Cash to Poor Families and Early Childhood Brain Activity

In a randomized controlled study, new research finds "causal impact" between decreasing poverty and increased brain activity of young children. 

Significance

This study demonstrates the causal impact of a poverty reduction intervention on early childhood brain activity. Data from the Baby’s First Years study, a randomized control trial, show that a predictable, monthly unconditional cash transfer given to low-income families may have a causal impact on infant brain activity. In the context of greater economic resources, children’s experiences changed, and their brain activity adapted to those experiences. The resultant brain activity patterns have been shown to be associated with the development of subsequent cognitive skills.

Abstract

Early childhood poverty is a risk factor for lower school achievement, reduced earnings, and poorer health, and has been associated with differences in brain structure and function. Whether poverty causes differences in neurodevelopment, or is merely associated with factors that cause such differences, remains unclear. Here, we report estimates of the causal impact of a poverty reduction intervention on brain activity in the first year of life. We draw data from a subsample of the Baby’s First Years study, which recruited 1,000 diverse low-income mother–infant dyads. Shortly after giving birth, mothers were randomized to receive either a large or nominal monthly unconditional cash gift. Infant brain activity was assessed at approximately 1 y of age in the child’s home, using resting electroencephalography (EEG; n = 435). We hypothesized that infants in the high-cash gift group would have greater EEG power in the mid- to high-frequency bands and reduced power in a low-frequency band compared with infants in the low-cash gift group. Indeed, infants in the high-cash gift group showed more power in high-frequency bands. Effect sizes were similar in magnitude to many scalable education interventions, although the significance of estimates varied with the analytic specification. In sum, using a rigorous randomized design, we provide evidence that giving monthly unconditional cash transfers to mothers experiencing poverty in the first year of their children’s lives may change infant brain activity. Such changes reflect neuroplasticity and environmental adaptation and display a pattern that has been associated with the development of subsequent cognitive skills.

This latest finding is consistent with a body of research that shows direct correlations between family wealth, family income, school funding, and child academic achievement levels.  

It is sickening to think that monthly federal tax credit payments to families with children have been discontinued due to white privileged intransigence among anti-democrats.  The cutting of child poverty in half, which the program promised to accomplish in just a few years, could have been the greatest education reform of the past half century--if education reform were actually meant to help the disenfranchised, rather than holding them accountable for the educational problems that the white power establishment created.

Dear Sen. Bennet: The best way to help "high poverty schools" is to eliminate "high poverty schools."

Call me excited about the many billions of dollars that Team Biden is planning to invest in new and renewed education initiatives, from pre-K through college.  Even more exciting is the total absence (so far) of systemic efforts to bribe and/or extort states to adopt corporate policies favored by the profiteers of the education industrial complex.  It's too early to know for sure, but it looks as if these unprecedented education investments now on the horizon actually acknowledge the massive education debt owed to public institutions that have been deprived for decades of needed funds for staffing, physical plants, transportation, and instructional resources.

As these new funding streams come closer to reality, the Biden Team has also targeted child poverty, with tax credits in the Covid relief legislation that will cut child poverty almost in half. If these cuts can be made permanent, the reductions in child poverty would constitute, in themselves, the most important education reform of the past 50 years.  For as child poverty rates decrease, we may certainly expect increases in student achievement.

But old habits of thought die slowly, it seems.  For as we stand on the cusp of dramatically cutting poverty rates and addressing other structural issues that have helped preserve segregation based on race and class, some politicians remain focused on treating the symptom, rather than the disease.  

Senator Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) offers a good example of politicians who believe that the performance, behavior, and morale problems associated with high poverty schools can be solved by using funding as both carrot and stick to "drive policy."  

This has been tried, and we know it doesn't work. James Coleman knew it didn't work in 1966 when the Coleman Report was issued and then quickly shelved by the Johnson Administration, for fear that the Report's findings would expose the shallowness of federal priorities to send more money to high poverty schools, while ignoring the structural issues that insure the continuation of poverty and inequity.  

From WaPo:

Sen. Michael F. Bennet (D-Colo.), a former superintendent of the Denver Public Schools, generally supports the new spending but said he would like to see some fundamental changes in the Title I formula to direct more money to high-poverty schools if the government is going to increase spending so dramatically. He’d also like to see the money used to drive policy. For instance, he said, he’d like to see schools incentivized to pay teachers at high-poverty schools more.

“It would be a shame if we spend all this money and we do it in ways that don’t transform outcomes for kids,” Bennet said. “We’ve got to change the system. I don’t believe the system works well for kids living in poverty.”

Senator Bennet, there is NO system that "works well for kids living in poverty." Poverty makes sure of that.

David Sirota Weighs In on CorpEd

A clip from Salon (minus links):

. . . .For education, technology and charter school companies and the Wall Streeters who back them, it lets them cite troubled public schools to argue that the current public education system is flawed, and to then argue that education can be improved if taxpayer money is funneled away from the public school system’s priorities (hiring teachers, training teachers, reducing class size, etc.) and into the private sector (replacing teachers with computers, replacing public schools with privately run charter schools, etc.). Likewise, for conservative politicians and activist–profiteers disproportionately bankrolled by these and other monied interests, the “reform” argument gives them a way to both talk about fixing education and to bash organized labor, all without having to mention an economic status quo that monied interests benefit from and thus do not want changed.

Meanwhile, despite the fact that many “reformers'” policies have spectacularly failed, prompted massive scandals and/or offered no actual proof of success, an elite media that typically amplifies — rather than challenges — power and money loyally casts “reformers'” systematic pillaging of public education as laudable courage (the most recent example of this is Time magazine’s cover cheering on wildly unpopular Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel after he cited budget austerity to justify the largest mass school closing in American history — all while he is also proposing to spend $100 million of taxpayer dollars on a new private sports stadium).

In other words, elite media organizations (which, in many cases, have their own vested financial interest in education “reform”) go out of their way to portray the anti-public-education movement as heroic rather than what it really is: just another get-rich-quick scheme shrouded in the veneer of altruism.

That gets to the news that exposes “reformers'” schemes — and all the illusions that surround them. According to a new U.S. Department of Education study, “about one in five public schools was considered high poverty in 2011 … up from about to one in eight in 2000.” This followed an earlier study from the department finding that “many high-poverty schools receive less than their fair share of state and local funding … leav(ing) students in high-poverty schools with fewer resources than schools attended by their wealthier peers.” . . . .

More Than Half of American School Children Are Poor: More Accountability Testing, Anyone?

For the first time since the first ESEA was passed in 1965, the majority of U. S. school children qualify for free or reduced price lunch.  from The Washington Post:

Today the dipshits on Capitol Hill from both parties agreed wholeheartedly that the new ESEA will do nothing to address poverty or segregation, other than to weigh the hungry and to send more money to apartheid charters, while they disagreed mightily about how many tests should be demanded of kids who come to school unwashed and without food at home.  These poor kids' schools will be held accountable for their poverty and hunger, and the states and federal government will keep score and weigh the poor, while turning over the poor schools to corporations to impose more "broken windows" schooling to make the poor less dissatisfied.

All those who support this plan should join AFT or NEA and then send money to FairTest and Ravitch's NPE.

Authentic reforms from Dr. Krashen. Address poverty, and ensure access to books to preempt summer learning loss!

Providing more access to interesting reading material by investing in public libraries and librarians is an excellent way to deal with summer learning loss. — Dr. Stephen D. Krashen

Yesterday morning at teacher sent me a Dr. Edward Haertel paper discussing the unreliability of Value Added Measures. I saw an interesting figure in the paper regarding "summer learning loss" that started me working on an infographic. After creating the graphic and posting the corresponding tweet, I noticed that Dr. Paul Thomas had tweeted a new post by Professor Krashen on essentially the same topic entitled: Arne Duncan suggests year-round school as a solution to the summer slide. I disagree. That post appears here on Schools Matter as Arne and the summer slide.

Krashen's Solutions Work!

Professor Stephen Krashen and colleagues have repeatedly proven that both access to books, and ameliorating the effects of poverty are critical in addressing so-called achievement gaps. Neoliberal corporate education reform's wrongheaded assertion that we need to lengthen the school year ignores these indisputable facts, as emphatically illustrated by differences in the table (Haertel 17) above:

References

Haertel, Edward. "Reliability and Validity of Inferences About Teachers Based on Student Test Scores." Educational Testing Service, 2013. Web. 6 June 2014 <http://j.mp/1kQw5kw>

Krashen, Stephen D. "Protecting Students against the Effects of Poverty: Libraries." New England Reading Association Journal. 46.2 (2011): 17-22. Web. 6 June 2014 <http://j.mp/1kIlgFV>

—————. The Power of Reading: Insights from the Research. Westport, Conn: Libraries Unlimited, 2004. Print.

Shin, Fay H, and Stephen D. Krashen. Summer Reading: Program and Evidence. Boston: Pearson/Allyn and Bacon, 2008. Print.

Dr. @skrashen's proven reforms to preempt "summer learning loss." Address poverty, and ensure access to books! #LAUSD pic.twitter.com/d3oPORVZpF

— Robert D. Skeels (@rdsathene) June 6, 2014

What Does the PISA Report Tell Us About U.S. Education?

When the OECD releases the PISA report every three years, many people use the ranking to claim public education in the U.S. is failing and push their corporate education reform agenda. But looking at the data, lessons that can be learned from the highest performing countries point in a completely different direction. For more information: http://go.aft.org/pisa #ReclaimIt

Discourse Analysis of NYTimes Piece on Poverty and Achievement

I have been reading Gerald Coles for a long time, and I am glad to see Anthony Cody hosting him here to get underneath the neoliberal rhetoric of the Times to see its real influences:

Gerald Coles: The Growing Educational Achievement Gap: Don't Think What You Might Think You Should Think

By Anthony Cody on February 15, 2012 5:51 AM

Guest post by Gerald Coles

Last week the New York Times provided valuable, disturbing information by reporting recent research on the growing educational achievement gap between rich and poor students, which has grown substantially over the past few decades, even while the achievement gap between black and white students has narrowed. As the author of one study put it, "family income appears more determinative of educational success than race."

Yet, as is often true of the Times, what it gives with one hand, it takes with the other. For example, as the media watchdog group, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has long documented, while the paper of record frequently provides factual information about events, its interpretation of the facts buttresses against drawing the "wrong" conclusions about political-economic power relationships.

A clue lies in the opening sentence of the article, which offers a summary of a presumed long-held national expectation. "Education," the reader is told , "was historically considered a great equalizer in American society, capable of lifting less advantaged children and improving their chances for success as adults."

The passive voice in this sentence expeditiously cloaks a contentious history that, if included in the article, would raise critical questions both about the assumption and whether education should be the determining factor for social well-being. With respect to the assumption, as John Marsh documents in his recent book, Class Dismissed: Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way Out of Inequality, during the nineteenth century "public education encountered as much opposition as it did support," with few people believing "that education alone or education at all" would offer the nation's children a path out of poverty and to occupational mobility and economic security. Moreover, although during the 20th century, particularly from the Great Depression onward, many Americans did see education as an economic and social elevator, in practice college was less necessary because high wage jobs were plentiful for many millions without higher education. As these jobs have disappeared in the U.S., Marsh argues, a greater focus on educational attainment has served to displace "the debate about social class and economic power" and "the causes of and the cure for sustained poverty and increasing inequality."

The Times article contributes to this change of focus by reporting on the educational achievement gap but then citing "expert opinion" that discourages readers from thinking that poor children's education would be helped by directly addressing fundamental disparities in class and economic power. The Times' expert opinion removes from the reader's focus any thoughts that a redistribution of wealth, which would include the use of that redistribution to create end-of-poverty legislation, would serve to reduce or eliminate the social class achievement gap. Expert opinion makes clear that while affluent families know how to use their income, time and privilege to nurture their children's minds and abilities, these advantages would be wasted in the hands of poor parents.

One of the experts quoted, John J. Heckman, has built a prominent career trying to improve parenting skills and enrichment educational programs for poor children. Assumed in this effort is the belief that the poverty of the families served can be left untouched, that the children can remain poor and that the overall educational conditions of the children can remain in an abysmal state. He warns us, with regard to poverty, not to go back to the time (whatever time that might have been!) when we thought that "poverty was just a matter of income, and giving families more would improve the prospects of their children. If people conclude that -- if they want to redistribute income -- that would be a mistake" (his heartfelt word in the Times article).

This view is reinforced in the article by another expert, Charles Murray of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. Murray (co-author of the racist and classist book, The Bell Curve) has devoted his life to the claim that differences between the rich and poor are largely due to genetics, that is, the unequal inherited intelligence favoring the rich. As Murray concluded in the Times article, income inequality is "more of a symptom than a cause" (that is, were Murray to speak frankly, the poor, in his view, are genetically dumber). A great expert for the Times to quote!

The last expert cited is Douglas J. Besharov, also of the American Enterprise Institute, but listed in the article only as a "fellow of the Atlantic Council" which, the article fails to note, is a think tank servicing global corporations.

Besharov's aid to the rich, like that of the other two experts quoted, has included his opposition to government policies to end poverty because, in his informed view, the U.S. has no genuine poverty! "Rhetoric about cutting 'poverty' is misleadingly outmoded," Besharov has intoned, because "almost all Americans already live far above subsistence poverty." (Yes, he really wrote that.)

The Times article leaves Besharov with the last word about the growing education gap between the rich and poor, a takeaway message meant to leave the reader scratching her or his head: "The problem is a puzzle. No one has the slightest idea what will work."

Yes, there's an educational gap between rich and poor, but let no reader of the article think that any of the following, using a redistribution of wealth, would significantly end the achievement gap:

--Work that provides parents with a good income for raising a family. That won't help!

--A workweek with reasonable hours that leave a parent time and energy to parent. Forget that!

--National health insurance for all, good housing for all, good nutrition for all, schools fully funded, free college for all, etc. etc. (you can finish the list that you think would serve to create an equitable society and translate into solid educational achievement for all youngsters). Mistakes, mistakes! The implementation of these ideas would be money down the drain.

At least that's what the 1% and their scholarly troops would like us to believe.

What do you think now?

Gerald Coles is a full-time researcher, writer, and lecturer on the psychology and politics of literacy and education. He is the author of several books, including Reading the Naked Truth: Literacy, Legislation, and Lies, as well as numerous articles in education, psychology and psychiatry journals. Before devoting himself to full-time research and writing, he was on the faculties of the Department of Psychiatry at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development at the University of Rochester. His chapter, "Reading Policy: Evidence Vs. Power," will appear in the forthcoming Handbook of Early Childhood Literacy (Sage). He lives in Rochester, NY. He can be reached at geraldcoles@rochester.rr.com

Separate and Unequal in Body and Mind

by Judy Rabin
While the scrooges in the halls of Congress, the multi-billion dollar testing industry and the greedy, fascist proponents of more tests to measure and punish poor students and those who teach them sit down to their Christmas dinner, here's yet another story that is finally changing the conversation about education from "no excuses" to "it's the poverty, stupid."

A country that is now obviously divided along the lines of haves and have nots, when it comes to health, education, housing, jobs, security of any kind, is also a country of haves and have nots when it comes to physical fitness and overall health.

Here's another story from the Bay area where like most other places across the US, provides plenty of opportunities for the ones who live in the right neighborhoods.

December 24, 2011

The Haves’ Children Are Healthier Than the Have-Nots’

By KATHARINE MIESZKOWSKI

Every Monday, Sycamore Valley Elementary in Danville challenges its students to run a “Smile Mile” together after school. Some parents even run with their children. Photos of the student joggers’ grinning faces are posted in the cafeteria. On a recent Monday afternoon, there were 41 smiling faces on the wall.

Students at Sycamore Valley have a lot to be happy about when it comes to their physical fitness. Fifth graders there got the best scores among all of their Bay Area peers on the 2011 statewide Physical Fitness Test.

Eighty-three percent of the fifth graders tested at Sycamore Valley aced the test by receiving healthy scores on all six different measurements — of aerobic capacity, abdominal strength, upper body strength, trunk strength, body composition and flexibility, most of them gauged through physical activity. One part of the Physical Fitness Test measures a child’s body composition, usually through body mass index, which is calculated using weight and height and is used to determine who is overweight.

Statewide, only 31 percent of public school students performed as well, according to the California Department of Education.

An analysis of state data by The Bay Citizen revealed a large variation in how fifth graders in Bay Area elementary schools perform on the test. The schools that performed the best have few students from low-income families, for reasons that experts say are not surprising. At Sycamore Valley Elementary, in an affluent suburban community, not a single student was eligible to receive a free or reduced-price lunch because of low family income last year, according to the state’s data.

Across the Bay, in San Francisco’s Mission district, none of the fifth graders at Cesar Chavez Elementary School received six healthy scores on the test. More than a quarter of them were found to “need improvement” on every measure of fitness.

At Cesar Chavez, where Spanish is the first language for many, more than 85 percent of the students are eligible to receive free or reduced-price school lunches. In the school district that includes Cesar Chavez, Hispanic and black students are less likely to receive healthy scores than their Asian and white peers, the state data show.

Students at Sycamore Elementary have a dedicated “physical education specialist” on campus to help them train for the test. Those at Cesar Chavez do not.

“There is an inequity problem with the availability of quality physical education between schools of varying socioeconomic status,” said Drisha Leggitt, executive director of the California Association for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance, a nonprofit organization.

Robert O’Brien, Sycamore Valley’s physical education specialist, who favors shorts even when the temperature dips into the 40s, is fond of slogans like “exercise, not extra fries.” He leads students as young as 6 in sit-ups, jumping jacks, push-ups and running, striving to get all of them moving, while giving their classroom teachers time to prepare other lessons.

All 21 of the elementary schools in the San Ramon Valley Unified School District, in which Sycamore Valley is located, have a physical education specialist like Mr. O’Brien.

“Having dedicated physical education teachers can make a big difference in students’ performance on the test,” said Linda Hooper, an education, research and evaluation consultant for the California Department of Education.

The San Francisco Unified School District has just 15 physical education specialists for all 76 of its elementary schools. Spread thin, they work with about half the schools at any time. According to Michelle Zapata, the physical education program administrator for the district, Cesar Chavez was among the 38 schools that had no physical education specialist on campus.

Advocates for child health warn that failing to teach children how to be active and healthy will have long-term consequences.

“It comes as no surprise whatsoever that such enormous inequities would be present,” said Dr. Harold Goldstein, executive director of the California Center for Public Health Advocacy, a nonprofit organization. “It is grossly unjust and will have health and economic impacts on the state of California for generations to come.”

Sycamore Valley Elementary maintains a focus on health outside of physical education class time. Parents are not allowed to bring in cupcakes or other potentially fattening treats to celebrate birthdays. Instead, gifts of pencils or erasers to classmates are substituted.

Parents also contribute financially. Fund-raising pays for a twice-a-week movement class for kindergarteners that is not required by the state. In the fall, the school’s Parent Teacher Association gave Mr. O’Brien a $375 grant to buy new basketball hoops, and he also leads an after-school sports camp that helps raise money to buy sports equipment.

Each fall, the PTA holds a “fun run” fund-raiser, in which students are sponsored to run laps during school. It raised nearly $10,000 this year.

Even the school’s location supports fitness. It is next to a park, near a sweeping open space of rolling hills dotted with oaks. The park features a play structure, a basketball court, a bocce court and athletic fields, where Mr. O’Brien sometimes holds physical education lessons.

Many elementary school students in the suburbs also play sports outside school, including basketball and lacrosse.

Rebecca Adams, president of the Sycamore Valley Elementary PTA, said her children, who are in the first and third grades, participate in indoor soccer, swimming, gymnastics, baseball and softball, depending on the season.

Not all their activities are organized by adults. “A lot of kids play outside in their front yard,” said Ms. Adams, who lives less than a mile from the school. In-line skating, biking and tag are popular.

“My kids play outside all the time,” she said.

At Cesar Chavez Elementary School, physical education lessons, taught by classroom teachers, are held on a fenced-in blacktop lot below a huge, colorful mural of the school’s namesake. In the mural, Mr. Chavez, the late civil rights leader, is surrounded by a crowd of children as he carries a banner that reads “Help me take responsibility for my own life so I can be free at last.”

On the urban school’s blacktop, the basketball rims have no nets. “We don’t have a field or a park next door,” said Catalina Rico, the school’s principal.

Most of the students’ parents, many of whom are immigrants, cannot give extra money to help beef up its programs. Some families are homeless, and many others are struggling financially.

“A lot of our kids have been traumatized by poverty, violence, their parents being deported,” Ms. Rico said.

For those families, regular exercise in a safe place after school may be out of reach.

If parents are working two jobs, Ms. Rico said, “who is going to take them to the park?”

kmieszkowski@baycitizen.org

Sydney Lupkin contributed reporting.

More Than 4 of 10 Children Born into Poverty Will Remain There

Mike Feinberg was the guest on Tuesday of Wall Street's Cowen Institute at Tulane University, a propaganda tank set up at Tulane to provide an academic facade for the glossy reports they produce to push the completion of the corporatization of schools effort inspired by Hurricane Katrina. According to a fawning scribe on the scene, who refers to Feinberg as "Dr. Feinberg," an undergraduate from Tulane handled the intro, reading from the KIPP script that reads as

"Every day KIPP students are proving that demographics do not decide destiny."

Then Feinberg began his KIPP pitch with a favorite "African custom of greeting one another with 'How are the children?' with an expected answer of 'All the children are well.'" 

The oft-repeated platitude about demographics and destiny and this bit of African custom fit nicely into the KIPP brand of positive psychology nonsense, but it has almost no connection to the grinding realities of poverty that remain the invisible elephants in the boardrooms and classrooms of KIPP, Inc., where total compliance and zero tolerance are promoted as the solution to the economic ruination of families that is ignored. 


The privileged corporate reform schoolers like Mike Feinberg and his plutocratic patrons should take a few minutes to look the facts presented below, first in a clip from the CBS Evening News, broadcast on the same day as Feinberg's Tulane sales pitch.   And second, in the findings by the Pew Research Center on the wiping out of minority economic gains over the past 25 years, even as philanthrocapitalists with hundreds of billions in capital remain entirely silent on the poverty epidemic that has now stricken 1 of every 4 American children.

"Dr." Feinberg, how long must we listen to your bullshit platitudes and your dangerous and child-destroying nonsense before you are dismissed?  How long must we listen to you, Levin, and your plutocratic patrons continue to shove your perfected "no excuses" chain gang tactics onto the most vulnerable children, all the while castigating these children and lying to them with your shameful, self-serving sham talk that never mentions the real civil rights issues that your privileged philanthrocapitalist pals and pols ignore.

When these irresponsible and shameless fools begin talking about and doing something about poverty, racism, hunger, homelessness, disease, crime, and violence among the children that they command to be nice and work hard, only then will they deserve to be heard. 
Click any chart to enlarge.  Report available here.

Guest Post: Assumptions that 'Just Seem Obvious' to Steve Brill

By John Thompson

There is a long line of education experts exposing the factual errors in Steve Brill's Class Warfare so, instead, I set out to illuminate the assumptions underneath his brand of "reform." I was overwhelmed, however, by the number of times that Brill, and the non-educators he fawned over, discovered findings that "just seemed obvious." So, I only want to recount Brill's tale of the naive assumptions, opinions, and assertions, based on numbers from one district, that supposedly propelled Bill Gates into the experiment that Gates said was, "the riskiest thing we have ever done."

Brill begins with "Identifying Effective Teaching Using Performance on the Job," by Tom Kane, Robert Gordon, and Douglas Staiger. Kane et. al wrote, "the current credential-centered regime is built upon two questionable premises ..." They then presented evidence that was solid enough to contribute to the minor league debate over teacher certification. But then these economists made another leap, "the second premise is that school districts learn nothing more about teacher effectiveness." Without making any effort to link their data (and that assertion) to reality, Kane and company called for dangerous and revolutionary changes to the entire nation's educational systems. When I first read their opinions, I chalked them up to being academic theory.

If Brill's account is trustworthy, though, I was naive. Either Brill was loose with his words, or he was celebrating a classic "bait and switch." According to Brill, the authors asserted that the need for "paper qualifications" is a "bedrock of public education." Worse, Kane et. al supposedly claimed that the second core assumption of our system is that "districts can learn nothing more of teaching effectiveness after the initial hire," and "this was why almost all teachers initially receive satisfactory evaluations." (emphasis mine.) Even worse, they successfully convinced Bill Gates that a "surprising" lack of volatility in teachers' performances, measured by standardized tests, was grounds for overturning decades of social science research on teaching and learning, and the way that organizations change.

Rereading the paper, I fear that Brill accurately reported the authors' true intentions. Now I see the report as a grab bag of political soundbites. Kane et. al predicted an impending shortage of teachers, which would be most damaging for high-poverty schools. Their solution - based on the presumption that the lowest scoring teachers should be fired using a methodology that is systematically biased against teachers in high-poverty schools - would supposedly attract talent to those schools!?!?! To their credit, Kane and company recognized the need to adjust for circumstances beyond the teachers' control. For example, if construction was going on outside the window on testing day... But, they argued that test score growth models that would be used for evaluations should not be controlled for poverty.

Fortunately, the Gates team has subsequently distanced themselves from their initial overreach, but it still raises a huge question. What did they not know about peer effects and when did they not know it?

If Brill is accurate, having assumed that there is a single simple explanation for the sorry state of evaluations, the theorists did not need to search for other reasons why inner city schools have a hard time attracting and retaining talent. Having reached the shocking discovery that, "some teachers are better than others," Gates and company thus decided that the path to school improvement must go through their version of instruction-driven, standardized test-driven reforms.

According to Brill, Bill Gates bought the hypothesis that the lack of volatility in test scores meant that their version of teacher quality had to be the focus of reform. After a two-hour discussion, supposedly, Gates became increasingly frustrated that educators ignored a solution that "seemed so obvious."

I will leave it to the experts to analyze how stable or volatile test scores are. Subsequent research by Gates' scholars has been used to argue that teacher performance is no more unstable than major league baseball players' performance - as if that has much to do with fixing schools. My point is that their assumption could only have been made by people with no knowledge of the logistics of schooling. As I have explained, if Brill, Kane, or Gates had had a rudimentary knowledge of how schools are actually run, they could not have jumped to such a weird conclusion.

And that gets to other assumptions. When I was in school, Kane would not have begun such a paper with a mischaracterization of his opponents' positions. A reader used to assume that a scholar would start his argument by honestly summarizing what his evidence was and was not able to prove. In polite discourse, a summary of opposing arguments was always presented in a fair manner. Kane would have been honor-bound to summarize the record of longstanding evaluation methods such as the Toledo Plan, the Teacher Advancement Program, and other successful peer review and mentoring efforts, as well as National Board certification. Had Gates been briefed on the strengths and weaknesses of those union-endorsed methods, perhaps he would have chosen to fund efforts to better incorporate data into those holistic systems, or perhaps he would have financed a scaling up on those methods of improving teacher quality.

The bad news is that education, and educators, are held in such low esteem that revolutionary reforms are mandated by non-educators, based on what seems obvious after being exposed to a sliver of information. Too often, it presented only by self-interested parties who represent a small minority of scholars. The good news is that snap judgments can be reversed. Smart people have changed their minds when introduce to better evidence.

This era of primitive test-driven hypotheses reminds me of the rookie mistakes made by first generation econometricians such as Robert Fogel, Stanley Engerman, Alfred Conrad, and John Meyer. One even earned a Nobel Prize, showing that a bone-headed error, born of inexperience need not be a mark of shame. Back then, however, there were more checks and balances in regard to academic assertions. When I was in school, these economists made the daring, and soon-to-be-proven-silly proclamations that the building of the railroad system did not accelerate economic growth and that slavery was profitable. Those mistakes are humorous now, but then again, we did not cite their speculations as reasons to tear apart our railroads or reinstate slavery.

And we should remember a key reason why an econometric model, based on data from one state, reached such inaccurate conclusions about slavery across the nation. To the Harvard economists, it seemed obvious that half of Kentucky's mules must be momma mules and half must be daddy mules. Not knowing that mules are sterile, they assumed the profits due to mule reproduction.

If Gates and Kane would be more open about what they do not know, and listen to actual practitioners, they could still be a powerful force for good. But they need to listen to educators with concrete knowledge of how schools are run, and understand the power of peer pressure.

Dr. John Thompson was an award-winning historian, lobbyist, and guerilla-gardener who became an award-winning inner city teacher after crack and gangs hit his neighborhood. He blogs at thisweekineducation.com, and huffingtonpost.com, and is writing a book on 18 years of idealistic politics in the classroom and realistic politics outside.

Guest Post: The Facts Not Included in Steve Brill's Tell All

By John Thompson

Steve Brill’s Class Warfare is full of breathless accounts of the rich and powerful that are reminiscent of the biographies of Kitty Kelly. Ironically, the most valuable part of his Class Warfare may be his accounts of dramatic decisions to undertake risky and revolutionary "reforms" based on minimal evidence and some strange assumptions.

According to Brill, "Identifying Effective Teaching Using Performance on the Job" by Tom Kane, Robert Gordon, and Douglas Staiger was used to convince Bill Gates and President Obama that "teacher quality," measured by standardized tests, must be the focus of reform. According to Brill, they argued that tests showed, "remarkable consistency among teachers," and that "obviously" this suggested that the person in front of the classroom was the key to closing the achievement gap. Gates was supposedly told that the "surprising" lack of volatility in the test scores of one district meant we could trust algorithms to drive the firing of teachers. If we believe Brill, because of the stability in the charts that Kane and Gordon presented to Gates, we should presume that 25% of teachers with the lowest test score growth should be fired.

Perhaps I should make no assumptions, and use my 90% low-income district to explain Urban Education 101 for reformers. In our six magnet and charter high schools, the attendance rates never drop below 95%, while our seven neighborhood schools struggle to reach an attendance rate of 80%. When you add in the far lower enrollment rates and the far higher suspension rates in the neighborhood schools, their students attend class at a rate that is 1/4th to 1/3rd less than their peers in selective schools (and far less than their previous three years in middle school.) It would take a superhuman effort for neighborhood school teachers, with kids who are five to six years behind grade level in reading, to meet growth targets that were not controlled for school selectivity.

By the way, those patterns are all stable. Should we thus assume that the teachers in the magnet schools are better than the teachers in neighborhood schools with deplorable scores?

Neither would anyone with firsthand knowledge of actual classrooms assume that a relative lack of test score volatility within schools justifies the "reformers’" extraordinary conclusions. I would assume that Kane, at least, would know that even when student assignment policies are stable, students are assigned differently to tested and non-tested classes. I wonder how he would address a stable pattern in my district where middle school "Science" classes are taught to the names, dates, facts, and figures of the benchmark tests, producing pass rates ranging from 70 to 73%. Then freshmen Biology students have a pass rate that fluctuates from 30% to 51% to 41% on tests designed to measure scientific thinking. Since the Biology teachers’ growth targets would be based on middle school tests, would Kane support the mass firing of those teachers for failure to meet targets generated from the results of different tests?

Recognizing that districts differ, let us take some more obvious examples of stable patterns from my school system. As 5th graders, the kids of Zip Code 73120 attend schools with poverty rates ranging from 23%, 50%, 69%, and 76%, with the special education populations ranging from 5.5% to 14%. The number of suspensions are 0, 14, 33, and 86. The pass rates for 5th grade Reading range from 81% to 95%.

Between 5th and 6th grade, the district's student population drops by nearly 1/5th as the numbers of special education and ELL students increase. In 73120, the decline is more remarkable as the majority of their students move to magnet, enterprise, and charter schools, including four that have gained national recognition. So, the 6th graders arrive at a school with 2,020 disciplinary actions, which lost its middle class students after the campus policeman was hospitalized in a riot, and where 1/4th of their class are on IEPs. Should the 6th grade teachers to be blamed for a Reading pass rate of 44%? Is it reasonable to expect those teachers to meet test score targets based on the three previous years of performance in very different types of classrooms, with incomparably different peer effects?

Similarly, a non-educator might be unaware that the challenges facing an Algebra II class are radically different to those of an Algebra I class next door. The demographic differences between the two math classes, however, are just as stark as the unbelievable differences between our 5th and 6th graders. My school was the lowest-ranked secondary school in Oklahoma, but the percentages of poor and at-risk juniors in Algebra II were not dramatically different to the percentages in many suburban schools. After all, 1/3rd or more of the freshmen Algebra I students drop out before reaching their 11th grade year. (By the way, 9^th grade is the year when the enrollment rate reaches rock bottom, with the average freshmen being in school for less than 2/3rds of a year, and when the truancy and suspension rates explode. Should we fire most, if not all inner city Algebra I teachers for not raising the performance of students who do not attend class?)

Worst of all, the Gates shop has given no indication that they have become aware of the difference between a student with a math or a reading disability, as opposed to a conduct disorder or serious emotional disturbances. Neither have they dealt with the effect of federal policies on how schools are allowed to handle those students, and the implication for schools where 35 to 40% of their students are on Individual Education Plans.

In other words, they do not have the background knowledge to comprehend the scenario described by Paul Tough where an inner city class of thirty kids, because it has 8 to 10 kids who have been traumatized to the point where their brain circuitry has been altered, degenerates into a culture of hitting and fighting. Otherwise, how could Kane and Gates assume that teachers with those sorts of classes would have a chance of hitting their growth targets?

Unless these theorists assumed that Seriously Emotionally Disturbed students are distributed evenly throughout our diverse nation's classrooms, they betrayed a basic misunderstanding of peer effects in urban schools. A class where a third of the students are well- behaved kids with cognitive differences, can not be compared to a class with a critical mass of children who have been victimized to the point where they can not control their behavior. And if the theorists have that level of ignorance, perhaps they also are unaware that schools facing an impossible load of the most difficult-to-educate students tend to turn certain classes into dumping grounds.

Brill’s Class Warfare included 19 pages of sources and endnotes, but there is no indication that he read any of the immense body of social science on teaching, learning, and schooling. According to Brill, Gates gave the go-ahead for his Measuring Effective Teaching effort after two hours of discussion. There was no indication that Gates was exposed to scholarship that contradicted the hypothesis that teacher quality must drive reform.

Had Gates been briefed on the way schools are organized, and the need for early education, a concentration on reading comprehension and socio-emotional skills before 3rd grade, the need for high-quality curriculum, and the promise of community schools that turn education into a team effort, I doubt this smart man would have assumed that there was only one way to fix urban schools.

If Gates, or for that matter, if President Obama (who later adopted the Gates agenda) had been provided a full and fair briefing by educators as well as economists, it would be no skin off Brill's nose. There are still plenty of Kitty Kelly-type books out there begging to be written by a person with Brill's confidence that he obviously knows all of the answers.

Dr. John Thompson was an award-winning historian, lobbyist, and guerilla-gardener who became an award-winning inner city teacher after crack and gangs hit his neighborhood. He blogs at thisweekineducation.com, and huffingtonpost.com, and is writing a book on 18 years of idealistic politics in the classroom and realistic politics outside.

Why the Reform Schoolers Will Never Mention "The Children Left Behind"

When UNICEF published last December the international rankings on children living in poverty "The Children Left Behind," neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post, or any other major American newspaper, carried a story on it.  The closest the Times came was a tepid and cursory note by opinionator Charles Blow who could only manage to suggest that we should not make the situation any worse than it is.  For the United States, the richest nation on Planet Earth, Blow's hope could, indeed, be realized, since we already occupy the bottom spot in at least half the categories that Report measures. 

As Larry Cuban pointed out this past weekend in a piece posted by Valerie Strauss, international comparisons are only of interest to corporate reform schoolers or to the corporate media when the scores can be used to label our public schools and teachers as failures in the international test score competitions.  In looking at the stunning poverty standings of American children in the UNICEF report, it is surprising that the U.S. does not do worse on international tests, since the correlation between poverty and test scores is direct and unassailable.  (In fact, we know that without the bottom quintile of test takers, which is comprised of America's poor, our scores would right up there with the highest flying developed nations.

And so it is in the corporate reform schoolers' best interest to keep attention away from the subject of impoverished children in America.  To acknowledge the problem of poor housing, poor health, poor nutrition, all of which are actually worse than the UNICEF report indicates (no data after 2008 Wall Street heist), we as a people might be moved to do something about this national shame.  This would require the oligarchs and their corporations to pay taxes, and it would require, too, an acknowledgement that the larger factors influencing student test scores are beyond the school room.  This realization, if widespread, could threaten the stranglehold of the post-partisan corporate reform school agenda of privatization, corporate welfare, destruction of the teaching profession, and the inexpensive segregation and behavioral containment of the poor.

Below, then, are some key pages from the UNICEF report released last November.  Please note that this Report represents a pragmatic comparison of where nations stand in terms of their own capacity to improve the lot of their impoverished children as measured against each country's median levels of well-being.

The longer the privileged continue to ignore the facts presented by this Report, the more expensive their eventual remedies will become, in dollars, in social disturbance, and in blood. 

Please read this excerpted section of the Introduction in order to fully appreciate the avoidable horrors that the charts below present (click on any chart to make it larger, and then click on the chart that pops up).

Introduction

This Report Card presents a first overview of inequalities in child well-being for 24 of the world’s  richest countries.

Three dimensions of inequality are examined: material well-being, education, and health. In each case and for each country, the question asked is ‘how far behind are children being allowed to fall?’

Figure 1a summarizes the results. Within the limitations of the available data, it represents an overview of how well the world’s developed nations are living up to the ideal of  ‘no child left behind’.

Figure 1b presents the same data from a different perspective, showing each nation’s performance in relation to the average for the nations of the OECD as a whole.

Both charts show that a small group of countries – Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, and Switzerland – are leading the way in promoting equality in children’s well-being. Greece, Italy and the United States, on the other hand, are allowing children to fall furthest behind.

Why inequality matters

The increase in inequality over the last three decades – its economic causes, its social costs, its possible remedies – is the subject of considerable debate in OECD countries today.i On the one hand it is argued that, after a certain level of economic development has been achieved, greater equality “would increase the well-being and quality of life for all”.ii On the other, it is maintained that inequality is a justifiable reflection of differences in ability and effort and provides incentives for further progress in all fields of human endeavour.

This is an important debate. But it is not one that affects the premise of this report.

The idea that inequality is justified as a reflection of differences in merit cannot reasonably be applied to children. Few would deny that children’s early circumstances are beyond their own control. Or that those early circumstances have a profound effect on their present lives and future prospects. Or that growing up in poverty incurs a substantially higher risk of lower standards of health, of reduced cognitive development, of underachievement at school, of lower skills and aspirations, and eventually of lower adult earnings, so helping to perpetuate disadvantage from one generation to the next.

None of this is the fault of the child.

Second, the question being asked here – ‘how far behind are children being allowed to fall?’ – requires a measure not of overall inequality but of inequality at the bottom end of the distribution.

In other words, the metric used is not the distance between the top and the bottom but between the median and the bottom. The median level of child well-being – whether in material goods, educational outcomes, or level of health – represents what is considered normal in a given society and falling behind that median by more than a certain degree carries a risk of social exclusion. Today, ‘bottom-end inequality’ is no longer a concern only of the political left. In the United Kingdom, for example, a Conservative Prime Minister has argued that “We should focus on closing the gap between the bottom and the middle not because that is the easy thing to do, but because focusing on those who do not have the chance of a good life is the most important thing to do.”

That ‘gap between the bottom and the middle’ is the focus of Report Card 9 . . . .(p. 9).

 

Hunger, Homelessness, Poverty Have Been Declared "No Excuse." How About Lead?

The unethical and self-serving hucksters of corporate ed reform have ignored every social factor that science and common sense have ever shown to contribute to and maintain the test score achievement gaps that are routinely blamed on teachers, parents, and public schools.  The media, meanwhile, have remained faithful to the Business Roundtable's agenda for maintaining the status quo stupidity of impossible testing targets for the poor, even while the teaching profession and public school are dismantled in favor of corporate charter solutions that contain and segregate the poor and brown, while applying psychological and behavioral neutering techniques to our most vulnerable children.

Even our President has declared there are No Excuses. Not zip code, hunger, poverty, homelessness, sickness, fear, insecurity, or anything else.  Nothing can stop the testing, the punishing, the shutting down of public schools, and the lifelong labeling of children as failures.  What kind of country have we become?  What happened to compassion, concern, care, and help.  When did we stop being human?

One must wonder how the Oligarchs' teams of dissemblers and lawyers will choose to ignore or deny this latest bit of evidence that poor children suffer environmental effects that make all the wishful thinking by the cheerful idiots (to use C. Wright Mills's term) at Education Trust and the Fordham Insitute irrelevant and dangerously myopic.

From the AP:

Children who ingested even small amounts of lead performed poorly later on school tests compared to students who were never exposed to the substance, according to a new study of Connecticut students.

The Duke University study also found that black children were much more likely to have experienced lead poisoning from paint residue, dust or other sources by age 7 than the state's white children. Educators worry that factor might be among many contributing to Connecticut's status as the state with the largest achievement gap between the races.

Education and public health officials called the Duke study a stark reminder that although lead poisoning cases have dropped sharply nationwide in recent years, even very low levels of exposure can irreversibly influence children's development.

"It's compelling evidence. I think it provides even greater awareness to parents, medical providers and advocates that lead poisoning is a serious issue and prevention is key," said Francesca Provenzano, health program supervisor for the Connecticut Department of Public Health.

Duke researchers reviewed the cases of 35,000 Connecticut children whose blood tests showed lead exposure before age 7, then linked them to their fourth-grade reading and math scores on the 2008 and 2009 standardized Connecticut Mastery Tests.

They concluded that the greater their exposure, the lower the children tended to score -- but that even those whose lead levels were lower than the established danger threshold were doing worse than peers who'd never been exposed.

The Children's Environmental Health Initiative at Duke conducted the same study in 2009 of North Carolina students, finding a similar association between lead exposure and problems later in academics. The federally funded Connecticut study, which state education offcials asked Duke to conduct, was completed in February and presented this month to the Connecticut State Board of Education.

Several other government and university research studies nationwide over the years have found links between lead poisoning and delays in academic and cognitive growth, although the Duke study is Connecticut's first research linking individual students to their test results.

Lead was banned in house paint, cookware and products marketed to children in the U.S. in 1978. However, it can sometimes still be found in many older homes, which are prevalent in the Northeast.

It's also found in some soil and household piping, though aggressive remediation efforts have been in place in Connecticut and nationwide for several years. When young children swallow lead in paint chips or inhale it in dust, it can lead to delays in physical and mental development, lower intelligence, shorter attention spans and behavioral problems.

Connecticut also started screening all children in 2009 for lead exposure, helping pinpoint families, neighborhoods and regions where more intervention is needed to remove lead hazards and more early intervention education services.

The Duke study of Connecticut students found that black children were notably overrepresented among those whose blood tests showed they were exposed to lead, which some officials say may reflect the older housing in urban centers.

The researchers also removed records for all students who had limited English proficiency to ensure the test scores, particularly in reading, had not been skewed by that factor.

They also looked at whether students' family income qualified them for free or reduced-price lunches, and concluded that even poor children exposed to lead performed worse than poor children who were not exposed.

Connecticut educators worry the lead exposure among black students could be one of many factors in the achievement gap between white and minority students, and between wealthy and poor students.

The National Assessment of Education Progress, an annual review mandated by Congress and overseen by the U.S. Department of Education, says Connecticut's poorest students -- many of whom are black -- are about three grade levels behind their peers in reading and math. That gap is the largest among all states.

What Does the Data Tell Us?

 From the Texas Tribune:

Marder, it should be noted, has a vested interest. In addition to being a professor in the University of Texas' department of physics and a member of their highly regarded Center for Nonlinear Dynamics, he is also the co-director of the university's UTeach program, which focuses on preparing and encouraging university graduates to become secondary math and science teachers — a boost of which the state desperately needs.. . .

. . . .After looking at the data, Marder has yet to be convinced that any teaching solution has been found that can overcome the detrimental effects of poverty on a large scale — and that we may be looking for solutions in the wrong place. 

Detroit Schools Emergency Mismanager Bobb Continues to Do a Heckuva Job

Eli Broad's corrupt stooge in charge of Detroit Schools, Robert Bobb, continues his dismantling of Detroit's public schools per oligarch instructions, with a strategy that could not be clearer: provide a breathtaking level of planned incompetence and draconian policies that 1) destroys confidence in the public governance of schools, 2) scares away all students from the system whose parents have resources to make another choice, 3) blows up the debt through accelerated loss of students to unsustainable proportions, which is then used to justify all sorts of curriculum and teacher/admin/aide cutting, salary and benefit reductions, and union smashing. 

Once that process is completed, the remaining pockets of impoverished children will be turned over to the hedge funders' corporate charter CEOs to manage with behavioral and psychological sterilization plans borrowed from the KIPP and Uncommon Schools chains.  This is modern day eugenics plain and simple.

Below is part of the story told by Michael Winerip of the Times as only Michael can capture it:

. . . Since Mr. Bobb arrived, the $200 million deficit has risen to $327 million. While he has made substantial cuts to save money — including $16 million by firing hundreds of administrators — any gains have been overshadowed by the exodus of the 8,000 students a year. For each student who departs, $7,300 in state money gets subtracted from the Detroit budget — an annual loss of $58.4 million.

Nor have charters been the answer. Charter school students score about the same on state tests as Detroit district students, even though charters have fewer special education students (8 percent versus 17 percent in the district) and fewer poor children (65 percent get subsidized lunches versus 82 percent at district schools). It’s hard to know whether children are better off under these “reforms” or they’re just being moved around more.

Steve Wasko, public relations director for Mr. Bobb and the Detroit schools, did not respond to a dozen voice mails and e-mails seeking comment. Those who know Mr. Wasko say he cares about Detroit and is sick of the national media portraying the city as hopeless.

Is it?

Maybe the best way to say it is: Things are not hopeless, but they are not hopeful, either. Last week, union officials took me to a few schools to see some of the good.

In September the district opened a new public school, Palmer Park Preparatory Academy, that is run by teachers instead of a principal. Sherry Andrews, a 25-year veteran, teaches sixth grade there. Her credentials are impressive: she attended Cass Technical, one of Detroit’s elite high schools; graduated from the University of Michigan; and returned. “These are my kids,” she said. “This is my community.”

Every week Ms. Andrews holds a spelling bee. At the most recent bee, the last one standing was Keimon Gordon. “My best method for figuring out words,” Keimon said, “is standing still, closing my eyes and drawing everything out in my mind.”

It takes practice. “I tell my mother I need everybody to be quiet, I need to study the dictionary,” he said.
Keimon’s mother, Charity Williams, a mail clerk, sent her older son to high school in Ferndale, a nearby suburb, because she didn’t trust Mumford High, the Detroit school he was assigned to. “What do I think of the Detroit schools?” she said. “They need a lot of improvement.”

But not Keimon’s teacher, Ms. Andrews. “A wonderful teacher,” Ms. Williams said. “At the start of the year, when Keimon first got in her classroom, he was smart and picked on. She showed him he didn’t have to follow them. She told Keimon, ‘Just be the person you are.’ ”

Down the hallway, in third grade, Emily Wize, who has been teaching 12 years, has every student’s reading scores saved on her laptop. She knows that on Oct. 14 her best student, Danielle Rogers, read 150 words a minute on a test of her fluency. On Nov. 10, she read 184 words; and on Jan. 13, 203 words.

Detroit teachers learn to be ready for anything. In wintertime, local TV newscasts in Northern states stream the list of school closings because of snow. In Detroit, they stream the list of school closings because of the fiscal crisis.
Last spring, Mr. Bobb had planned to close 50 schools with dwindling enrollment. But his list was reduced to 30 after several public meetings at which parents and staff members pleaded their school’s case before the all-powerful Mr. Bobb.

In June, Mr. Bobb held a news conference at Carstens Elementary — one of the schools spared — to announce the 30 closings.

One reason Carstens survived was an article in The Detroit Free Press last March headlined “Carstens Elementary on DPS closing list is a beacon of hope.”

The school, surrounded by vacant lots and abandoned houses, serves some of the city’s poorest children. Thieves who broke into the school last year escaped by disappearing into what the police call “the woods” — the blocks and blocks of vacant houses.

Yet Carstens students perform well on state tests, repeatedly meeting the federal standard for adequate yearly progress.

“We try to fill in the holes in our children’s lives,” said Rebecca Kelly-Gavrilovich, a Carstens teacher with 25 years’ experience. Students get free breakfast, lunch and — if they attend the after-school program — dinner.

To have more money for instruction, teachers sit with students at lunch, saving the school from having to hire lunchroom aides. Teachers hold jacket and shoe drives for children who have no winter coats and come to school in slippers. At Thanksgiving every child goes home with a frozen turkey donated by a local businessman. Twice a year a bus carrying a portable dentist’s office arrives, and a clinic is set up at the school so children can get their teeth checked.

Despite all this, teachers worry that Carstens’s appearance on Mr. Bobb’s closing list — even though it was brief — means the end is near. Anticipating the worst, several parents have taken their children out of Carstens, enrolling them elsewhere, including at charters and suburban schools.

Carstens’s enrollment is half of what it was a few years ago. Every hallway has empty classrooms, giving the school a desolate feeling.

Mr. Bobb has set off a vicious cycle undermining even good schools. The more schools he closes to save money, the more parents grow discouraged and pull their children out. The fewer the children, the less the state aid, so Mr. Bobb closes more schools.

Carstens has also been harmed by poor personnel decisions made by the district. Last year, 1,200 teachers took the retirement buyout, and Mr. Bobb laid off 2,000 others in the spring. Then in the fall, he realized he needed to hire the 2,000 back, and chaos ensued.

At Carstens, a kindergarten class of 30 had no teacher until October; teachers at the school took turns supervising the class. “How do you think parents feel when there’s a different teacher every day?” said Mike Fesik, the current teacher.

It’s hard to understand why any teacher who could leave Detroit stays, but they do. Kim Kyff, with 22 years’ experience, is one of the lead teachers at Palmer Park, the elementary and middle school that opened last fall. In 2007 she was the Michigan teacher of the year. She has had offers from suburban schools, but stays because she believes that in Detroit, she has a better shot at being a beacon of hope.

Last summer, she went door to door in the neighborhood to explain to parents the plans for the new school, including classes not seen in most Detroit elementary and middle schools: French and Spanish, art and music. “Most were skeptical,” she said. Even so, Ms. Kyff thanked them and then tried the house next door.

Let's blame (1) teachers (2) schools of education (3) the decline of the US (4) lack of a national education program (5) parents, but not the real culprit: POVERTY

Let's blame (1) teachers (2) schools of education (3) the decline of the US (4) lack of a national education program (5) parents, but not the real culprit: POVERTY

Stephen Krashen

Everybody seems to think that our educational system is broken, because of our "low" test scores on international tests. 

The federal government and Bill Gates think that the solution is improved teaching and teacher education, and that we can force teachers and Schools of Education to get better by "raising standards" and by evaluating teachers according to student gains on standardized test scores. (My comment = http://bit.ly/fr1rU1)

In fact, the US Dept of Education is in the process of developing the most ambitious, brutal testing program ever seen in the US, increasing testing far beyond current levels.

But not everybody is blaming teachers.

Newsweek regards American educational problems as part of an overall decline in the United States of America. (My response = http://bit.ly/h6PXOI)

A Barron's writer says we should blame the fact that we don't have a national education system (My response = http://bit.ly/fNy7Hf)

An Indianapolis Star columnist says we should blame parents. (My response = http://bit.ly/i3rx1o)

The USC Trojan Family magazine even wondered if better online games would fix the "failing" schools (my response = http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2011/03/are-american-schools-failing.html)

There is no evidence that any of this is correct, but there is plenty of evidence that the real culprit is poverty. As I mentioned in each of the letters and comments cited above, American children who do not suffer from poverty achieve do very well on international tests, scoring at the top of the world. This suggests that our schools, teachers, and parents are doing OK. (Of course we can always improve, but the data indicates that there is no national crisis).

I also cited the work of David Berliner and Michael Martin, who document the damage caused by poverty, the impact of an inadequate diet, environmental toxins, and poor health care, and several scholars have documented that fact that children of poverty have little access to reading material at home, in school, or in their communities, which means little chance to develop literacy. 

In each of the letters to the editor and comments, I also mentioned some solutions, ways of protecting students from the effects of poverty that require far less effort and money than we are now eagerly investing in new tests.

The US Dept of Education will not even consider this possibility. They maintain that with determination, high poverty can schools can do very well, a claim that both Gerald Bracey (to a large extent) and I (to a small extent) have challenged (http://sdkrashen.com/articles/dont_trust/all.html). All we need to do is raise the bar, or, in other words, make school harder and test more often. 

This won't work. When students are hungry, have serious health problems, and have not read much because of the absence of books in their environment, all the determination, hard work and inspired teaching in the world will be of little use. 

A modest proposal:

1. No child left unfed (Susan Ohanian): In addition to free/reduced price lunch, a good breakfast.
2. Better health care: More school nurses in high poverty schools.
3. Improve school and public libraries, especially in high poverty areas.
4. Pay for this by reducing testing (NUT = No unnecessary testing, posted at http://sdkrashen.com/index.php?cat=4)