Poverty, segregation persist in U.S. schools, report says
pbs.org
pbs.org
Teachers in high-needs schools are dealing much more frequently with students who have severe issues stemming from poverty, trauma, and lack of support in their families and communities. Those factors are equal to or greater than variation in teacher quality, which no doubt exists.
Arguments about the mechanism of teacher pay distribution distracts from the reality that many teachers in poor districts are functioning as social workers for the effects of poverty, neglect, and violence borne by the children before they arrive in the classroom.
Teaching in such environments will always be a lot harder than it is in stable middle class and higher income communities.
If poor schools are expected to bear the costs of the social dysfunction created by the larger society, then either the teachers should be paid for providing those services, or we should invest in other capacities, inside and outside the school, to mitigate the needs for these services in the classroom, freeing up teachers for actual teaching.
But until those things are addressed, it's just a convenient distraction to frame the fundamental issue as a problem of how to use teacher pay as a carrot.
In a word, what's lacking from these communities is, in a couple of words, stability and security. Some children have parents who are either homeless or constantly on the verge of homelessness; some children have parents who have difficulty putting food on the table; some children come from households with absent or abusive parents.
How, exactly, would hiring more social workers for schools solve this problem? Ought social workers be able to go into childrens' homes and intervene in some way? Put food on the table, pay the parents' past-due bills, catch abusers red-handed and put a stop to them? I'm not so sure this is the answer, because apart from the fact that doing so falls somewhere on the spectrum between absurd and enablement, in extreme cases, society already removes children from abusive homes to put them in foster care. And it doesn't seem to me like the numbers and research bear out about outcomes for fostered children being on par with children from more privileged backgrounds.
Instead, funding needs to be directed towards stabilizing the parents' environment. That means more public works projects (for stable employment), more affordable apartments (for stable housing), longer school days with funding for post-schoolday extracurriculars and funding for free daycare for younger children (so that parents can stay at work while their children are looked after), exchanging prosecution for funded treatment for drug addicts. When the parents have a stable environment, then the child has a stable environment.
[0] http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/2018-01-10-Education-Inequity.pdf [1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/562/the-problem-we-all-live... [2] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/finance_in... [3] http://www.nbc12.com/story/28265605/ucla-study-singles-out-h...
It really is frustarting to see the US fall further behind.
Talking further about teachers it is super one sided. Minorities are not joining the ranks of teachers and instead the diversity of teachers is getting more and more white.
https://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/highered/racial-diversity/...
Latinos that send their kids to the private schools would argue very strongly that their children should not be forced to endure the charter schools. Those that can afford it make every effort to leave.
The link you cited seems to contradict this statement ...
> Figure 2 shows that the population of public school teachers has gradually become more diverse over time.
Segregation isn't addressing the root problem, it's just hoping that spreading out the problem (households that don't value education) will mask issues.
If one school was 100% Asian-American and a neighboring school was 100% white, the two schools wouldn't underperform because of segregation.
EDIT: Instead of downvoting, can someone refute my point about the Asian-American and white schools? Segregation itself isn't the issue.
It reads like you are saying that the root problem is households that don't value education, to which I would say that perhaps students that don't value education is the root problem. And then, perhaps spreading those students out into classes and schools among students who do value education won't mask that problem, but actually change the attitudes and eventually behaviors of those you are trying to help.
It might help out some, and some of those students will go on to college and they won't return to the same community to make it any better. Having children wake up early to ride the bus for an hour is avoiding the root issue. Communities should have local schools that they can take pride and ownership in. Having school close to home also makes it easier for parents to be involved.
It's obvious to everyone what the problem is, yet we're not able to discuss it.
Please, let us know what you think the problem is. Why hide behind an implication?
As for the problem? Well, the 72% illegitimacy rate among African-Americans is an absolute social disaster (1). No amount of school funding or social welfare programs can fix an economic problem of that scope. And yes, I believe that this is a cultural problem. What is the solution? I don't know, but I'm open to debating, engaging, and supporting policy that will help.
You can see a flip occur around 1980 which would coincide with the beginning of the crack era, the failing war on drugs, and mass incarceration.
https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/families...
The "flip" doesn't occur around 1980, it occurs in the 1970's (feel free to download the excel sheet and examine it yourself, as I did) and it's a trend that follows ALL races, yet the crack era was largely an African-American epidemic.
There was, however, a major social movement in the 60's that encouraged free love, sexual liberation, women's rights, and an explosion of contraceptives. I think this is a stronger explanatory argument, one also made by the Brookings Institution:
https://www.brookings.edu/research/an-analysis-of-out-of-wed...
When you don't have access to that wealth* and society takes an active role in eroding its explicit social safety net (welfare), the implicit communal safety net (redlining, divestment), and individual liberties (mass incarceration, the crack vs cocaine sentencing disparities), you can see what results. What you're falsely ascribing to sexual liberation I'm ascribing to the real, tangible effects of capitalism and a society that values black life less.
* http://www.post-gazette.com/business/businessnews/2010/03/09...
That reminds me of something I've heard before. Oh, right...
“The bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed correlation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.” — Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party
Now as for the nonsensical rant about capitalism, I’ve had that debate about a thousand times, so I don’t see the point in engaging again - it’s not like we’re going to change each other’s minds.
My side? Please elaborate.
"Traditional family structure" has been used to browbeat same-sex parents, transgender people and anyone that lives a life not depicted in Norman Rockwell portraiture. In that way it has been politically weaponized to oppress the marginalized.
Families remain powerful agents for wealth creation, economic as well as intellectual, social, and spiritual wealth. This does not mean we should structure society to make no resources available for a single mother; no one should be faced with the choice of staying with an abusive partner or losing her only means of providing for her children.
It's nice to have a point of agreement, but unfortunate that you choose to keep your worldview narrow regarding our economic reality.
When you set up incentives such that a woman loses money by marrying a guy with a small or nonexistent income, you're going to see fewer marriages in the lowest income bracket. It's rational in the short term, but the long term effects are corrosive.
He is. It's incredibly ignorant and hateful to ascribe to the individual problems caused by systemic divestment from black and brown communities. We have to fight for every cent, our teachers are not only expected to be social workers, they're also held to different standards in ways that they wouldn't be if they were teaching in wealthy white districts.
From the article:
"Whether channeling more money to schools in underserved communities will help improve the quality of education is a subject of academic debate."
This isn't a question in countries where public schools are succeeding, it's obvious. Public schools in France have enough to serve their kids multi-course meals. Public schools in Sweden have small classrooms. Everyone gets enough to make their kids thrive. Not so in America, where the primary source of funding is local property taxes.
"simply increasing the salaries of all teachers in a high-need school district won’t have as much of an impact as identifying high-performing teachers and increasing their salaries."
This is exactly the kind of comparative stack-rank culture that breeds toxicity in a workplace. Why should high-need school districts have differing salary standards?
Also anecdotal: my grandfather (along with many other rural students in the country) went to school in a one-room schoolhouse. The funding was extremely limited. This didn't hold back their educational performance.
It's the Heritage Foundation so obviously it has an angle to push, but here's a study about school funding and performance: http://www.heritage.org/education/report/does-spending-more-...
This is extremely prevalent in diverse urban areas dominated by liberals, such as New York City.
"My city the segergation is increased through Private and Charter Schools. One charter school has 93% Latino population. Another Private School near me has over 90% Caucasian population."
These are the people who preach that "diversity is our strength" but will spend a LOT of money to avoid this "strength".
Blue states still have better public schools than red states https://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/articles/...
So even if they are sending them to private schools, the public schools that "they won't send them to" STILL do better than the public schools in conservative states.
> while at the same time bashing conservatives who wish to do the same.
Those wealthy liberals pay for both the local public school and the private school. They aren't exempt from taxes because they send their kids to private school. This is why they bash conservatives, for their desire to defund public education.
> That's because the link between funding and performance is tenuous at best
So if funding is irrelevant and liberal states provide better education, what's the next post-rationalization to justify downvotes for unsubstantiated political claims?
I don't think the metric used gives the entire picture. It's pointing out the percentage of nationally-ranked schools and ignores everything below that threshold.
>So even if they are sending them to private schools, the public schools that "they won't send them to" STILL do better than the public schools in conservative states.
The urban school that the wealthy whites are avoiding probably isn't nationally ranked.
>for their desire to defund public education
Who wants to do that? It's about the amount spent, not defunding.
Though it is I think broadly acknowledged that simply throwing money at the problem won't solve anything. The Brookings Institute side of the argument even acknowledges that. [1]
However, the Brookings Institute does argue for long-term state education finance reforms changes, with linked studies that show some improvement with overall school performance, with funding equalization structures. Another Brookings article [2] argues for spending on resources that matter where they are lacking, particularly well-qualified teachers and high-quality curriculum. Seems reasonable to me.
That does not change the socioeconomic factors that also are a large factor in current school performance. This is unfortunately a lot harder to solve.
But it's not going to be solved by being too broad in scope. "One school was 100% Asian-American and a neighboring school was 100% white" is too broad. After all, Appalachian whites currently have an educational gap, and Cambodian Americans currently having an educational gap. There are many other factors involved in school performance, such as socioeconomic status, parental and community involvement, etc.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/research/its-not-nothing-the-role-... [2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/unequal-opportunity-race-...
I grew up (and recently moved back to) Boone County, in north-central Arkansas. My school experience was... suboptimal.
> On average, school districts spend around $11,000 per student each year, but the highest-poverty districts receive an average of $1,200 less per child than the least-poor districts, while districts serving the largest numbers of minority students get about $2,000 less than those serving the fewest students of color, according the study.
The source of that statistics is this report: https://edtrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/FundingGaps20... (Figure 1). But that ignores federal funding, which is specifically targeted to the highest poverty districts. For example, Figure 1 shows Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, and Illinois as states with the biggest (double digit) gaps. But accounting for federal funds, the gap disappears in New York, Maryland, and Illinois: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/03/12/in-2... (change the drop down to state, local, and federal funding).
In Maryland, for example, Baltimore City has much higher spending per student than wealthy (and much more expensive) suburbs like Montgomery County: https://www.google.com/amp/s/conduitstreet.mdcounties.org/20....
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/04/us/baltimore-schools-wint...
Federal Funding is very low and has shrunk to 10% of funding for education. With education dollars it comes with designations and paper work. Most school districts have to spend hundreads of thousands of dollars on admins and staff to follow through with Federal funding. My inner city district had to fire 3 principles so we could recieve $2,000,000 in funding in 3 years. We got $400,000 and probably lost money out of the deal.
Having local, state, and federal involvement in funding adds complexity without providing any net benefit. EX: People move all the time, focusing at the state level concentrates costs while defusing benefits.
Further, the "laboratories of democracy" model means that if I don't like how my state is doing education, I'm free to move to another one.
> People move all the time, focusing at the state level concentrates costs while defusing benefits.
Not sure I understand what you're trying to say here. You don't think states are big enough to get economies of scale?
If some state say Iowa sees most young people move out of state then they don't get direct economic benefits from educating well. Alternatively, Virginia may benefit from importing an educated population and have less economic incentive to educate it's own population well.
Yes, their are incentives to educate your own children well, but a Florida retiree may not have any kids or grand kids in state and thus not care about educating people without a direct connection to them.
Those connections and thus incentives become more direct at the national level.
Personally, Common Core standards for all states was a great idea that we will never see again in our lifetime.
I do want all local taxes and property tax to be removed from Educational funding and all funding to be statewide and the same per student across the state. (This might happen in our lifetimes)
"(aging)" is just a remark about the demographics skewing away from children as the economy here stumbles along.
From what I understand having worked with educators the 3rd is the only problem that really impacts results. You don't need a new textbook to study anything about physics math or history below the college level (with the possible exception of certain history topics but even that can be a lesson about history if you want it to be one). They also complained about how administrative decisions made for political reasons (e.g. "We need to be seen using our money on something quantifiable so you're getting new desks" or "We need to look up to date, force technology into your lessons, I don't care how") forced good teachers to perform at a lower level.
Which the article does get around to in the last sentence:
"Increasing the salaries of all teachers in a high-need school district won’t have as much of an impact as identifying high-performing teachers and increasing their salaries."
Good teachers teaching in bad schools get some experience on their resume and jump ship to somewhere better. Wash rinse repeat. If you're good at your job of course you work your way up to some rich district where resources aren't a problem.
In general this is true, but there are some major exceptions. Math is now taught vastly differently than when I learned it. The interesting thing is I did not learn it how it was taught, but internalized it differently and ended up competing in Math Olympiads / number sense and all that fun stuff very successfully. The very cool thing is that math textbooks now teach it in a way closely resembling to how I internalized it.
For instance adding by powers of ten and the nearest ten. What is 29 + 77? You can just change that to 30 + 77 (remembering you now 'owe' one) which can then be changed to 30 + 70 + 7. So we end up with 107 - 1 which is 106. Lots of words, but it's a process that lets you solve most any problem more or less instantly, in your head. It also helps for understanding.
Similarly for multiplication. What's 17 x 19? We can borrow 17 and change that to 17 x 20 which can be recognized as 17 x 2 x 10 which is clearly 340. Since we borrowed 17 we subtract it again using a basic strategy of 340 - 10 - 7 = 323. These sort of thought processes I think also help make math more fun since it's more of a puzzle that a grind. And the logical but abstract thinking involved in figuring out the quickest way to solve the problems also mirrors more the much more advanced mathematics that they will get into in college.
What's your describing is having a good understanding of how to play tricks with numbers to make problems line up with your strengths and preferences. Teaching students that notation and "how" you attack a problem is arbitrary and they can do whatever they want with the numbers as long as they can clean up the mess and get the right answer is far more teacher dependent than curriculum structure dependent.
You need iPads or Chromebooks or whatever they're pushing now
Are there studies about this? What attracts more talent:
a) Pay increase for everyone in an industry. b) Larger pay increases, but limited to the best performers.
Trevor Noah makes a really good point in his autobiography. He recounts the story of someone giving him a CD writer, which enabled him to go into the bootlegging business in post apartheid South Africa. He explains that what poor people need is capital, like that CD writer. You can teach a man to fish, he explains, but if you don’t give him a fishing rod you haven’t done him any good.
On the flip side, though, straight up wealth distribution to the poor has a huge waste factor, though. I work with poor people at my church, and a lot of times they have no idea where their money is even going. They see a predatory letter with scary red letters and they send money to it, even though it's not even a bill! The bills they are getting are for services they aren't even using (expensive cable plan, etc.). Yes, the poor need more money, but they also desperately need mentors and education.
In the Trevor Noah example, it's both having the CD writer, and also knowing how to use it. The former doesn't guarantee the latter.
https://www.tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/archives/2015/07/14/wh...
Industry culture that obstructs identifying and utilizing talent is probably a more concise way to describe the problem as I see it.
That has always baffled me living in America - how poor districts end up being doubly punished because their children also get less funds, and less resources. If anything, shouldn't it be the opposite, if poverty is prevalent, wouldn't that school get more funds? A wealthy district can probably manage and do well for its kids even with less funds because it probably can have less teacher, less time addressing and manages trauma and behavior stemming from growing up poor and everything associated with.
There is an interesting phenomenon at play, I have heard more about "think of the children first" in this country yet when it comes to actions they point in the opposite - "think of children last, think of profits first" basically.
> “How much is spent on schools is not as important as how the money is spent.” For instance, he said, simply increasing the salaries of all teachers in a high-need school district won’t have as much of an impact as identifying high-performing teachers and increasing their salaries.
Throwing wild ideas around -- I think it has something to do with teachers already being burnt out and used to certain patterns of behavior, most likely in response to lack of support, funding, some because classes are too large, regulations, etc. Giving them a raise might not break that pattern and make any difference. I think they'd need to bring in fresh teachers and give them higher salaries to start with.
Fresh doesn't have to be new graduates, could also mean teachers from out of town. Wonder if it makes sense - to provide incentives for teachers to move to other schools. Say if they move they get a higher salary, it would be federally sponsored, and include, generous bonuses and all paid relocation etc.
Thinking about the above, try to remember if you knew a burnt out coworker, or yourself if you were burnt out - would getting a salary bump make that go away? I have not seen it yet. The same is true for other professions I imagine.
This [1] page offers a raw table with PISA, a standardized educational performance test, results across nations. We're now losing to places like Vietnam in Math/Science. This article mentions we spend about $11,000 per student on education. The per capita GDP of Vietnam is $2,305. Their per child spending is, in turn, going to likely be some fraction of that.
It's getting quite silly. This [2] is an interactive page allowing you to compare nations' performance based on OECD PISA scores across the world using a wide array of metrics - click on a country to get details and the ability to compare that country to others. The US problem is not with how much money schools get. It's not even with how much money teachers' get. You can find data on that here [3]. The problem is not money.
So what is the problem? I think that's why people like to just blame money, or the lack thereof. It's easy. Trying to figure out what the actual problem is is going to be extremely difficult. And as political correctness is such a hot trend in the US, some factors cannot even be considered which isn't exactly productive for trying to figure out the most effective solution.
[1] - http://www.businessinsider.com/pisa-worldwide-ranking-of-mat...
[2] - https://www.oecd.org/pisa/
[3] - https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/teachers-salaries.htm
To be more clear, finding that wealthier school districts perform better than poorer school districts does not immediately imply that the problem is money. I've yet to see compelling evidence suggesting that it is, and I think I've provided reasonably compelling evidence suggesting that it is not. To make this even clearer, let's use the same logic to make an absurdly false argument. 'Poor countries tend to do better than rich countries when it comes to training world class runners. Therefore, the problem for the richer countries is that they have too much money to train world class runners.' The statement is so illogical it reads nonsensically, yet if the reverse were true and that richer countries did a better job of producing world class runners, you might have been inclined to agree with that exact same fallacious logic!
Without some citable international performance numbers that are adjusted for 1) purchasing power parity, 2) class parity 3) social services and infrastructure availability and quality (i.e Sweden vs US) 4) education accessibility, this is a suspect claim,and on it's face it is very overgeneralized. Countries and their students are not monoliths.
I'm not advocating that putting more money in the education system alone is a solution, but considering that nations that spend more and those that spend less as a % of GDP get both better and worse results suggests it's not as simple as suggesting that more money won't help.
If a lot more money is going to spent, it ought to be spent to address the root issues in poor communities (unemployment, lack of security, healthcare), whose effects ultimately manifest themselves in the classroom. What's unlikely to help educational outcomes in poor communities in the US is continued divestment and chalking the problem up to "cultural" issues in those communities.
However, as I pointed out elsewhere, if we continue to expect (as we currently do) teachers in poor communities to function as social workers for the problems created by divestment instead of addressing the socioeconomic issues at their root, then we should pay teachers more for providing those services in addition to teaching.
Vietnam is an interesting example, thanks for sharing. Notably, according to [1] it has a centralized state-run public educational system where public schools are directly administered by the government. Vietnam is also an authoritarian, single-party, and nominally communist society. That level of socialist-style centralization is not feasible (or even desired) in most parts of the US, where even at the state level, the government stays relatively removed from the day-to-day administration of the schools.
Vietnam's education system is a complete shit show. Teachers earn scraps leading to a semi-open practice of education related bribery. Resources are all but nonexistent and invariably outdated. Native teachers tend to be poorly educated, whereas foreign teachers are a mix of sexpats and backpackers. And I'm not entirely sure what you are trying to imply with their government, but the nation is not communist. It has a single authoritarian party that oversees a market economy. The only semblances left of communism are an extremely poor people and the complete lack of any freedom of speech. Schools in many cases are practically falling down.
Regardless, the nation somehow is producing even more capable students than the US. When I was young I also went to a incredibly poor urban school. And I also had numerous Vietnamese individuals in my classes who I remain friends with to this day. In an interesting coincidence they too, in spite of enormous adversity of our youth, went on to all do well more than fine. Of course that's completely anecdotal. In looking for demographic data I was completely unsurprised to see Vietnamese well above the median in terms of US median household incomes. [1]
So what's their secret sauce? Whatever it is, it's unlikely to be replicated by just throwing money at the problem anymore than you would manage to turn lead to gold with good intentions and lots of dollars.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
My comment was meant to highlight the disparity between districts. You can pit the best US students against the best students from any country and get excellent rankings. Our worst students are far worse then other developed nations. We need to address the systematic problems in our country that are causing us to value certain students more, and give them better opportunities. All children deserve opportunity.
In school I felt I always worked hard, or was somehow more incentivized for the work than others. The harsh reality, apparent in hindsight, is that I was lazy and it came to me easily - as it does to many people. In teaching you one begins to quickly appreciate that inherent differences between children is absolutely night and day - and these differences emerge even as early as elementary.
These inherent differences are the giant elephant in the room that nobody wants to consider. In my opinion ignoring them and pretending that all we need to do is give more opportunity or money to some schools is doing us all great a disservice. A near majority of the kids in the classes I taught I could personally adopt and give them 24/7 attention and education at home and I suspect they would still fall well below the curve.
What is the solution? I have absolutely none. But at the same time I think that complete and open honesty and assessment is the first step to resolving any problem. When we start with false assumption as its more socially palatable, is it any wonder that we spend all of this money with absolutely nothing to show for it?