective teachers, as more significantly influencing student achievement, he dismisses the premise that “poverty and income inequality, not inadequate schools, are the fundamental problem in American education that needs to be fixed,” and instead advances test-based accountability, school choice, and teacher policy reforms (e.g. merit pay incentives, elimination of tenure).
• Edward H. Haertel. March 22, 2013 William H. Angoff Memorial lecture at the National Press Club. Reliability and Validity of Inferences about Teachers Based on Student Test Scores. Education Testing Service. Haertel, a researcher at Stanford University, examines the use of value-added models (VAMs) to measure teacher effectiveness. Complex and controversial statistical models for calculating teacher value-added estimates, VAMs have shaped efforts over the past decade to use teacher evaluation systems to guide promotion, support and firing decisions, seen as critical in the “no excuses” school reform movement. Haertel begins by assessing how much differences in teacher quality (versus other factors) affect student achievement, and cites their relatively small contribution – and thus the need to distinguish them from statistical “noise” – as one of many problems with this use of VAMs.
• Equity and Excellence Commission. (2013). For Each and Every Child: A Strategy for Education Equity and Excellence.S. Department of Education. Convened by Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the Commission starkly documents large and persistent inequities that impede progress in the U.S. education system. The report offers five major sets of recommendations in the categories of: equitable funding and resources, effective teaching and leadership, access to high quality curriculum and learning opportunities, access to quality early childhood education and out-of-school time enrichment, and addressing poverty-driven issues of student health and nutrition.
• Anthony S. Bryk. (2009). Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago. The University of Chicago Press. Bryk’s seminal book on effective school improvement models, which rely on integrated ecosystems of non-school and school-based factors, illustrates the problem with arguments like those above that fail to see how factors interact and instead try to point to specific factors as determinative. In the second chapter, they identify a comprehensive set of practices and conditions that are essential to improving educational outcomes. Considering these as five “ingredients” akin to cake-baking (i.e., if any is too little or left out, the cake doesn’t come out right), they cite: school leadership, parent-community ties to school, including social and economic conditions, the professional capacity of the faculty and staff, a student-centered learning climate, and instructional guidance. .

Optional Reading List

• In 2009, the New Teacher Project, founded to address the inequitable distribution of effective teachers, published The Widget Effect: Our National Failure to Acknowledge and Act Upon Teacher Effectiveness. The report, which surveyed teacher evaluation and dismissal over 15,000 teachers and 1,300 principals in 12 school districts, concluded that the U.S. public education system treats teachers as “interchangeable parts, rather than individual professionals.” It argued that teacher evaluation was seriously flawed, rating most teachers as good or great. While generally well received, the report did not consider prior research (e.g. Ray Pecheone) on why evaluation systems don’t work: they rely on administrators who have inadequate time, pedagogical expertise, tools, and processes and have a limited understanding of effective teaching.
• Critics of this report note that it is likely that most teachers actually are either good or great – but that the main purpose of an evaluation and accountability system should be to help all, but especially the majority in the middle, to improve. The Peer Assistance and Review Program (see this discussion in Education Week) that was developed in Toledo, Ohio, and has since been adopted in Montgomery County, Maryland, San Juan, California, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and other school districts has been found by a rigorous review out of Harvard – A User’s Guide to PAR – to do exactly that, both effectively and cost efficiently. The PAR program succeeds by creating a collegial culture in which teachers and principals use a variety of sources for ongoing feedback to reflect on teaching and learning and thereby build a process of continuous improvement.
• Big Study Links Good Teachers to Lasting Gains. January 6, 2012. This New York Times article discusses the work of Raj Chetty and his colleagues, which shows that teachers can have wide-ranging and lasting positive effect on student lives. An advocate of using VAM in teacher evaluation, Chetty finds students can learn in any given year somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of a standard deviation more if they have an effective teacher rather than a very ineffective one. He also estimates that replacing a teacher in the bottom 5% VAM by an average one (which is the equivalent of a full standard deviation improvement) would increase the lifetime earnings of that teacher’s entire class by more than $250,000. While highly technical, see Chetty’s study, The Long-Term Impacts of Teachers: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood
• Civil Rights and Testing: Response to Haycock and Edelman, June 10, 2015, and Annual Accountability Testing: Time for the Civil Rights Community to Reconsider, May 28, 2015. In these two Ed Week Blogs, Marc Tucker, Executive Director of the National Center on Education and the Economy, responds to criticisms from Kati Haycock, Jonah Edelman and others who challenge his argument that policy changes based on annual testing and accountability have not helped students of color and have, in fact, done some damage to schools serving them. Some charged that his call for the Civil Rights community to reconsider their support for this reform is an attack on their leadership and endangers their unified consensus, which is needed to ensure needed public engagement and equity in testing and accountability.

Graphics & Data

As the graph above shows, there is a there is a strong negative correlation (-0.71) between a state’s child poverty rate and how proficient 4th graders read in each state. In general, the lower a state’s child poverty rate the better its students score on reading proficiency tests. Data are from the 2009-10 school year.

This chart is based on New York state students in grades 3-8 in the 2013-14 school year. Overall, there is a strong correlation between achievement and poverty. There are, however, exceptions to this pattern that invite further investigation. They may perhaps illustrate strategies to mitigate the effects of poverty (rather than reduce it) that can have a positive impact on student outcomes.

This pie chart, based on research by Edward Haertel, illustrates the many factors beyond single teachers that influence student achievement. These other factors include other in- school factors such as class size, curriculum, instructional time, availability of specialists and tutors, and resources for learning (books, computers, science labs, and more); and, a much larger share, non-school factors such as home and community supports or challenges, and individual student needs and abilities, health, and attendance.

Studies like this one by Robert Marzano support the premise that teacher effectiveness can greatly impact student achievement. If an average student in an average school has an effective teacher two years in a row, then this student can achieve the 96% percentile of performance. Marzano uses a complex rubric according to research-based elements for both effective teachers and effective schools, respectively, and this chart measures the impacts of those effective schools and effective teachers according to that specific rubric. In addition to questions about this versus the BBA and other perspectives, another is how, in practice, to create such effective schools and recruit and retain the best teachers.

Video

“Getting Better at Getting Better,” at the NEA Foundation’s October 9, 2015 Cross-Site Convening, featuring: Tony Bryk, President, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.  Bryk discusses how multiple individuals and stakeholders in a variety of roles in a school community can and must come together with shared purpose in a coherent and unified way for effective school reform. He decries the fragmentation and “initiative fatigue” that characterize education reform in general and suggests the current chasm between heightened aspirations in reform and what we actually achieve for poor and low-income students is the “greatest social justice issue of our time.”In response, he presents his “school improvement paradigm” centered on six big ideas, based on his successful work in some of Chicago’s most disadvantaged schools.

Book Club Recommendation

If a MOOC session is not your thing, try suggesting this for your next book club instead. These follow the same theme as the more scholarly articles listed above, but make for good discussion over crackers, cheese, and wine.

• Ravitch, Diane. (2013). Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools, Knopf. See especially chapter 10, “How Poverty Affects Academic Achievement,” starting at p.91. Ravitch is one of the foremost critics of the standards-based reform movement and particularly, since No Child Left Behind and the dominance of the “no excuses” school reform movement, it’s over reliance on high stakes testing and accountability. Having herself been one of the strongest advocates for the testing-and-accountability agenda, she combines the passion of a new convert with the deep wisdom of one of the leading historians of U.S. education. But does she go too far in suggesting that all is well with U.S. schools, and in providing plenty of critique but less in the way of fixes?

Study Questions

Question #1

Rhee, Klein, Chetty, and Thernstrom rightly argue that schools and teachers can make a critical difference in the lives of children; Thernstrom suggests that school-based factors explain up to two-thirds of the variation in achievement among student of color and poor and low-income students. Is this “no excuses” argument tenable in light of decades of evidence of larger impacts of out-of-school factors and more recent research by Reardon that not only finds the correlation between achievement and socioeconomic status increasing over the past decade but also attributes much of this increase to academic enrichment outside of school provided by more affluent parents?

Question #2

Why do you think this argument over the primary cause of the achievement gap, expressed generally as due to either ineffective teachers and leaders or family, social and economic disparities, has become so heated and polarizing in politics and culture in the U.S. since the passage of No Child Left Behind, which originally represented a bipartisan consensus in Congress and across the nation’s governors?

Question #3

Both Bryk and colleagues’ work in Chicago and the Equity and Excellence Commission offer a way out of the false “either/or” debate above over how to close the achievement gap by finding that both in-school and out-of-school factors play significant roles (and interact).  How are the Commission’s recommendations, which correspond to the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, reflected in the recent reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act called the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)? Where does the legislation fall short?

You have heard – including from us here at BBA – that the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education is grounded in evidence of poverty’s impacts on student success, and of effective strategies to mitigate them. You want to make the case to your friends so they will sign on, and to your school board members and community leaders so that your school can do what it takes to give all children an equitable, excellent educational experience. Or to your graduate students, who need to understand the many ways that education and poverty intersect, so that they can go change our education system and the world for the better. But you don’t know where to start.

Introducing BBA101. This “MOOC” gives you everything you need, in class-sized doses, to educate yourself and, if you’d like, others, on this important subject. Each month, you’ll find a new session with everything you’d expect to find in a classroom (except the teacher and other students). It is designed so that you can go through it alone or with a friend, session-by-session or occasionally, based on your specific interests. Each session includes:

• “Required” and “optional” reading lists. The former are seminal chapters and articles – “must reads” – from some of the preeminent scholars in the field, and the latter are excellent but often more in-depth or challenging pieces that you might want to take on if this session’s topic is of particular interest.
• Graphics and data: Illustrations of 2-3 of the most important and surprising data points or trends featured in the readings, with captions to explain what you’re seeing and why you might want to share it. This helps crystallize core points from the week and what you want to take away from the session.
• Video: Where possible, we feature a video (or audio) presentation from one of the experts whose work is featured. While he or she may not be speaking to the article’s topic or point, this is a way to get a general sense of the week’s main points, and also an alternative if you prefer this to the more academic articles.
• Book Club Recommendations: We want you to share this MOOC far and wide. And we know that everyone learns differently. So maybe discussing a few of the key highlights of this session with friends over wine and cheese works better for you than going through the data and analysis in their original format.
• Study Questions: Finally, we offer a set of questions that will help you sort through the material, whether it’s with your book club or in preparation for a mock “quiz.”

Contents

Required Reading

Optional Reading List

Graphics and Data

Video

Book Club Recommendation

Study Questions

Required Reading

• Richard Rothstein (2004). Chapter 1 in Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic And Educational Reform To Close The Black-White Achievement Gap, (pp.1-59). Economic Policy Institute. Widely considered the “bible” for evidence of the connections between poverty and education, this book stands the test of time.
• David Berliner (2009). Poverty and Potential Out-of-School Factors and School Success Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. Berliner is one of the foremost scholars on this subject; this brief focuses in particular on health-related impediments to low-income children’s academic success.
• Helen Ladd (2011). Education and Poverty: Confronting the Evidence. Presidential Address to the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management in Washington, D.C
• Greg Duncan and Richard Murnane (2011). Whither Opportunity: Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances. Russell Sage. (Introduction, pp.3-23). This seminal compendium of scholarly articles starkly illustrates how growing US societal socioeconomic inequalities are being replicated, and even compounded, in American schools. See Executive Summary.
• Prudence L. Carter and Kevin G. Welner (2013). Closing the Opportunity Gap: What America Must Do to Give Every Child an Even Chance. Oxford Press. (Introduction pp.1-10). This three-part collection of scholarly essays effectively counters the education reform narrative that points to low standards and weak teaching, rather than large disparities in opportunities to learn, as the critical problem facing children and school.

Optional Reading List

• http://educationandpovertycivilrights.blogspot.com This collection of commentaries from BBA co-chair Pedro Noguera and others provides a civil rights perspective on the issue.
• National Center for Children in Poverty research, http://nccpreports.blogspot.com/ These commentaries reflect the perspective of child poverty experts and advocates.
• Letourneau, Nicole Lyn; Duffett-Leger, Linda; Levac, Leah; Watson, Barry; Young-Morris, Catherine Socioeconomic Status and Child Development: A Meta-Analysis Journal of Emotional and Behavioral Disorders, 2013. As described in the abstract, a number of factors mediate the relationship between socioeconomic status and school achievement. (full article requires payment).
• Nelson, C. and Sheridan, M (2012). “Lessons from Neuroscience Research for Understanding Causal Links between Family and Neighborhood Characteristics and Educational Outcomes.” in Duncan, G.J. & Murnane, R. (eds), Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, And Children’s Life Chances. This chapter includes a brief review of developmental neurobiology and its significance for factors shaped by families, schools, and neighborhoods; it includes recommendations for cost-effective early intervention.

Graphics & Data

Growing gaps in educational attainment are explained in large part by sharply increasing gaps in family income. As researchers document, such large disparities in resources mean that parents are able to provide very different levels of enrichment and support to their children.

In recent decades, the sharp increase in Americans with bachelor’s degrees has been driven almost entirely by growth in the top half of the income scale, with no growth at all among the bottom 25%.This fact represents – and drives – a major facet of our societal inequities.

In an era in which educational attainment predicts life chances more than any time in history, this graphic reflects the series of obstacles that disadvantaged students, particularly those growing up in poor communities, face starting from birth.

Video

Pedro Noguera delivers the 2011 UVA Ridley Lecture, titled “A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education,” outlining BBA principles and recommendations for addressing poverty-related impediments to learning that diminish opportunities too many American children.

Book Club Recommendation

If a MOOC session is not your thing, try suggesting this for your next book club instead. These follow the same theme as the more scholarly articles listed above, but make for good discussion over crackers, cheese, and wine.

• Kozol, Jonathan. Savage Inequalities. This classic work is based on journalist Jonathan Kozol’s visits between 1988 and 1990 to schools in burnt-out Camden, N.J., Washington, D.C., New York’s South Bronx, Chicago’s South Side, San Antonio, Tex., and East St. Louis, Mo., where virtually all students were nonwhite. Kozol offers insightful, heart-rending and eminently humane looks at how children from poor families are cheated out of a future by grossly underequipped, understaffed and underfunded schools in U.S. inner cities and less affluent suburbs.

Study Questions

Question #1

Rothstein, Berliner, Ladd, and others all point to poverty as the single largest factor affecting student success. Are they talking about poverty itself, or various factors related to it? Which of those strikes you as posing the largest barriers to success and why?

Question #2

Standards-based reform—described as the three-legged stool of standards, assessment and accountability—has been the dominant framework guiding education policy for over three decades. In light of the opportunity-to-learn issues raised by Duncan, Murnane, Carter, and Welner, what is the case for incremental changes to this framework in order to effectively address persistent achievement gaps? Or if a radically new framework is needed, what are the broad contours of one that addresses both in-school and out-of-school factors?

Question #3

In Whither Opportunity, Reardon’s research finds that the relationship between family socioeconomic status and academic achievement has strengthened over the past decade. He explains this by the increasing investment by wealthier families in out-of-school enrichment activities such as music lessons and tutoring. This reality, along with the widening social inequality in America, seems to undermine the American ideal that public education is a great equalizer and vehicle of social mobility. Given the contrast between policies that aim to reduce poverty and those that ameliorate its effects, which other reforms are needed to restore education as a great equalizer?

Optional: For Further Investigation

Question #1

In light of the significant research presented by Rothstein and Reardon on the impact of health care, nutrition, parents, home and community on the achievement gap, what recommended policies (e.g. earned income tax credits, school-community health clinics, affordable housing, early childhood education, after-school and summer programs) do you find most promising for the school district you are investigating or that serves your children? A new endeavor in the philanthropic community is called “collective impact.” Collective Impact reverses the traditional nonprofit social change process. Traditionally, a nonprofit identifies an isolated need, creates a service for that need, demonstrates results, and scales their service to more people in hopes of creating larger societal change. Collective Impact instead begins with changing the community overall and works backward. See seminal article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. What community stakeholders are likely to help initiate a broader approach for collective impact in improving the schools in this district?

Question #2

In Whither Opportunity?, edited by Duncan and Murname, the American promise of social mobility through educational equity has been seriously eroded in the past three decades of widening social and economic inequality; in fact, the correlation between family income and wealth and the educational attainment of children has strengthened over this period and perhaps calls into the question the capacity of American schools to perform this historic role of promoting equity. This correlation, known as the “iron law” of education policy, however, has been successfully overcome in countries like Finland and Canada (see Pasi Sahlberg, Finnish Lessons). What factors have strengthened this correlation in the American context and what corresponding policies could address them, given or in spite of international differences in political economy (i.e. the American emphasis on free market ideology)?

Question #3

In Closing the Opportunity Gap: What America Must Do to Give Every Child an Even Chance, Carter and Welner argue that opportunity to learn is the essential condition for every child to learn and achieve their potential and yet it has been ignored and even dismissed by policymakers in the standards-based reform era as an “excuse” for the failure of schools in high-poverty communities. Opportunity to learn is actually a legal principle established by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and has a long case law history. In recent decades, advocates for equity, however, have been generally unsuccessful in using opportunity to learn in courts (e.g. see this summary by FAIRTEST on the decision in G.I. Forum et al. v Texas Education Agency, where plaintiffs failed to win even though showing that high stakes “exit level” tests had a disparate impact on minority students). Nevertheless, groups like the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under Law, NAACP and NUL continue to seek to leverage the law to ensure the federal role in ensuring equity in schools (see this 2010 framework for reauthorizing ESEA). What do you consider the promise and the challenges in using opportunity to learn as a strategy to improve America’s schools?