It’s the Classroom, Stupid—wait, no, it’s Poverty (sigh):: Blog | PICED - Pacific Islands Center for Educational Development

It’s the Classroom, Stupid—wait, no, it’s Poverty (sigh)

May 13, 2009

NY Times columnist and cultural commentator David Brooks wrote an excellent piece last week—click here to read it. Brooks, I think, gets to the heart of the debate over closing the academic achievement gap. He cites a recent study reporting “enormous” gains in academic achievement by a charter school system in Harlem, NY. Regarding the Harlem charter schools “miracle,” Brooks says:

“Forgive some academic jargon, but the most common education reform ideas — reducing class size, raising teacher pay, enrolling kids in Head Start — produce gains of about 0.1 or 0.2 or 0.3 standard deviations. If you study policy, those are the sorts of improvements you live with every day. Promise Academy produced gains of 1.3 and 1.4 standard deviations.”

The substantial gains in Harlem caught my attention, certainly, but it was this quote, for me, that said it all:

Basically, the no excuses schools pay meticulous attention to behavior and attitudes. They teach students how to look at the person who is talking, how to shake hands. These schools are academically rigorous and college-focused. Promise Academy students who are performing below grade level spent twice as much time in school as other students in New York City. Students who are performing at grade level spend 50 percent more time in school.

Most charter school critiques based on militant practices and racism miss the point Brooks makes in his piece: It’s not about race or even socio-economics —it’s about combating the kind of lethargy and low-level learning that can cripple an inner city classroom in an instant. By the time the average inner-city, at-risk student reaches 9th grade, the deficit isn’t just about test scores or knowledge—it’s about basic intangibles like life skills, coping mechanisms, study habits, classroom etiquette, self-discipline—all things of which their upper middle-class, more wealthy counterparts have more.

Critics counter that poverty as the root cause breeds these social and behavioral deficits. Fix poverty, and you fix that. But that’s small solace for the teacher or principal concerned with the daily reality of educating at-risk students. The end-of-poverty as a cure-all is ultimately an imposing entity with a nebulous end that administrators and educators alike have little or no control over.

And yet those who would abolish traditional public schools in favor of charter schools—despite the significant Harlem gains—would also fall short of their goal. Charter schools hand-pick their students and can change their minds after the fact by removing undesirable or underperforming students—two luxuries regular public schools do not have. Therein lies the rub. All students are entitled to an education, wherever they may fall on the spectrum of behavioral and academic achievement.

Charter schools succeed exactly because they find a group of committed students and parents who buy into a shared culture and vision. Those students who habitually get called into the principal’s office, miss class, and fail tests—for whatever reasons—are typically unable to thrive in charter school environments because they fall outside that select circle of families who seem to get it. The divide is vast between a family that not only gets their child into a charter school but supports them and nurtures them throughout their academic careers and a family (or surrogate family) that either literally or figuratively abandons a child to fend for his or her own self.

While academics engage in a debate that essentially amounts to chicken-or-the-egg semantics, our most disadvantaged students continue to flounder academically, socially, and ultimately, in life. Whatever lasting answers we arrive at will be found in combining the best that charter schools have to offer with the spirit of equal education for all that should—but doesn’t always—exemplify the American public education.

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