What it takes
The NY Times Magazine cover story yesterday was on the disadvantage faced by low-income students and what it would mean to take seriously the idea of "no child left behind." It’s an interesting article, pulling together a lot of different strands of research and thinking. I want to try to pull the different strands apart, though, because I agree with some of the assumptions behind the article, but not all.
1) The first claim is that low-income children enter school at a significant disadvantage compared to middle-income children. I think there’s pretty much broad consensus behind this one. Anyone care to argue it?
2) Next, Tough argues that this disadvantage is primarily due to differences in parenting styles, especially the use of language. There’s not a consensus on this one. On the one hand, there are those (cf. The Bell Curve) who argue that the differences in performance are larguely genetic. I think that’s wrong — there’s good evidence that genetics is a strong driver of differences in IQ among middle- and upper-class children, but that poor kids often don’t get to develop up to their full potential. On the other hand, there are a lot of liberals who would reject Tough’s claim that parenting style matters more than the material deprivation that poor kids experience.
(Tough doesn’t entirely dismiss the role of poverty, but concludes that parenting matters more: "True, every poor child would benefit from having more books in his home and more nutritious food to eat (and money certainly makes it easier to carry out a program of concerted cultivation). But the real advantages that middle-class children gain come from more elusive processes: the language that their parents use, the attitudes toward life that they convey.")
As Jal Mehta points out at TMPCafe, this isn’t just an academic dispute — it has real policy consequences. If you think that material hardship is the main reason poor children are lagging, it points you in the direction of child allowances and other income redistribution schemes. But if parenting matters more, just giving poor parents more money won’t solve the problem. You either need to somehow change their parenting practices (possibly through some form of home visits), or compensate for them (through programs like Head Start and redesigned schools).
I think the evidence that there are class-based differences in parenting practices is strong (I’ve written about Lareau’s Unequal Childhoods here before), but am not quite willing to write off the role of money.
3) The next question is whether poor kids are entering school so far behind that they couldn’t succeed if given schools with the resources of the average American public school. Tough suggests that they can’t, because there are so few examples of schools that are succeeding with overwhelmingly poor, minority populations. I’m not convinced that makes his point — as Kozol argues in Shame of the Nation, it’s essentially an experiment that has never been tried. The best argument for Tough’s position, I think, is that the small number of low-income kids in predominently middle-class schools have generally not done particularly well. (And I think the strongest part of NCLB is the attention that it has forced school administrators to pay to that achievement gap.)
Tough argues that the kinds of schools that have succeeded — and are needed for widespread success — provide three key components: extended school days and years, highly structured lesson plans, with frequent testing to make sure that the desired skills are being aquired, and an explicit focus on affecting the behavior and values of the students by "teaching character." He writes:
The message inherent in the success of their schools is that if poor students are going to catch up, they will require not the same education that middle-class children receive but one that is considerably better; they need more time in class than middle-class students, better-trained teachers and a curriculum that prepares them psychologically and emotionally, as well as intellectually, for the challenges ahead of them.
But is this a better education? It’s certainly a more costly education, once you burn through the supply of true believers who are willing to subsidize such schools by working extra hours for no extra pay.
But I’m reminded of Scrivenings’ post about his horror at a New York Times story about a kindergarten class that is operated along such lines. While some parents would welcome the eased demand for after school care, I think an equal number of middle-class parents would be outraged if their kids’ schools added another 3 hours of classes a day, especially if that time were spent on core reading and math rather than "enrichment" activities. I know that my biggest concern about sending D to a school with lousy test scores was fear that they’d adopt a drill-and-kill approach.
And I know a lot of good teachers resist such a highly structured approach, prefering the flexibility to follow the children’s interests and take advantage of teachable moments. Kozol argues that schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods get caught in vicious cycles, where they get the least experienced teachers, so the administrators rely on scripted lessons, which makes the schools even less attractive for creative teachers.
***********
Edited to add that none of this says that any individual child can’t succeed. There are certainly kids who overcome mediocre parenting and indifferent schools to achieve great things. And there are poor parents who devote all their limited resources to making things better for their kids. All this is about averages.
November 28th, 2006 at 12:56 am
I’ll preface this by saying I’ve been on a county board distributing state money to human-services agencies that serve families with children aged 0-5.
1. Lotsa luck on the home visits. The most tangible thing you’ll get there is screening and tagging, depending on whether the social agencies are equipped to handle the data. You will not persuade the semi-abandoned 21-year-old mother mired in a lifetime of rural poverty and powerlessness that it’s just super important for her to read books to her 1-year-old. Oh, and to read books herself and develop her vocabulary so her kid can compete with the likes of board members’ toddlers, who play with their parents molecular modeling kits and have conversations about what’s good for the earth.
There’s just too much to do there.
2. The alternative, essentially taking the kids away, comes with serious problems, esp. if you’ve got white people taking away kids who aren’t white. And that’s what our other programs do, I think. Do they work? To some degree, yes. At a serious cost. I think it probably only works well when the parents want the white people to take the kids away and give them a fighting chance, a la Americanization in NYC in the first half of the 20th c.
Sorry to be bleak.
November 28th, 2006 at 9:13 am
Other countries do home visits after babies are born as a matter of course. It’s not impossible in the generic sense, just unlikely in the US sense. Then again, a lot of private foundations have been hitting away at this for years. Arguably, for a century — Hull House and the settlement projects were all designed to inculcate “Middle Class” values. They often failed because of the inherent condescension — and yet, there are real-world consequences for respecting “cultural” differences. (The Settlement House endeavors can be useful reminders that the “racial” aspects of these discussions aren’t static.)
I wish I could find the someone or someones who wrote about the Wake County NC experiment that buses extensively to make sure that no one school has more than 40% of kids receiving reduced-cost/free school lunches. I would SWEAR that the Times Magazine did the original article, and that it DIRECTLY answers the “what can we do” question (even if the author(s) of that article might have oversold their case). When peer effects make such a difference in schools — when you need a certain percentage of kids with “middle-class” values to succeed, and create a climate of success — than ensuring economic intergration a la Wake County IS one good possibility. Or at least one of the lowest-cost possibilities.
There’s a long literature about the negative effects of suburbanization when it means that urban geographic boundaries lock the inner cities away from their regional growth areas. County- or metro-based school integration is one place where you can overcome this segregation barrier, but funding or re-introducing urban incorporation is another. Of course there’s enormous resistance to reversing the trend, but it’s the clearest way historically in which cities hurt themselves — when they stopped incorporating the areas on the edges of their growth band, and let those edges become cities of their own.
November 28th, 2006 at 9:21 am
I’ve been reading “A Hope in the Unseen” by Ron Suskind of the Wall Street Journal. A sort of personal look at just this topic. While the student in the book, a young man named Cedric, formerly of DC’s notorious Ballou high school, does make it to Brown University, he certainly faces all that you describe above. One other thing that’s a serious factor (at least in Cedric’s case, but I suspect for others too) is peer pressure. At Ballou it’s just not socially acceptable to be smart. In fact, at this nearly all-black, lower income school, it’s considered “white” and students who do well academically are at the very least ridiculed and very often beaten up. I’m not sure what the solution to that part of the problem is …
November 28th, 2006 at 9:22 am
Jody, here’s the link to the NYTimes article (now behind the select wall):
http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=FA0617FE3E540C768EDDA00894DD404482
I linked to it when I wrote about The Failures of Integration:
http://www.halfchangedworld.com/2005/10/tbr_the_failure.html
November 28th, 2006 at 9:23 am
Ah, found it (and made it blog-friendly via the New York Times Blog Link Generator):
http://tinyurl.com/axo4g
And I KNEW we’d talked about it here (because I was so uncomfortable posting my comments), but you wrote Raleigh instead of Wake, which is why my original google search didn’t find it:
http://tinyurl.com/yyjlty
I’m being really irritated by the Times’ pathetic inability to keep track of their own reporting lately.
November 28th, 2006 at 9:24 am
Oops! Cross-commented LOL.
Mine is out from behind the Select wall, though, so that counts for something. 🙂
November 28th, 2006 at 9:26 am
Oh, and wasn’t there just a study on the issue that W mentions? I think researchers found that “smart” black kids lost an average of 2 friends compared to their academically average friends, while “smart” white kids stayed at, or even above, the average.
Peer effects again.
November 28th, 2006 at 11:06 am
I also read the NY Times piece with great interest. And I’ve read the Lareau book, and had many conversations about it.
In general I feel this whole debate, including this NY Times coverage, starts at the wrong spot. I think we’d all agree that our overall goal should be to ensure a lifetime of opportunity and prosperity, or at least equal access to these things, to all Americans. Yet we make this huge leap of logic that the best way to do this is to make sure everyone goes to college, and that the best path to college is roughly equivalent test scores for pre-college kids. I just don’t buy that. If the only way we’ve seen to improve the scores of kids from impoverished areas is by condemning them to a classroom for 8 hours a day — as Elizabeth notes, something the middle class parents amongst us would be unlikely to do — then should we not be open to questioning our methods? Why have we decided that a focus on book learning is the only way to even the scales?
In my work and home life I’ve seen many examples of people, of many ethnicities and many backgrounds, who despite being obviously intelligent and able, did poorly at school. One of the threads that ties these people together is a dislike of reading — which does not mean a dislike of learning — and an inability to sit still in a school chair for long periods. Dental hygienists, EMTs, small business owners, sales people, tons and tons of computer people of all stripes. These people went into the world and found work that enabled them to be happy and prosper. It was not about their test scores — it was about an economy that made room for them. I just think it’s dumb to say “Our statistics indicate that people who go to college make more money. Therefore we need everyone in this country to go to college.” No, not necessarily. Anyone who’s watched an English PhD serve coffee at Starbuck’s knows that education does not guarantee you a prosperous life, or choices. Blindly working towards college is not the answer. Especially when we’re essentially asking some of these impoverished kids to give up their whole life: all your friends, your family connections, your neighborhood, your cultural identity. There has to be a better way.
November 28th, 2006 at 11:47 am
I came at this article from a different direction (as you know from commenting on my blog–sorry for the overly aggressive spam filter). But like you, I’m not ready to write off the role of parental class and money in this debate. I doubt very much that we will get to a situation in my lifetime where the political will in the country will exist that moves us more in the direction of equalizing resources, though, or even coming much closer to equal.
November 28th, 2006 at 10:35 pm
I briefly scanned this article in The New York Times over the weekend. I basically was left with many unanswered questions. How does the role of daycare play in the development of low-income children? Many daycare centers have some level of academics even if it is simply reading. Isn’t extended school days placing the parental responsibility on teachers and schools rather than parents? I grew up in NYC and if one is resourceful, with very little money, a parent can take advantage of many free cultural and educational tools cities offer. The library is still free, right? As a college professor I witness countless students that have no interest in reading anything, forget books, not even newspapers, magazines or even internet sources for news, etc. I also see many students that do not belong in college and are there due to parental expectations. Cultural and family values towards the role of education can be a brick wall for anyone trying to change the system. Perhaps there should be more vocational school options for students. When did a college education become part of the American Dream? Standards keeps increasing for students without student performance meeting these expectations. In New York State students must pass a certain amount of state regents exams in order to obtain a high school diploma. Many of my friends that teach in vocational and non-vocational high schools tell me that these are unrealistic expectations.
November 29th, 2006 at 6:54 am
I like Jen’s comments. And I see my boys in a school environment which rewards (well, schools DO) exactly the kind of behavior which the KIPP schools work at inculcating, and to which boy #2 in particular is LOTS more resistant than many of the other kids in class. So we are trying to do our own little mini-KIPP here at home and I hope there is room for them in future.
That said, Elizabeth, I am going to claw away at your remarks, “…There’s not a consensus on this one. On the one hand, there are those (cf. The Bell Curve) who argue that the differences in performance are largely genetic. I think that’s wrong — there’s good evidence that genetics is a strong driver of differences in IQ among middle- and upper-class children, but that poor kids often don’t get to develop up to their full potential. On the other hand, there are a lot of liberals who would reject Tough’s claim that parenting style matters more than the material deprivation that poor kids experience.
(Tough doesn’t entirely dismiss the role of poverty, but concludes that parenting matters more: “True, every poor child would benefit from having more books in his home and more nutritious food to eat (and money certainly makes it easier to carry out a program of concerted cultivation). But the real advantages that middle-class children gain come from more elusive processes: the language that their parents use, the attitudes toward life that they convey.”)…” and you then go on as though genetics is dismissed. My mother had four kids, we range in IQ from 110 to 150 – we all got read to on laps, taken to culture, admiration was expressed for intellectual figures and not for football players, good diet, the same 2000 books were on the living room wall for all of us. So something made the difference – as you note, good evidence for genetics within middle class families. There’s got to be some kind of back story in your assumptions that genetics isn’t a factor worth thinking about in looking at class-related differential success, no real obvious reason to assume there would not be differences between families which would have had an effect on where they have landed even before the kids came to them.
What can it be? I think the assumption would be that there is some kind of miasmic general depressive effect on academic performance from poverty, and it knocks everybody down two standard deviations from what they ought to be if raised by middle class people. And then you would assume there is a ‘real’ distribution of intellect in impoverished people which can be elicited by – and Tough thinks KIPP type schools, and some folks vote for salad and pork chops, and some folks vote for somehow getting the moms to put them to bed early and read to them. The abject failure of communities like Princeton and Evanston and Arlington to close the gap in the kids coming into their schools suggests that just throwing more money and resources into the current style of public schools is not going to do it. On the other hand, everybody is doing a little better every year on tests, in terms of absolute scores, so that maybe inclines a bit for ‘miasma’.
The Nazis took all the food away from Netherlands in, I think, 1944, and sent it to Germany. Awful times. After the War, the Dutch decided to look at the kids’ intellectual functioning, whether they could see some depression based on how old they were at the time, or in the womb, etc. The largest effects they found were birth order. Starvation was less important than whether you were a first-born. So I kind of doubt the salad and pork chop theory. Other commenters have noted the problems getting nagging social workers into the homes and trying to make them adopt middle-class values. What to do? If KIPP type programs give kids better skills, it’s certainly worth a try, nothing else seems to be making a big difference.
November 29th, 2006 at 11:49 am
You know, in third world countries some relief organizations don’t try to simply help children. They try to help their *mothers*. (Not to say helping dads is not useful, but if I recall correctly statistically the kid gets much more benefit from help given directly to the mom.) And it works.
There are a million reasons why this is not a good comparison point, but I still find myself wondering what would happen in this country if we committed to something closer to full employment at a living wage for these kids’ parents?
February 6th, 2007 at 1:57 pm
here’s the reference on ‘salad and pork chops’ –
“[Malnutrition] may be much less important than has been suggested. Consider, for instance, a study carried out in Holland by Stein and co-workers.* They collected test scores, at the age of 19, of some 20,000 Dutch army recruits whose mothers, during the German occupation, had been subjected to severe starvation in the crucial months around the time of the birth. These recruits showed no lasting general retardation when compared to 100,000 recruits whose mothers had not suffered starvation….” — Hans Eysenck, 1981, in Intelligence: the Battle for the Mind, Pan Psychology.
* Elsewhere, Eysenck gave the reference as: STEIN, Z., SUSSER, M., SAENGER, G. & MAROLLA, F. (1972). Intelligence test results of individuals exposed during gestation in the World War II famine in the Netherlands. T. Soc. Geneesk. 50, 766-774.