When you visit a school like WHEELS or Polaris, it is hard not to feel hopeful, not just for the prospects of the students there, but for the possibility that a new approach to educating low-income children, rooted in the science of adversity, might be taking hold more broadly. I felt the same sense of hope observing ABC’s parent coaches and All Our Kin’s childcare mentors at work, patiently spreading a new set of ideas about the environments that infants and toddlers need to thrive.
But the reality is that the ideas I’ve explored in this book are still outside the mainstream, and the interventions I’ve described are still quite rare. Most preschools and schools that serve low-income children in this country don’t operate anything like Educare or Polaris. The early-childhood organizations whose work I highlighted in the first half of this book are all still small in scale, serving at most a few thousand children or families. The schools and classroom interventions that I’ve described educate a tiny fraction of the nation’s poor children, and they are competing against a dominant culture in education that only very rarely considers whether there might be another, better way to motivate and engage children who are growing up in poverty.
The system that exists today in the United States to support and educate those children is profoundly broken. There are currently more than 15 million American children living below the poverty line, and almost 7 million of them are living in deep poverty, with family incomes of less than $12,000 a year for a family of four. The problems most of these children face are relentless and pervasive. Statistically, they are likely to live in chaotic, disrupted families, in neighborhoods or regions of concentrated poverty where there are few resources to nurture children and countless perils to wound them, physically or psychologically or both. The schools they attend are likely to be segregated by race and class and to have less money to spend on instruction than the schools well-off students attend, and their teachers are likely to be less experienced and less well-trained than teachers at other schools.
Faced with the depth of this disadvantage, the intervention strategies I’ve described in this report can seem overmatched. But what the research I’ve described here makes clear is that intervening in the lives of disadvantaged children—by educating them better in school, helping their parents support them better at home, or, ideally, some combination of the two—is the most effective and promising anti-poverty strategy we have. When poor children grow up in an environment marked by stable, responsive parenting; by schools that make them feel a sense of belonging and purpose; and by classroom teachers who challenge and support them, they thrive, and their opportunities for a successful life increase exponentially.
Which brings us back to the question that I raised at the beginning of this book: Now that we know this, what do we do?
Let me propose three answers.
First, we need to change our policies. Consistently creating what Pamela Cantor has called “fortified environments” for poor children will mean fundamentally rethinking and remaking many of our entrenched institutions and practices: how we provide aid to low-income parents; how we create, fund, and manage systems of early-childhood care and education; how we train our teachers; how we discipline our students and assess their learning; and how we run our schools. These are essentially questions of public policy, and if real solutions are going to be found to the problems of disadvantaged children, these questions will need to be addressed, in a creative and committed way, by public officials at all levels—by school superintendents, school-board members, mayors, governors, and cabinet secretaries—as well as by individual citizens, community groups, and philanthropists across the country. I’ve tried in these pages to identify some specific changes in funding and policy that I think will enable us to help more children more effectively. But beyond those concrete suggestions, my larger aspiration for this book is that it might provide us with a set of guiding principles to propel forward the public-policy discussions and debates that we need to have now.
Second, we need to change our practices. The project of creating better environments for children growing up in adversity is, at bottom, the work of individuals. Which means that the teachers, mentors, social workers, coaches, and parents who spend their days working with low-income children don’t need to wait for large-scale policy changes to be enacted in order to take actions today and tomorrow and the next day that will help those children succeed. What the research I’ve described here makes clear, I hope, is that the trajectory that children’s lives follow can sometimes be redirected by things that might at first seem, to the adults in their lives, to be small and insignificant. The tone of a parent’s voice. The words a teacher writes on a Post-it note. The way a math class is organized. The extra time that a mentor or a coach takes to listen to a child facing a challenge. Those personal actions can create powerful changes, and those individual changes can resonate on a national scale.
Finally, we need to change our way of thinking. When you spend time reading through the kind of intervention studies that I’ve written about here, it’s easy to get caught up in the specifics of the data: sample sizes, standard deviations, regression analyses. And that data certainly matters. But I also find it useful, every once in a while, to think about the individual people who conducted these studies: the doctors or psychologists or social workers who went in to an orphanage in Russia or an impoverished neighborhood in Jamaica or a high school in Chicago or a living room in Queens and said, in essence, I want to help. I think we can do better.
As much as we draw on the data that those researchers have produced, I think we can also draw on their example. The premise underlying their work is that if there are children suffering in your community—or your nation—there is something you can do to help. We all still have a lot to learn about how best to deliver that help, which means that we need to continue and indeed expand upon the work those researchers are doing. But at the same time, we don’t need to know exactly what to do in order to know that we need to do something.
Helping children in adversity to transcend their difficult circumstances is hard and often painful work. It can be depressing, discouraging—even infuriating. But what the research shows is that it can also make a tremendous difference, not only in the lives of individual children and their families, but in our communities and our nation as a whole. It is work we can all do, whether or not it is the profession we have chosen. The first step is simply to embrace the idea, as those researchers did, that we can do better.