Children, Poverty, and Outcomes: Who's Distorting Reality?

Yesterday, I happened upon the latest blog post of Amanda Ripley, an up-and-coming edu-pundit who recently changed focus from how the brain works under extreme duress to how other countries “build” smarter kids.   is a frontal assault on Diane Ravitch and others who declare poverty “a problem so intractable that schools cannot be expected to overcome it.”  The same debate, she states, gleefully, citing an old story from the New York Times, was used to defend low-performing, segregated public schools in New York City in the 1960s.

Wouldn’t you know that on the same day Ripley lobbed her grenade, taking Ravitch to task for some messy data analysis, NYC’s hometown newspaper featured an op-ed by Helen Ladd, a public policy and economics professor at Duke, and Edward Fiske, former NY Times education editor.  they ask.   In education reform circles, they remind us, it’s become fashionable to accuse anyone who even mentions the “P” word of “letting schools off the hook—or what Mr. Bush [architect of NCLB] famously called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” 

The new edu-pundits, it should be noted, have no truck with the idea of low expectations, and are careful to dissociate themselves from anything that smacks of the retro “blame-the-victim” deficit model.  Ed Reform 2.0 is based on a fervent belief in the infinite perfectibility of schools, educators, and the systems they inhabit—a universe in which standards, accountability, and corporatization promise to eradicate the ills of what everyone agrees is a badly damaged enterprise.   Educators in higher-performing systems across the globe, Ripley claims, acknowledge poverty, but they think it is their problem, “a problem so intractable that our schools must be outstanding in order to help overcome it.”  

How can anyone argue with outstanding schools?  Or taking ownership of poverty?  But it’s quite another thing to expect educators to tackle the problem alone.

Today, 25 percent, or one in four, of children under age 6 live in .   Positive outcomes for  these children, including their readiness for school, ongoing academic success, and future productivity, depend not only on their intellectual development, but also on their physical and social-emotional health, and on their immediate environments, most importantly, their families and neighborhoods.  Poverty can shape children’s long-term health and development in profound ways.  When little ones are exposed to or prolonged physical or emotional abuse, chronic neglect, parental substance abuse, violence, or the considerable burden of family economic hardship without adequate adult support, their development and learning can be severely compromised.

While voluminous research supports the benefits of high-quality early care and education, we are not going to change children’s outcomes without more holistic community supports and interventions.  , the federal initiative based on Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone model, is taking this tack.  States and communities across the country have long been creatively using education funding—including Title I—to support services for children beginning at birth. In Wisconsin, for example, the Appleton Area School District has adopted a comprehensive plan, which includes literacy programs for parents delivering at local hospitals; community parent education workshops; Parents as Teachers home visiting; Early Childhood Special Education, Title I Preschool and Even Start Family Literacy.

The stories of teachers and schools that have changed children’s trajectories are legion.  Education has historically been, and must continue to be, a path out of poverty.  As a nation, we should never aspire to less.  But as we shoot one silver bullet after another at the intractable challenges of education reform, we need to confront the reality and ravages of poverty head-on, lest our quest for school improvement  be permanently derailed.