James Harvey of the National Superintendents Roundtable has provided some valuable insights into the international education rankings that are so often used to bash the U.S.
In addition to some important context to the numbers, Harvey emphasizes the challenges that poverty now present to American schools.
Harvey is right about the situation of families and students and right about the challenge. Anyone who has been on the earth for a while and paying attention, and/or anyone who has read the first part of Paul Tough’s excellent How Children Learn, will understand the extraordinary hurdles that poverty places in front of educational success.
Harvey, and many others, argue that we need to rethink some of the things our schools do to better cope with high levels of poverty. And, most people familiar with the problem assert that current funding levels won’t be sufficient to do what has to be done, even after needed corrections are made.
I agree with both of these points. We do need some refocusing and we definitely need more funding. Where I diverge from Harvey and others, however, is that I don’t believe that achieving either of these will be even close to sufficient if our goal is pulling large numbers of children out of poverty and into successful, knowledge economy employment.
There’s now a lot of evidence that poverty creates major psychological barriers to education. In many cases, though not all, low-income people fail to convince their children that education is critical and, far more important, fail to inculcate a belief that anyone can be a successful learner with appropriate effort and focus.
Indeed it seems that parents in low-income families generally inculcate negative attitudes about educational ability—even though they are likely tell pollsters something different.
These low-income parents aren’t deliberately doing something bad to their children. Rather, they’re simply reflecting the culture they themselves grew up in--the thinking that “people like us don’t do well in school.” That’s not a deliberate choice that anyone has made, it’s an inherited belief based on experience. Cultural chains of this kind are very hard to break.
It doesn’t seem likely that schools alone will be able to pull more than a small percentage of children out of their fatalistic cages, the deeply held if not directly articulated belief that “I can’t do that.”
The inability to affect fatalism isn’t an absolute. Schools can do many things and a great school can certainly change the futures of some of its students. When that happens, though, in my experience it’s not because of curriculum or teacher preparation. It’s almost always because of teacher personality. We all know that there are charismatic people who can break through the toughest shells (at least temporarily).
But, in addition to all the other things we’re asking of teachers, with so little in return, can we reasonably expect them all to be charismatic? I say “all,” because students who are turned on by one teacher will sink back into the culture if that excitement isn’t maintained year to year.
If we posit that we can’t expect every teacher to have a dynamic personality, an aura capable of turning fatalism to optimism, then I think you have to agree that schools alone aren’t the answer.
Sadly, it’s also certain that we’re not going to improve the conditions of poverty any time soon. The current political environment suggests that, if anything, the situation will get worse (and of course that goes for school funding, as well).
The only alternative in my view is to start the difficult work of changing the culture. That will be tough because it can’t be done through mass media; only peer to peer communications are going to work. We’ve started down that path in South Carolina with Education Success Circles. Time will tell how well that works.
