Say we identify Bob as being gifted. Is a chance at success giving him access to resources? But what if because of his horrid home life he isn’t going to be able to make use of them? Do you try to put him in a better environment, or is offering him access to enrichment adequate?
We have a friend who teaches second grade outside of Phoenix. Half of her class turns over in the middle of the year, because the parents of the kids are migrant workers. How do you give them a chance?
I agree with you - I just don’t see how we get there
And the problem is not even poverty. I know plenty of middle class parents who run down education and in various ways sabotage their kids. The kids will never become criminals or anything, but won’t achieve what they could achieve with some role modeling and coaching. What do you do about them?
Nobody’s saying that we should throw Bob to the wolves. Bob deserves an adequate education. But not at the expense of other children.
What we are saying is that Suzie, who lives a half-mile away in the crime-free neighborhood of single-family homes near Bob’s high crime, low income apartment complex, shouldn’t be effectively penalized because the school she’s zoned to is spending all their time and effort trying to mitigate all the problems that 500 Bobs bring to the table at that school. In that situation, if Suzie’s showing up on time, most of the time, not failing her classes, and not egregiously bombing the standardized tests, then she’s doing “good enough” and the school spares no resources for her.
It’s a matter of relative need vs finite resources When the schools are concerned with such absurdly basic matters as making sure that 500 Bobs get at least one good meal a day, or that they have learned their alphabet by 1st grade, they’re not spending effort trying to develop Suzie into the best student she can be, even if she knew how to read coming into kindergarten. Suzie will do ok- she’ll probably even have better grades than at a more challenging school, but she won’t be as well educated as she’d have been had she gone elsewhere. Plus, there are the (IMO) corrosive effects of the attitudes and mores evidenced by the 500 Bobs who are her classmates toward education and other important things.
When Suzie’s parents put her in private school or in a magnet school or just another elementary school in a nicer area, it’s not with the intent of punishing the Bobs, it’s more out of a recognition that what’s good for the Bobs of the world isn’t always going to be what’s good for the Suzies of the world. And it’s unfortunate that taking the Suzies out of the school is detrimental to the Bobs, but what do you expect Suzie’s parents to do? Have their daughter take one for the team, so Bob can get a better education? Hardly. Suzie’s parents are going to do all they can for Suzie, with the expectation that Bob’s parents will do for him, or the school will.
Yes, exactly. The problem goes far beyond the school day. This is a really interesting article on how the US’s flimsy social safety net compared to other wealthy English-speaking countries widens our poverty gap, and suggests certain ways we can strengthen that net. Strengthening that net will improve educational outcomes for poor students far more than adding test-based performance standards for teachers will do.
I get this. Part of my frustration comes out of a dynamic I see over and over: a wealthy family volunteers a lot in their public school, which really needs volunteers–but then when their public school is still too under-resourced, they instead put their kid in a private school, and stop volunteering at the public school.
Maybe the solution is for us to fund all public schools such that you’d no more volunteer at them or donate supplies to them than you’d volunteer at or donate supplies to the air force. If we reach the point where public schools don’t vary in resources (financial and otherwise) based on the wealth of their neighborhoods, varying instead only on specific student needs (e.g., students with learning disabilities require more resources than students without), I’d be a lot more sanguine about the economic segregation that others seem to be okay with.
And yeah, I know it’s hard to make this call for your own kid. That’s why I think we need to be making it on a societal basis; if folks realize we’re all in this together, there’s a lot less of a temptation to make a tragedy of the privates decision.
Actually, I think the solution is free IUDs and levornogestrel implant systems for all girls and women who want them so that the Bobs here in the US aren’t born to parents who don’t particularly want them and aren’t really ready for them. The solution is a livable minimum wage so Bob’s parents can afford to take care of the kids they have without having to choose between 60 hour weeks or government handouts. The solution is subsidized child care so Bob can spend his formative years with proper teachers and caregivers instead of grandpa who shoves him in front of the TV for 6 hours at a time so he can smoke cigars on the back porch all day.
If Bob was growing up in a household where he was loved, with parents who had the time and inclination to actually parent him, and with a proper preschool education, probably he would do just fine no matter how poorly his school was funded. This isn’t a perfect solution, of course, because there will always be people who fail as parents and children who just aren’t interested in learning, but the vast majority of the student population would then have the ability to rise to the challenges they are given in school instead of dealing with all the rest of the garbage so many children are faced with today.
This is all definitely true.
[QUOTE= Left Hand of Dorkness]
Maybe the solution is for us to fund all public schools such that you’d no more volunteer at them or donate supplies to them than you’d volunteer at or donate supplies to the air force.
[/QUOTE]
Currently we spend almost $600 billion on the military, vs. something like $900 billion on education. We’d have to cut education spending quite a bit before we fund it at anything like the level of the air force.
[QUOTE=pbbth]
Actually, I think the solution is free IUDs and levornogestrel implant systems for all girls and women who want them so that the Bobs here in the US aren’t born to parents who don’t particularly want them and aren’t really ready for them. The solution is a livable minimum wage so Bob’s parents can afford to take care of the kids they have without having to choose between 60 hour weeks or government handouts. The solution is subsidized child care so Bob can spend his formative years with proper teachers and caregivers instead of grandpa who shoves him in front of the TV for 6 hours at a time so he can smoke cigars on the back porch all day.
[/QUOTE]
Even if that were true, you are going to run up against what I mentioned earlier. Every penny the government takes away from me to benefit Bob is a penny I don’t have to spend on my own kids. And the ROI in terms of educational achievement is going to be higher with my kids, because they don’t have the same disadvantages that Bob does.
The usual response is that we should do both. So educational spending goes up, as it nearly always has, but educational achievement does not.
Regards,
Shodan
Most parents who have the time and inclination to actually parent their kids and give them a proper preschool education aren’t inclined to settle for “fine”, which implies solid adequacy and nothing more. They want their kids to be educated to their potential, or at least to get beyond “fine” at the very least.
And that’s where I was going with my Bob and Suzie comparison- in the schools that have to deal with all the problems of a low income/low interest student body, the expectation is that the Suzies will do “fine” regardless of what happens, so they’re not really in the crosshairs of the school’s main educational effort.
Take Suzie and put her in a school with a student body composed of 80% students with parents who are college educated upper middle class students, and Suzie may well flourish, or even be identified as needing extra help, if she’s not up to the standards of that particular school.
Ultimately the problems that the Bobs of the country face aren’t ones that can very easily be solved by schools, no matter how much money you throw at them to solve the problem.
I’m not even sure money’s the problem- from everything I’ve read and seen, it’s a cultural and mindset issue. You can take the head of some low income family and give them a 75,000/yr job with health insurance, and that isn’t going to change how they make decisions or what they value. It’s true that they’re unlikely to be hungry or to lack anything essential in the way of physical items, but that doesn’t mean that they’re going to somehow auto-magically start socking away college fund money for their kids, or they’re going to start saving for retirement, or expecting better grades out of their kids, etc… That kind of thing is either the product of a culture that expects such things (and penalizes the lack thereof), or of uniquely determined and insightful individuals who can see past their own upbringing and the culture that they’ve been marinated in for their entire lives.
I really think the largest part is cultural expectations. I mean, as a middle-class white guy, it was pretty much expected that if I wasn’t going to go to college, I was going to go into a solid trade. Doing something like dropping out of high school and working construction, or even graduating high school and getting some sort of non-career job to pay the bills was considered seriously loserly for yourself, and embarrassing for your family. I get the impression that’s not the case for many lower-income demographics- there’s little expectation of success, and little opprobrium for failure, or for not even trying, so why bother?
How do you change that? That’s the billion-dollar question that nobody can answer.
Actually these programs will cost you less. For example, Colorado just did an experiment of offering free birth control to anyone who wanted it and found that it dramatically reduced the teen birth rate by 40% and found that the $23 million they invested in the program in a three year period saved the taxpayers somewhere between $49-$111 million dollars., specifically stating that for every dollar they invested in this program it saved them $5.85 in medicaid costs. Increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 would cost you as a taxpayer nothing and bring almost 5 million people out of poverty.
Did Colorado cut taxes by $49-111 million as a result?
It also would cost about a half million jobs, according to theCongressional Budget Office. So maybe Bob’s father will rise out of poverty. Or maybe he will lose his job.
Regards,
Shodan
And probably, as bump points out, not raise Bob’s educational achievement, because the issue isn’t just poverty, its the cultural around poverty. Its the things Bob’s parents value, the restrictions and encouragement they put on Bob. If Bob’s parents were merely poor, but weren’t part of the culture of poverty (as, for instance, immigrant families often are not) then Bob wouldn’t struggle as much because he’d have home support.
Even to the extent that people might share your society as a village view, the rubber hits the road when you ask someone to help “kids” generically and they have to weigh that against doing the very best they can for their own kids.
Additionally, even if you provide schools with everything they need, sparing no expense, that evidently does little to nothing to improve schools. As I’ve shared before: The Kansas City Schools Experiment.
We should have had a National Recommended Reading List decades ago. I don’t really buy the concept of IQ since I do not think mental performance can be boiled down to a single number. But I will use it for the sake of simplicity. How badly do children in the top 5% need most teachers and how many educators are in that 5%?
So how much good would that reading list do children in that 5%? Our educational system seems designed to cram everyone into mediocrity whether “good” schools or not. The list could have 100 books for kindergarten, 200 for 1st grade, 300 for 2nd etc., etc. That would be fewer than 10,000 books by 12th grade.
But now we have Project Gutenberg with 50,000 books. Sci-fi and science literature can be associated.
Omnilingual, by H. Beam Piper
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19445/19445-h/19445-h.htm
Worlds Within Worlds: The Story of Nuclear Energy, Volume 1 (of 3), by Isaac Asimov
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/49819/49819-h/49819-h.htm
Worlds Within Worlds: The Story of Nuclear Energy, Volume 2 (of 3), by Isaac Asimov
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/49820/49820-h/49820-h.htm
Worlds Within Worlds: The Story of Nuclear Energy, Volume 3 (of 3), by Isaac Asimov
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/49821/49821-h/49821-h.htm
psik
Absolutely agree that throwing money at the problem does no good and that parents have the biggest influence AND that giving every child a good education is good for everyone. I wonder how conditional cash transfers would work in the US. The idea is if your kid meets certain criteria the parents get money from the government. It makes in the parents best short-term interest for their child to meet the criteria. The criteria can include things like attendance, grades, and vaccinations. The government gets a good return on that money from a better educated populace which leads to a bigger economy/more taxes, less social problems, etc. So far Brazil and Mexico seem to be having success with it.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/03/to-beat-back-poverty-pay-the-poor/?_r=0
What I am not sure of is how it would work in a more developed country. There were plenty of shitty parent attitudes at my daughter’s mainly white and middle class public high school. Sports were important than academics, parents doing drugs with their kids, administrators tolerating absolutely godawful teachers. We sent her to a private, non-religious school for K-6 and they had a different sort of attitude. Reputation and fund raising seemed to me to be more important than actual academics.
Tough problem but we need to try something different.
That’s why no other country has done better than us, right?
The lesson a person SHOULD learn from that experiment: corruption and incompetence can prevent wise expenditures. Astonishingly, the CATO institute derives completely different conclusions.
Remember, though, that I’m NOT saying the solution is entirely, or even primarily, within the schools. I think the solution is primarily a societal solution. Do things like:
-Drastically reduce or eliminate prison sentences for nonviolent drug offenders.
-Dramatically improve the social safety net.
-Through similar means, reduce the percentage of children living in poverty to rates comparable to other first-world countries.
Yes, things need to happen in schools, including improving equitable funding of schools across the board. But the problem is far larger than the schools.
Those apples look nothing like those oranges. Providing a rich, vital, excellent education for everyone between the ages of 2-18 (yeah, we need public preschools, which is a whole nother kettle of fish) is going to have a budget completely unrelated to the budget needed to defend the US borders and also fight unnecessary land wars in other countries. My comparison was the to the need for private folks to donate materials to education and the military respectively, not to the cost of each program.
That’s a really interesting idea.
I heard on the radio yesterday that some entrepreneur in Chicago (I think?) is trying to find investors and businesses to work with for a new scheme. His plan is to offer students getting Ds and Fs a $500 reward and an internship with a company if they pull their grades up to B-. Interesting approach, to attract the “bad” students instead of the “good” ones. (I may have some of those details wrong; I was driving when I listened to it, and unlike most of their stories, they didn’t play it over and over all day long…)
Other countries don’t share the burden of our culture.
Yeah, our shitty racist plutocratic culture is definitely a burden. But “culture” is just the plural of “behavior.” And if we change our shitty racist plutocratic behavior, we change our shitty racist plutocratic culture. Win!
Yeah, there are more cultures than just the racist one or the plutocratic one at play. There is the culture of intergenerational poverty - where getting an education doesn’t matter, its more important to learn the system you’ll need to learn in order to survive. Its the culture of poverty that doesn’t respect authority - and therefore creates a disruptive classroom.
Yes, there are changes to culture that need to be made on the position of power side - racism isn’t helping - nor is our ‘pull yourself up by the bootstraps’ mentality, but there are simultaneous cultural changes that need to occur within the communities these kids inhabit. As long as we only place the blame one direction, even if we commit to solving it in that direction, the problem won’t get fixed.
I’m a victim of the failed Louisville, KY busing experiment. Bus some poor kids out of the inner cities into the 'burbs - bus some middle class kids into the city, reduce the disparity in income and race in the schools. It didn’t work. And it was obvious to me as a forth grader that when the kids from the inner cities talked back, didn’t do their coursework, messed around in class - their education was not going to be any better than what they were getting in their community school - however, the education of the middle class kids suffered because now we had a babysitter instead of a teacher.