Surprise! Poverty Trumps Race (Most of the Time)

The New York Times performed a public service of sorts by placing the story about the growing achievement gap between affluent and poor kids on its front page February 10. One can only hope that President Obama, Secretary Arne Duncan, and all the we-know-for-certain-what-to-do-about-the-achievement-gap reformers will read it carefully.

The theme of the story is that it is income, not race, that is the defining characteristic in predicting academic performance. Here is the unsurprising finding: kids growing up in very poor families do not do nearly as well as kids growing up in affluent families. Moreover, the gap is growing.

Almost a half-century ago, the authors of the famous but little-read Coleman Report documented that the most important factor in explaining variations in achievement is the socio-economic status of one’s parents. The second most important factor, particularly for black students, is the socio-economic status of one’s classmates. Published at the height of the Great Society, the Coleman Report rudely interrupted President Johnson’s designs on pushing the federal government into a massive effort at school construction and modernization in the belief that lousy schools without laboratories and libraries explained why poor (black) kids did so poorly.

Coleman found that facilities and, surprisingly, teachers had relatively little to do with the big differences in achievement between black students and  white ones. Instead, it was the socioeconomic status of a student’s family that mattered most.

Despite assaults from all sides, including hundreds of dissertations and scores of commissions, the bedrock conclusions of Coleman survive. And yet, the educational policy debates of today concentrate on teacher accountability, charter schools, technology, and other panaceas not connected to the effects of growing up poor. In fact, since the era of the Coleman report, reform efforts seem to have focused on everything but the true underlying causes of the achievement gap. More resources was the first solution tried. Title I of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act put the federal government into the financing of programs aimed at schools and districts with lots of poor kids—to no effect. Governance was targeted next, sometimes by emphasizing increased authority for district headquarters; sometimes decentralizing authority to schools. Technology has also been a favorite answer—remember educational television, or laptops for every kid?

Much of what makes some students unable to thrive in school actually happens outside the classroom, yet this simple fact is still ignored by most education reformers. As for the Times story, as helpful as it is, it omits four important facts or factors:

1. Poverty is growing, particularly among children. In 2010, the poverty rate among all Americans (15.1 percent) ticked above the rate in 1965. More distressing for this discussion, the poverty rate for single-parent households (31.6 percent) is now five times the rate for married households (6.2 percent). The poorer the families, the more children are affected—while children under age 18 make up 24 percent of the population, they are 36 percent of those in the poorest families.
2. Concentrated poverty takes a huge toll. Socio-economic status of schoolmates has a big effect on performance, so one certain predictor of academic failure is growing up in a poor family, in a poor neighborhood, attending a school with only other poor children. Evidence shows that children from poor families attending middle-class schools will outperform children from not-poor families attending schools of concentrated poverty. Almost all the schools on the lists of “chronically failing” schools are schools of concentrated poverty. This correlation is blithely ignored by Secretary Duncan and the reform movement.
3. The fastest-growing segment of the school population is Latinos. In just the past twenty years or so, the proportion of Latino students has tripled, now constituting more than 20 percent of students nationwide. Since the growth is explained both by immigration and birth to first-generation parents, many of these students come from families where no or little English is spoken and where Spanish is not read. This wave of students with potential language barriers is compounding the pedagogical problems for educators. And, as Latino students are statistically more likely to attend high-poverty or “poverty-only” schools, this language barrier will make those schools’ task even harder.
4. The Times article concludes with a discouraging quote from Douglas Besharov of the Atlantic Council: “No one has the slightest idea what will work. The cupboard is bare.” Not so. In truth, we know that it is possible to narrow the achievement gap by concentrating on younger students to insure that they are strong readers by third grade. We know that the investment in high-quality preschool for three- and four-year-old children can narrow the gap in vocabulary, general knowledge, and the other elements of “reading readiness” by the start of kindergarten. The payoff from this investment is huge, not just in improved literacy (particularly when connected to intensive literacy instruction in the primary grades), but in higher rates of high school graduation, marriage, and employment, and lower rates of incarceration.

The current reform agenda is offered with the same self-assurance as its failed predecessors. What we need is to stop firing at the wrong targets (once again) and focus on the causes of the achievement gap that are established (also once again) beyond dispute.