Let Me Repeat That: It's The Poverty, Stupid!

This is something I'll bet you didn't know: if we only count the US schools with a student poverty rate of less than 10 percent, our students outperform the kids in China, Singapore, and yes, even Finland on the Programme for International Achievement tests in reading, the very benchmark tests that have caused corporate education reformers to shriek, "The Chinese are beating us!"

US schools that serve a student population with a poverty rate over 75 percent wind up ranked near the bottom of the list. 

The evidence is crystal clear. Poverty is really the only national education reform issue that matters. Poverty is by far the number one reason children "fail" in school. Poverty, poverty, poverty. To phrase it as Bill Clinton might: It's the poverty, stupid. It's not a lack of a progressive play-based curriculum, it's not a lack of accountability, it's not about lazy teachers . . . Say it with me: it's the poverty.

The reason you probably didn't know this is that the corporate education reformers don't want you to know it. Guys like Bill Gates, the Koch brothers, Arnie Duncan, Michelle Rhee, and Barack Obama do not want you to look behind that particular curtain. They want you to believe that it's all about cracking the whip on those lazy asses and voila the kids (and their teachers) will chase those carrots and run away from those sticks all the way to the head of the class. They don't want you to know that the problem is poverty because they can't make money off of solving poverty the way they can off drill-and-kill education reform. So as part of their business plan, the American people have been subjected to an all-out public relations campaign in which they are attempting to claim the mantel of civil rights leaders. And it's working, but only to an extent: over 80 percent of us give our public school system as a whole, the devil we don't know, the ones other people's kids attend, a "C" or lower. When asked about our own public schools, the devil we know, the ones our own children attend, we hand out "A's" and "B's."

I don't think our educational system is perfect by any means. This whole blog is about better ways to educate children, but the assertion that our public schools are failing is, on its face, false. The failure is in an economy that leaves so many children in poverty. And that's actually something about which these Wall Street types really could do something, given that they have their hands on the levers of power and all. The Finns and Singaporians have strong safety nets that insure their poverty rates don't exceed 10 percent and just like US schools with low poverty rates the kids excel. Poverty is the national education emergency and it's on that front the Finns are beating us.

And if you've read this far and still need convincing, check out this fantastic piece from The Washington Post Answer Sheet entitled The Hard Bigotry of Poverty: 

In education, there are choices to be made that can indeed move the needle of student achievement. Developing a collaborative model, for example, can lead to improvements in the skills and study habits of disadvantaged children. But closing the so-called achievement gap between rich and poor will first require Americans to recognize a far more uncomfortable reality: The policies employed to purportedly address the struggles of low-income children have ushered in a new era of school segregation. Claiming that poverty is no excuse for student failure trivializes the damage caused by years of actions and inactions that have widened the gaps between rich and poor communities. Good schools aren’t molded through harsh sanctions, private takeovers, or even soaring rhetoric. They emerge from healthy, stable communities. That is, they emerge from a commitment to justice.

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