Reformers frequently say that poverty is just an excuse, that poverty is not destiny, and that a child’s education should not be determined by his or her zip code.
Poverty is not an excuse. It is a harsh reality. No one wants poverty to be any child’s destiny. Public schools exist to give all children equal educational opportunity, no matter what their zip code.
Schools fail when they lack the resources to provide equal educational opportunity. And they fail not because of lack of will but because poverty often overwhelms the best of intentions.
Poverty persists not because schools are bad and teachers don’t care but because society neglects its root causes. Concentrated poverty and racial segregation are social problems, not school problems. Schools don’t cause poverty and racial segregation, nor can schools solve these problems on their own. W. E. B. DuBois said during the depths of the Great Depression that “no school, as such, can organize industry, or settle the matter of wage and income, can found homes or furnish parents, can establish justice or make a civilized world.”1 DuBois was not “making excuses.” He was placing the blame for poverty and inequality where it belongs: on the shoulders of those who control industry and government.
DuBois recognized that schools alone cannot create equality or eliminate poverty. They can help highly motivated students escape poverty. Many thousands of personal stories attest to the power of one teacher, one principal, one school, that saved a student from his or her parents’ life of hardship. Educators and schools do have remarkable power to change lives.
As important and inspiring as those stories are, they are atypical. There is no example in which an entire school district eliminated poverty by reforming its schools or by replacing public education with privately managed charters and vouchers. If the root causes of poverty are not addressed, society will remain unchanged. Some poor students will get the chance to go to college, but the vast majority who are impoverished will remain impoverished. The current reform approach is ineffective at eliminating poverty or improving education. It may offer an escape hatch for some poor children, as public schools always have, but it leaves intact the sources of inequality. The current reform approach does not alter the status quo of deep poverty and entrenched inequality. After more than a decade of No Child Left Behind, we now know that a program of testing and accountability leaves millions of children behind and does not eliminate poverty or close achievement gaps. The growing demand for more testing and more accountability in the wake of NCLB is akin to bringing a blowtorch to put out a fire. More of the same is not change. The testing, accountability, and choice strategies offer the illusion of change while changing nothing. They mask the inequity and injustice that are now so apparent in our social order. They do nothing to alter the status quo. They preserve the status quo. They are the status quo.
Will it be expensive to address the root causes of poor academic performance? Of course, but probably not as expensive as the cost of doing nothing.
We need broader and deeper thinking. We must decide if we truly want to eliminate poverty and establish equal educational opportunity. We must decide if we truly want to build a society with liberty and justice for all. If that is our true purpose, then we need to move on two fronts, changing society and improving schools at the same time.
Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University reminds us that we know full well how to improve schools:
It’s not as though we don’t know what works. We could implement the policies that have reduced the achievement gap and transformed learning outcomes for students in high-achieving nations where government policies largely prevent childhood poverty by guaranteeing housing, healthcare and basic income security. These same strategies were substantially successful in our own nation through the programs and policies of the war on poverty and the Great Society, which dramatically reduced poverty, increased employment, rebuilt depressed communities, invested in preschool and K–12 education in cities and poor rural areas, desegregated schools, funded financial aid for college and invested in teacher training programs that ended teacher shortages. In the 1970s teaching in urban communities was made desirable by the higher-than-average salaries, large scholarships and forgivable loans that subsidized teacher preparation, and by the exciting curriculum and program innovations that federal funding supported in many city school districts.2
These policies were hugely successful from the 1960s into the 1980s. Darling-Hammond points out that “the black-white reading gap shrank by two-thirds for 17-year-olds, black high school and college graduation rates more than doubled, and, in 1975, rates of college attendance among whites, blacks and Latinos reached parity for the first and only time before or since.”
Thus, those who throw up their hands and say that nothing works are wrong. Those who say that public schools are obsolete and broken are wrong. Those who say that we must abandon public education and replace it with free-market schooling and for-profit vendors are wrong. When the public schools have the appropriate policies, personnel, resources, and vision to achieve attainable goals, they respond with positive achievement.
If we know where we want to go, we can begin to discuss the strategies that will move us in the right direction.
We need solutions based on evidence, not slogans or reckless speculation.