Schools, already under intense pressure to deliver better test results and meet more rigorous standards, face the doubly difficult task of trying to raise the achievement of poor children so that they approach the same level as their more affluent peers....
Many Republicans also think that the government ought to give tax dollars to low-income families to use as vouchers for private-school tuition, believing that is a better alternative to public schools....
The report comes as Congress begins debate about rewriting the country’s main federal education law, first passed as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty” and designed to help states educate poor children.
January 17, 2015
"For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families..."
"... according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound implications for the nation...."
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Well, clearly things have improved since LBJ gave us the great society.. Let's double down.
Ah yes, the fabled "War on Poverty." We can see how well THAT has turned out, yessiree..
Poverty is when you can't walk to school in the snow because you do not have any shoes.
What Jake said.
Schools, already under intense pressure to deliver better test results and meet more rigorous standards. . .
If one is going to use 'test results' as a proxy for 'fitness for a self-sustaining life in a civil society' (as should be the general goal) then one better make DAMN sure the test is crafted to do just that.
I'm suspicious, though, that the intention of the actors is more on the lines of: nearly any 'approved' test will do - just get the '% passed' metrics so I keep my job.
Ah, yes -- pass a new law, spend more money, require different tests, and soon enough schools will "deliver better test results and meet more rigorous standards" and have poor kids "approach the same level as their more affluent peers." Sure.
Looks to be a BS "analysis" defining "low-income" based on eligibility for free and reduced price lunches, which in many cases would include children most of us would not deem poor.
What is the goal of the analysis?
Follow the money.
The schools can't do it. The teacher unions fight fang and claw to keep the worst teachers in the school system, and bad principals work to get rid of the best teachers. Those of us who can, take our kids out. Been there. Seen it. It's what's real.
I was in favor of school vouchers, until I talked to a parent of kids in a fairly successful school.
The problem is that a lot of successful schools are driven by parent involvement, and a large part of the schools success.
With vouchers, there is no parental involvement from those recipients.
Not a fault of the children, or even necessarily the parents, if they live a good distance away. But it certainly waters down the ability for the school to maintain its success.
In other words, successful education is not borne from government involvement.
Not really true,if you trust Bob Somerby's analysis at Daily Howler.
Part of the issue is that they now declare a student "Low Income" if they're below the median family income. And people w/o kids and empty nesters tend to earn more than couples with kids, since one spouse often either stays home or takes a less demanding job to raise kids. Plus, people with kids in the house look even poorer b/c they're dividing the income among 3 or more people instead of among 2.
It's like WIC. You basically have to be a doctor married to a lawyer not to qualify for this 'low income' program in most of the country.
Heck, my kids have never gone hungry a day in their lives, but if they went to school, we'd be a "Title 1" family and get free lunch.
Many Republicans also think that the government ought to give tax dollars to low-income families to use as vouchers for private-school tuition, believing that is a better alternative to public schools....
Static analysis. The real idea is that both public and private school options will improve more quickly over time if you instill competition for those dollars among providers.
In the interim, what's the risk: that some kids might instead fall through some cracks in the private system rather than the government system?
Why look back again after another generation to bemoan that the government anti-poverty delivery system failed to improve?
The exception that proves the rule that correlation does not equal causation.
... the doubly difficult task of trying to raise the achievement of poor children so that they approach the same level as their more affluent peers...
Poverty is not the cause of low achievement. Poverty is a by-product of the same dysfunctional family environment that produces low achievement. (OK, I'm painting with a broad brush...)
As a serious question posed to Althouse and commenters: Where exactly does the federal government find it's power to regulate education?
I get that they take the extortionary stance of "hey we will give you this money if you do X"...
But as the department of education has grown in scope and power, it appears nationally we've struggled more. And yet the dept of ed doesn't appear to have any inherent constitutional basis. Seems like abolishing it would be a good place to start at the federal level.
I'm a few years from having to really dig into the school issue myself. Not looking forward to it.
Read a book on this, which I briefly summarized (and intend to flesh out later) at the ol' blog:
http://janetheactuary.blogspot.com/2015/01/from-bookshelf-schoolhouses-courthouses.html
Lots of documentation that you can spend massive amounts of money without anything to show for it, if that's all you do is spend money and the underlying issues are still there.
Easily fixed, just convince wealthy women to have more children.
The stats can quickly be improved.
As for what makes a better school - a school full of intelligent kids. A school full of stupid kids can be operated competently and make the most of the material they have to work with, but there is only so much that they can do. And nearly all kids, intelligent or stupid, benefit more from being with intelligent kids than any improvement in input factors. The prime strategic asset in improving schools is the supply of intelligent kids. This has been known since Coleman in the 1960's.
Fundamentally transformed! Now the masses can be turned into little Marxists. Che Day! Viva Fidel!
I voted for Johnny Mac!
“We have to think about how to give these kids a meaningful education,” [Michael A. Rebell of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College at Columbia University] said. “We have to give them quality teachers, small class sizes, up-to-date equipment. But in addition, if we’re serious, we have to do things that overcome the damages of poverty. We have to meet their health needs, their mental health needs, after-school programs, summer programs, parent engagement, early-childhood services. These are the so-called wraparound services. Some people think of them as add-ons. They’re not. They’re imperative.”
Lol. Jesus. Sounds like a bunch of wordy code for "hey, what we really need to do is take poor children away from their parents and hand them over to people who can raise them properly".
Hey, how 'bout we stop massively subsidizing the reproduction of people who can't even fulfill the rock-bottom minimal requirement of "parent engagement"? Importing poverty hand-over-fist might have a wee bit to do with those deteriorating metrics, too.
And oh yeah, how 'bout we check whether things like "early childhood intervention" actually, ya know, work before throwing billions more borrowed dollars at them? These people are still pushing Head Start, as if it's a tried-and-true solution that's just a little short of funding.
Public schools fail for one very basic reason - they are run by the government. And have been long enough that they have been captured by the (unionized) government workers working there. No matter how much they claim that the schools are being run for the benefit of the students, the reality is just the opposite - the public schools are run primarily for the benefit of the employees.
Instinctively, we all pretty much know this, but the left, beholden to govt employees for political power, publically dense it. And young progressives sometimes don't have the life experiences yet to understand the corruption of political capture yet. But watch where they send their own kids to school, and very often for the ruling elites in this country, it isn't public schools.
There are serious problems with the government's definition of poverty. It is not an absolute measure of a person's standard of living, but rather a comparasion of relative wealth between those at the top of the economy, and those at the bottom.
If you do an objective examination of people's standard of living, people's lives have improved immensely since LBJ's time. Most "poor" families have big screen TVs, cars, Ipods, etc.
The problem with "poverty" and the schools is that those communities produce the most intentional non-learners, and promote the idea of "acting White" to bully the successful.
"But as the department of education has grown in scope and power, it appears nationally we've struggled more. "
I blame Terrence Bell. Reagan gave him the task of shutting down Jimmy Carter's Department of Education and he did the opposite.
illegal immigrants can't really do private school, can they?
Fun fact: Michigan, to my knowledge, has the biggest "voucher-like" experiment going. Not vouchers per se, they can't be used for religious schools, but ready approval of charter schools, and what they call "schools of choice."
I tried to look into this a while back, but couldn't find any kind of assessment of how it was all working. Maybe it's all behind academic paywalls.
details here:
http://janetheactuary.blogspot.com/2014/09/back-from-michigan-part-3-schools-of.html
(Sorry for the un-html'd link. have to run.)
Gahrie: There are serious problems with the government's definition of poverty.
"Poverty" in this context is just being used as a euphemism for "black and Hispanic". Quibbling about whether these students are really poor isn't going to move the elephant.
Bruce Hayden: Public schools fail for one very basic reason - they are run by the government.
No, they don't. "Government run" public schools work and have worked just fine for some student populations.
And have been long enough that they have been captured by the (unionized) government workers working there.
Educrats and teachers' unions may be parasites, but getting rid of them isn't going to magically transform whole populations of "at risk" students into good students.
We keep raising the poverty minimum. Nowadays the lower middle class is "poor".
So naturally a higher percentage of students is poor. Some day we'll reach Nirvana, where everyone is poor.
Looks to be a BS "analysis" defining "low-income" based on eligibility for free and reduced price lunches, which in many cases would include children most of us would not deem poor.
Yep, only 10% of US kids are in private schools, so to believe this analysis, we also have to believe that ~45% of all K12 students in the U.S. are from poor families. Which is obviously false.
In order of impact on the students:
1) parent involvement or lack thereof.
2) Schools inability to discipline/fail students
3) Teachers - because teachers teach a new group of students every year, the poor teachers have a significantly disproportionate impact. IMO far outweighing the disproportionate impact of excellent teachers. (Even if the numbers are the same.)
4) Government micromanagement.
5) Poor administration, particularly of funding
I am not in favor of vouchers as that is fundamentally unfair. Taxes already go to public schools that are established. However, I am open to the discussion of abolishing public education altogether and reducing our taxes.
With vouchers, there is no parental involvement from those recipients.
Not a fault of the children, or even necessarily the parents, if they live a good distance away. But it certainly waters down the ability for the school to maintain its success.
The families that would take the vouchers DO care about their children's education. They will be involved. Your friends' are mistaken.
The stupid party will be stupid again. Is it the schools or the entitlement payments that keep kids stupid?
Someone once wrote an article on KY's rules which pay out more bennies to families whose kids can't read, etc.
Move those funds to the schools especially since the parents aren't feeding their kids.
There more than one way to skin this cat.
Money is neither the issue nor the solution. The problem begins at home, continues with the community, and ends with a corrupt school district (e.g. Atlanta). Money may, in fact, be the problem.
These stats are a little ridiculous.
Except for back East, (where per pupil spending is the highest), the default for every middle American family is to send their kids to a public school (charters count as public schools too).
As Deirdre Mundy alluded to as well, the free or reduced rate is not a telltale sign of poverty. I know families living in 3000 sq ft. McMansions that qualify for reduced lunch. Trust me, they're not poor.
Finally, how much of this is a reflection of "growing income inequality" and how much of it is a reflection of birthrates versus the well off and the lower classes?
Obamacare raised the poverty level by twice or more to compensate for liberal fiscal policies. Did the definition of "low-income" change in just that instance or generally?
Anglelyne said...
Bruce Hayden: Public schools fail for one very basic reason - they are run by the government.
No, they don't. "Government run" public schools work and have worked just fine for some student populations.
Not often I agree with Anglelyne but I agree with her on this one. My kids all went or go to public schools. Kids get out of school what they put in.
One of the arguments for bringing conscription back is that it was a great equalizer. Much the same is true for public schools. I went to a public school in an area with large disparities in incomes, it was a true education.
"Blogger buwaya puti said...
Easily fixed, just convince wealthy women to have more children."
Dude, I know you're funnin' us but you wouldn't believe how true this is. The ferocious energies of a handful of middle/upper-middle class Queen Bees with time and some money to commit, can transform a school for the better. Just stay out of their way and do what they tell you.
If you are deliberately keeping your kid stupid to get the cash, then it is (partially) about the money. What would happen if that incentive was removed?
What the stupid party should do is let the females be the face of this. We are looking forward to working ya dad yada, open up the program rules change, revoke some and put more stringent requirements and reporting in. Like tax returns and yearly review Interview audit and tax return by the local/state to qualify because it's only fair those who can afford to pay the full Lunch price do so. We need to free up money for those who truly need it and loosen provider rules. And get rid of Michelle's stupid rules.
But the stupid party is stupid and won't.
Well, if you import a bunch of immigrants, among them a lot of immigrant children, this is the expected result.
No one should be surprised by this - and the wave of immigration is also being used to keep wages much lower than they would be otherwise for a broad section of the population, so expect more of the same.
It's often seemed to me that, given the higher birthrates for the low/moderate income population (though it's hard to find hard stats), and the large numbers of low-skill immigrants we import, we ought to pat ourselves to the extent, such as it may be, that we don't fall even further behind, because a level poverty rate (or low/moderate-income rate) is actually a sign that at least some proportion of these kids are upwardly mobile.
TRILLIONS and TRILLIONS of dollars spent by politicians have not materially changed the poverty rate. But Leftists feel good about themselves.
The "study's" conclusion is very wrong, even fraudulent. They do NOT look at the number of school children in poverty. "The Southern Education Foundation reports that 51 percent of students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade in the 2012-2013 school year were eligible for the federal program that provides free and reduced-price lunches."
Eligibility for reduced-price lunches goes up to 185% of the federal poverty line. Districts can even decide they want to provide free or reduced-price lunches to everyone without even trying to determine need.
The National Center for Education Statistics (part of the federal Department of Education) says, "In 2012, approximately 21 percent of school-age children in the United States were in families living in poverty."
A nice graph "Percentage of Children Living Below Selected Poverty Thresholds, Selected Years, 1959-2013" can be found at
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/01/no-a-majority-of-us-public-school-students-are-not-in-poverty.html
The Cracker Emcee:
Exactly. While men performed as taxable assets of the state, it was women who developed the family and community. Each served their nation in equal but different roles. That changed with the feminist revolution. Now we have professional community organizers who have other goals and underperform mothers and wives in every meaningful measure.
Deirdre Mundy wrote -
"Part of the issue is that they now declare a student "Low Income" if they're below the median family income."
And the article states that 51% of kids come from "low Income" families.
Now THAT's funny! I don't know if Deirdre is correct, and yes there are plenty of caveats to comparing those numbers one to one. But someone needs to look up the definition of "median."
We don't need a new law, we need to repeal the law of averages.
Hey, guess what. Rich people have nicer stuff than poor people.
Public education is like public transportation. Better than nothing, but not very good. Anyone who can afford it buys their own, private transportation, because it takes you where you want to go, when you want to go there.
The map tells you all you need to know about the origin of the issue. Look south.
Lindsey,
It tells you no such thing.
Sorry.
Here is something worth thinking about, especially for those who advocate vouchers, and using them for private schools. I don't know where the rest of you live, but in my town the private schools and the parochial schools are already filled to the brim.
A lot of them are on properties that, deemed by the city, can only hold a defined number of students. If you have vouchers, where are those kids going to go to school??? No in my town. No rooms. I would think that this is not uncommon for many medium sized cities.
I read once a week to a parochial school in an underserved area of Los Angeles County. Even that school is filled, no room for any more students. Not enough teachers,not even enough classroom space.
It is a conundrum.
Vicki from Pasadena
Vicki from Pasadena
Tie the welfare benefits of the parents to the kid's educational accomplishments and lets see if there is a significant increase in parental involvement.
Just yesterday my 8th grade daughter received an invitation to apply to our district's university preparatory program within the large high school, comprised of rigorous small classes while at the high school and then the opportunity to take courses at the local university and earn dual credit.
She's a bright (skipped a grade and is at the top of her class in the gifted STEM track at her junior high) white kid from an upper middle class family with married, college-educated parents, and yet, and yet, from the letter:
"Students who will be the first in their families to attend college, who are economically disadvantaged, who are defined as 'at risk' and who are English language learners will be considered with priority."
Well isn't that special. Hope that they can squeeze my daughter, who is actually qualified for the program, in there with the kids given a boost so that educrats somewhere can give themselves gold stars for improving their metrics.
This is an article from 2010 about the school lunch program used for the numbers in the Post article.
http://educationnext.org/fraud-in-the-lunchroom/
I have my doubts things have improved since 2010 in terms of program integrity.
The capacity of parochial schools to expand depends very much on the location, and the limiting factor is usually available real estate. Places where the Catholic church or its various orders still owns much property permit much expansion. Most older central cities that had large Irish and Italian populations do.
New York for instance, has large spare capacity. San Francisco too, there are empty parochial school sites all over. Not coincidentally most of these central cities are also places with minority populations that could greatly benefit from Catholic education. That's why the Archbishop of NY offered to take as many kids as applied, given a voucher. This was a serious, realistic offer.
I am not surprised about LA and its region being tight, but that's not the usual situation.
Vicki from Pasadena, my tax-collecting school districts runs deeply positive on revenues. It has bought land on which everyone knows it will never build a school. Corn and soy crops grow there.
The school district and the township are in a tax-collecting and zoning war with each other.
And it's all in the black. There's too much money coming in, so they hoard it and spend it stupidly.
Good government would (1) reduce taxes and (2) sell the land responsibly. That's not gonna happen, especially because our schools can hide behind the fact that our rural/suburban schools are far better and cheaper than those in the big city nearby.
The lesson in the end is: government-run schools suck.
Hey, I was told that the reason to promote abortion on demand was to reduce the number of children from poor (and "dark-skinned") families. You mean it hasn't worked? Shoot, what do we do now?
I am not a robot.
A Lake Wobegone style analysis.
If the kids are poor how is a new pre school program going to help their parents? They, after all, are the cause of their children's poverty. I would think the first thing to advocate for would be expanded job opportunities for the parents.
@stlcdr Most anecdotes I have seen about voucher parents indicate that they are more involved with their kids' schooling. That's why they compete for the vouchers in the first place.
As for rich women breeding more, I'm being serious and direct. Its not about the parents themselves, though some parents are prone to entertain such vain ideas. Activist parents are not really needed, they are useful but marginal to school effectiveness. Even in cases where active parents organize funding of extra programs such as music and foreign languages. These things are a side effect really.
Whats of real value to the rest of the children are their own children.
Cubanbob makes a great suggestion:
"Tie the welfare benefits of the parents to the kid's educational accomplishments and lets see if there is a significant increase in parental involvement."
That's a good one. They won't even stop them from buying pot and strippers.
I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.
How many millions of illegals have put us over that 'for the first time' line?
Given that a super-majority of Americans are top 1% income in the world and nearly every American is top 5% it is hard to find the people who live in poverty. The average impoverished family has multiple vehicles and even more TV's.
About that "'For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families...'" :
I am intrigued (and for very, very good reason, I can assure you, and make no mistake about that). What does "at least 50 years" mean? I'd love that to be pinpointed. It should be, if we're going to embark upon comparisons. (Especially if both sides of our current political equations are going to continue to yap'n'yell re: ed 'n' all)
I think that people forget how different schools were, from place to place.
I'm not going to share everything about my schooling, from start to finish, much less what I think about all of that.
But what I will share is that from 1st through 4th grades, I attended Lincoln Elementary School in Monmouth, IL.
There was no cafeteria, for example.
We walked back and forth to school *twice" a day, just sayin'.
I kid you not, and make no mistake about it.
For you folks who despise the notion of college teachers, I will give you this explanation:
This was my father's first college teaching job. He taught music at Monmouth College from 1967-1971. (It was in August of 1971 that our family moved to Delaware because my dad got hired at the University of Delaware, in the Music Department).
To this day, I still think that it's odd that there was a school-wide celebration when milk-machines got put into my elementary school, I think in my 2nd grade, but it could have been 3rd grade. I don't remember the exact time anymore. I do remember that it was a big deal, and that, thereafter, we got to "milk" those tubes sticking out of those machines into those small, conical cups twice a day, at specific intervals, and had to drink the result as quickly as possible, so as to not to take too much time from classes.
I mean, y'all need to understand: The schedule was already tight and (by East Coast Standards, about which I learned shortly thereafter) odd. Lunch break was longer than an hour (though not all that much longer), because we all had to trot home to grab a bite and then trot right back to school for the afternoon part of school.
I will say, all that trotting kept us fit! Which was a good thing, given that, as with the music teacher and the art teacher, the PE teacher was also shared amongst other schools. so, just 1-2 times a week.
We did get recess, though, twice a day,at least briefly! Awesome.
By the way, I'm not lying about that trot. Of course, it wasn't uphill both ways (LOL, ahem). But it was indeed a trot, and I just went up and mapped the distance between my home there and my elementary school there.
Yeah, ya betcha, it was a trot, for sure, at lunchtime. Easier in the morning (because one could always leave earlier: so, there was some control there), and blissfully leisurely at the end of the day. That lunchtime thang, though, a trot it was: often enough, a quick slurping of a soup and a half-sandwich to eat on the way of the trot back.
My mom didn't let me go the most direct ways. I had to go the longest way. (Eh, so smack me: I truly believed, when I so young, that my mom and/or my dad would always know if I cheated/disobeyed.) So, more akin to 9/10ths of a mile each way, 4x a day, rather than 8/10ths.
Jeez. Too obedient an elementary child, was I. If I had it to do over... .
"For the first time in 50 years................."
Two thoughts.
So much for "the economy is improving" meme.
Aren't things like state and federally funded school lunch and after school activities linked to haw many students are at the poverty level?
The students at the poverty level, the more "free stuff" a school gets.
extra.
If teacher salaries were the way out of this Chicago Public Schools would have the highest graduation rate in the country.
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