The data tells a different story
Lonnie Palmer
Math and science teacher, school principal, assistant superintendent for secondary instruction, school superintendent
Real estate agents – and anyone in the Albany, NY, area -- will tell you Loudonville Elementary School, which is adjacent to Arbor Hill Elementary (one of the schools in the Albany School District where I was superintendent) is one of the best schools in the Capital Region, superior to the rest.
But the data tells a different story. It shows how the mostly white affluent suburban Loudonville K-5 elementary school is no more effective than the nearby mostly black K-5 Arbor Hill urban school. Both are within close range of their predicted scores based on their levels of student poverty. (See the scatterplot graph below.) Both schools are performing very close to their predicted line performance and at about an average level in comparison to comparable peer schools.
It’s an important distinction to make: test scores that don’t consider poverty can’t accurately gauge the success of a school. I suspected as much when I was superintendent of the Albany City School District, so I did the math myself and factored in the percentage of free and reduced lunch eligible students to accurately measure how well our elementary schools were doing.
The New York State Education Department’s accepted definition of a “good” school is flawed. Despite what we read in the newspaper: test performance alone is not sophisticated enough to evaluate a school’s performance. It’s on par with comparing a struggling inner-city hospital to the Mayo Clinic, apples to oranges. They have a completely different clientele and vastly different resources. Despite what we read in the newspaper: test performance alone is not sophisticated enough to evaluate a school’s performance.
The state’s flawed singular system for measuring performance makes it impossible to know which high poverty schools are performing well so we can’t duplicate what they’re doing in other high poverty schools. The same can be said for low poverty schools in wealthier neighborhoods.
So, what makes a “good school” good?
When my son Jason graduated from high school as his class’s valedictorian, a local charity sponsored a recognition dinner for all the regional high school valedictorians and salutatorians. The students were asked to bring their parents and one teacher who they saw as the most influential in their school success.
The teachers’ spouses were also invited to attend the dinner, which attracted a lot of media coverage.
While most of the students invited teachers from their high school years, my son invited his second-grade teacher from Krieger Elementary School in Poughkeepsie, NY, Virginia James.
In 1977, Krieger Elementary School’s free and reduced-price lunch numbers were on the rise because of a new nearby housing project that was home to a lower income, primarily minority population.
Ms. James, an experienced and very effective teacher, immediately diagnosed my son as having every educational advantage a second grader could possibly have. He learned to read before he arrived in elementary school, he loved to do his own “science research”, and he was able to work independently.
She provided him with all the right independent learning opportunities in a corner of her classroom for the entire year. She encouraged him, provided the right level of criticism and challenge and rewarded him with enough time and attention that he flourished.
She also knew when and how to involve him in whole group activities with the rest of his second-grade class to help him develop his social skills. And while she was doing this for my son, she was doing the same kind of high-quality teaching with 20-plus other students with skills, attitudes and motivations that ran the gamut.
My son understood after 13 years in K-12 school that Ms. James was an exceptional teacher.
I’m aware that such teachers exist, but it’s unrealistic to think that we can put an exceptional teacher like Ms. James in every classroom. It’s just not going to happen.
Educational improvements that rely on having exceptional teachers in every classroom to carry them out will probably fail. We should not and cannot tolerate incompetent or weak teachers. But even if we do our very best and remove every single incompetent teacher from our classrooms, and we improve the performance of every single weak teacher, we’ll still have exceptional teachers in only a few classrooms.
All teachers and principals have tough jobs, and all do those impossibly challenging jobs imperfectly. Teachers who teach mostly children from poverty have a much harder job than those who see only a few poverty students in their classrooms.[i] And as the poverty student numbers increase, the challenging job of teaching will become more challenging in a predictable rapidly expanding geometric progression, not unlike the failure rate.
Ms. James was an exceptional teacher because she could diagnose the entire range of student needs in her classroom, plan instruction and successfully implement a complicated, multi-faceted instructional plan with sound classroom management, good student rapport and a dash of creativity that my son remembered.
Good and very good teachers struggle with this tall order, no matter how many disadvantaged students they have in their classroom. As poverty numbers increase, teachers face higher numbers of students who struggle, and those teachers must work more hours to get those students to proficiency. Their planning becomes more complex, and the odds of their being able to effectively implement their complex plans become lower regardless of their skill level.
Putting more students from poverty in teachers’ classrooms would make those teachers more likely to fail. And by many international measures a growing segment of U.S. children grow up in less-than-ideal economic circumstances.[ii]
In high poverty classrooms, there are more students who need one-on-one tutoring and encouragement[iii], while there also are several students in these same high poverty classrooms who need more challenging tasks and encouragement. Is it hard to understand why many teachers and principals in high poverty schools end their workdays feeling overwhelmed? Why so many quit the profession after a few years?[iv]
Is it also hard to understand why so many effective teachers escape urban and rural high poverty schools as soon as they can get hired for a teaching job in a less diverse suburban school?[v]
No matter how hard they work and how effective these teachers and principals are in their efforts they must accept the fact that statistically far too many of their students will not succeed on standardized tests or attend college or even graduate from high school.[vi] It’s discouraging and difficult work.
Further complicating this issue is some alarming data. In 1989, 32 percent of the students in U.S. schools qualified for free or reduced-priced lunches. And last time I calculated (in 2013), 51 percent qualified. (Note: special increases in aid to low-income families with children during Covid temporarily reduced these numbers dramatically. But that aid has ended.) While some of this increase was attributable to the recession of 2008-10 and will hopefully decline over time, increasing income inequality in the U.S., globalization of our economy and advances in technology will continue to provide a push toward greater student poverty in our schools.[vii]
An expanded safety net put in place in the U.S. since the 1960s has helped reduce the impact of poverty on children[viii], but these offsets are insufficient to help those schools and classrooms overwhelmed with children from poverty.
In 1960, 9 percent of families with children under age 18 were headed by a single parent. In 2008, the number was 32 percent, and the projections are that by 2030 this number will be more than 40 percent.[ix][x] [xi]
While many single parents do a great job with their children, they are facing an uphill battle and long odds.
And the segregation of our schools by ethnicity and poverty also has increased. In 2016, 40 percent of poor, minority students attended a school where less than 10 percent of the population is white.[xii]
Real estate agents and banks have encouraged segregated housing patterns with red-lining and mortgage underwriting procedures that have reinforced economic and ethnic segregation for most urban and many nearby diverse suburban school districts.[xiii]
The result: more and more teachers are facing more high poverty students in their classrooms, and many teach poverty and minority children exclusively.[xiv]
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And finally, for a select few mainly high poverty school districts we brought in “competition” in the form of charter schools, charter schools established with no regard for the impact they would have on the students remaining in traditional district schools.
The school administrators, employees and their unions and school board members in high poverty school districts in many cases contributed significantly to the mess they find themselves in now. For decades they resisted the real changes that might have produced academic improvement.
They protected underperforming teachers and administrators who should have been fired. They wasted money on ever increasing teacher, support staff and administrator salaries and benefit costs in strong public union states, while ignoring many common-sense financial savings opportunities available to them. And they whined incessantly about the difficulty of their jobs in the process adding immeasurably to their rapidly declining public image.
THE END
[i] Kimberly G. Noble, “How poverty affects children’s brains,” The Washington Post, October 2, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/no-poor-child-left-behind/2015/10/02/df86c56e-4048-11e5-9561-4b3dc93e3b9a_story.html?postshare=6721444002009734
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[ii] Robert Samuelson, “Are we No. 1? It depends,” The Washington Post, October 21, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/are-we-no-1-it-depends/2015/10/21/6d7f997c-7807-11e5-b9c1-f03c48c96ac2_story.html
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[iii] David Bornstein, “Overcoming Poverty’s Damage to Learning,” The New York Times, April 17, 2015, https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/17/overcoming-povertys-damage-to-learning/?emc=edit_tnt_20150417&nlid=47562199&tntemail0=y
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[iv] Dian Schaffhauser, “The Problem Isn't Teacher Recruiting; It's Retention,” The Journal, July 17, 2014, https://thejournal.com/articles/2014/07/17/the-problem-isnt-teacher-recruiting-its-retention.aspx
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[v] Marlene Sokol, “High-poverty schools continue to wear on teachers, surveys show,” Tampa Bay Times, May 24,2015, https://www.tampabay.com/news/education/k12/high-poverty-schools-continue-to-wear-on-teachers-surveys-show/2230928
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[vi] Jim Tankersley, “High inequality makes poor kids drop out more,” The Washington Post, March 10, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/10/high-inequality-makes-poor-kids-drop-out-more/?postshare=5801457914836066&tid=ss_mail
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[vii] Motoko Rich, “Percentage of Poor Students in Public Schools Rises,” The New York Times, January 16, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/17/us/school-poverty-study-southern-education-foundation.html
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[viii] Brad Plumer, “Here’s how the safety net has — and hasn’t — reduced poverty in the U.S.,” The Washington Post, December 10, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/12/10/heres-how-the-safety-net-has-and-hasnt-reduced-poverty-in-the-u-s/
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[ix] Kirsten Andersen, “The number of US children living in single-parent homes has nearly doubled in 50 years: Census data,” LifesiteNews.com , January 4, 2013, https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/the-number-of-children-living-in-single-parent-homes-has-nearly-doubled-in
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[x] Aparna Mathur, Had Fu and Peter Hansen, “The Mysterious and Alarming Rise of Single Parenthood in America,” The Atlantic, September 3, 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/09/the-mysterious-and-alarming-rise-of-single-parenthood-in-america/279203/
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[xi] Emily Badger, “The unbelievable rise of single motherhood in America over the last 50 years,” The Washington Post, December 18, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/12/18/the-unbelievable-rise-of-single-motherhood-in-america-over-the-last-50-years/
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[xii] Dexter Mullins, “Six decades after Brown ruling, US schools still segregated,” Aljazeera America, September 25, 2013, https://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/9/25/56-years-afterlittlerockusschoolssegregatedbyraceandclass.html
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[xiii] Richard Rothstein, “Segregated Housing, Segregated Schools,” Education Week, March 25, 2014, https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/03/26/26rothstein_ep.h33.html
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[xiv] Emma Brown, “On the anniversary of Brown v. Board, new evidence that U.S. schools are resegregating,” The Washington Post, May 17, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2016/05/17/on-the-anniversary-of-brown-v-board-new-evidence-that-u-s-schools-are-resegregating/?tid=ss_mail
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