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Fall 2011 Issue of PATHWAYS A magazine on poverty, inequality, and social policy Trends in poverty and inequality: Periodic reports on key poverty and inequality indicators Cutting-edge research: Concise summaries of research that is changing how we understand the sources and consequences of poverty and inequality Bold new visions: Must-read discussions of how labor market, poverty, and inequality policy might be rethought and changed Debates: Leading scholars and policymakers weigh in on the crucial poverty and inequality questions of our time

If many so-called education reformers really want to close the student achievement gap, they should direct their fire away from public school educators and take aim at the real issue-poverty. This was the consensus of a panel of policy advocates and academics that convened recently on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. to discuss the impact of poverty on student learning over the past 40 years. The panelists presented data that showed the current state of student achievement and discussed what changes needed to be made to address the needs of students and schools in low socio-economic areas.

Smiley & West take to the road on a 15-city nationwide tour to highlight an invisible issue in Washington's halls of power - poverty in America. The Great Recession has left 1 in 7 Americans living in poverty with unemployment in many communities still on the rise. The war on poverty is the greatest policy failure in our society. Smiley & West will share the stories of real Americans, free of punditry and spin, in the hopes of changing government policy in the direction of justice and equality.

"...The black-white gap was closing because, thanks in part to Johnson's War on Poverty, segregation was decreasing in the United States. The progress stopped because neo-liberal approaches to policy focused on school and market variables and not any longer on social and civil variables. Segregation increased. Today, many policy makers and educators do not see pooling or unpooling poverty as "reading variables" like phonemic awareness or comprehension strategies. But the truth of the matter -- and it is an expensive truth to ignore -- is that school is not separate from society, and that ceasing to pool poverty is the key variable to undoing the black-white gap, as well as the gap between rich and poor children more generally. "

"NJ Spotlight today posted a story on upcoming Task Force deliberations and public hearings over whether the state should continue to target funding in its school finance formula to local districts on the basis of counts of children qualifying for free or reduced priced lunch.  That is, kids from families who fall below the 185% income threshold for poverty. The basic assumption behind targeting additional resources to higher poverty schools and districts is that high need districts can leverage the additional resources to implement strategies that help to improve various outcomes for children at risk. "

While the heightened attention paid to education policy, exemplified by federal policies such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, is a positive signal that the public and policymakers are eager to address the problems at hand, many of the "reforms" miss the mark. Yes, education is a way out of poverty -- but poverty is also a hindrance to education. As such, addressing in-school factors in a vacuum -- with no consideration of the problems facing the wider community -- cannot do enough to improve educational outcomes or to narrow the achievement gap between low-income students and their wealthier peers.

While it might seem encouraging for education and civil rights leaders to assert that poverty isn't an obstacle to higher student achievement, the evidence does not support such claims. Over 50 years, numerous studies have documented how poverty and related social conditions - such as lack of access to health care, early childhood education and stable housing - affect child development and student achievement.

Current U.S. policy initiatives to improve the U.S. education system, including No Child Left Behind, test-based evaluation of teachers and the promotion of competition, are misguided because they either deny or set to the side a basic body of evidence documenting that students from disadvantaged households on average perform less well in school than those from more advantaged families. Because these policy initiatives do not directly address the educational  challenges experienced by disadvantaged students, they have contributed little -- and are not likely to contribute much  in the future -- to raising overall student achievement or to reducing achievement and educational attainment gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students. Moreover, such policies have the potential to do serious harm. Addressing the educational challenges faced by children from disadvantaged families will require a broader and bolder approach to education policy than the recent efforts to reform schools.

"...For those involved in policy matters, this book will, if you let it, unsettle you. Most involved in policy are addressing matters around the edges, even if they do confront matters of poverty and background. Perhaps you will find yourself disagreeing with some of what the authors present. Fair enough, but can you then as a reader and a policy maker come up with reasons for not addressing the issues with which they challenge you? Do not all of us-teachers, parents, administrators, policy makers-owe our children, our students, a willingness to think beyond our current practices so that we can do the best job possible of preparing them to take responsibility for the world which we will leave them?..."

To date, the education policy and philanthropy communities have placed a premium on funding charter schools that have high concentrations of poverty and large numbers of minority students. While it makes sense that charter schools have focused on high-needs students, thus far this focus has resulted in prioritizing high-poverty charter schools over other models, which research suggests may not be the most effective way of serving at-risk students. There is a large body of evidence suggesting that socioeconomic and racial integration provide educational benefits for all students, especially at-risk students. Today, some innovative charter schools are pursuing efforts to integrate students from different racial and economic backgrounds in their classrooms. A new report,  Diverse Charter Schools: Can Racial and Socioeconomic Integration Promote Better Outcomes for Students? by Richard D. Kahlenberg and Halley Potter explores this topic.

"One of the big questions about the highly successful high-poverty KIPP charter schools is whether it's fair to draw broad policy lessons from them given differences in the student populations they educate compared with regular high-poverty public schools."

"Scientifically disproven years ago, the "Beat the Odds" myth is still the excuse of convenience for justifying claims that schools can single-handedly overcome poverty."

A substantial body of evidence reveals that past reforms have largely failed to improve schools in urban areas. The authors contend that prior efforts failed because they did not address the numerous ways that past research has shown poverty influences student academic outcomes and school performance (Coleman et al., 1966; Rothstein, 2004). The author's call for a new approach to school improvement, one that draws upon the principles advocated by the Broader and Bolder Approach, and includes: evidence-based instruction, community engagement, and the strategies that have been pursued by the Harlem Children's Zone, the Children's Aid Society, and a small number of similar efforts that attempt to mitigate the effects of poverty.

"School closings, the threat of which hang over Chicago public schools, and which have been a central feature of Bloomberg educational policies in New York, are perhaps the most controversial features of the Obama administration's "Race to the Top" initiative. The idea of closing low-performing schools, designated as such entirely on the basis of student test scores, removing half of their teaching staff and all of their administrators, and replacing them with a new (typically charter) school in the same building, is one which has tremendous appeal among business leaders and almost none among educators. Advocates see this policy as a way of removing ineffective teachers, adding competition to what had been a stagnant sphere of public service, and putting pressure on teachers in high-poverty areas to demand and get high performance from their students, once again based on performance on standardized tests. For a "data driven" initiative, school closings have produced surprisingly little data to support their implementation."

Most teachers in the US not only voted for President Obama, they spent considerable time and money campaigning for him. Like many other Americans, they thought the Obama presidency would bring new initiatives to help working families and help people rise out of poverty after 8 years of policieswhich favored large corporations and concentrated wealth among top earners. However, they were shocked when President Obama appointed Arne Duncan, a man who had never been a teacher, as Secretary of Education,and when policies began emanating from the new administration favoring charter schools over public schools, requiring student test scores as a basis of teacher evaluation, and encouraging "school turnaround"strategies which led to mass firing of teachers. Worse yet, the rhetoric emanating from Mr Duncan often portrayed "bad teachers" ratherthan deeply entrenched poverty, as the reason for race and class inequities in educational achievement, and for poor US performance globally on standardized tests, a concern heightened when Mr Duncan praised the mass firing of teachers in Central Falls Rhode Island and called Hurricane Katrina " the best thing that had happened to education in New Orleans" because it allowed local officials to replace public schools with charter schools

The Obama Administration's approval last week of 10 state applications for waivers from NCLB was another missed opportunity to learn from a decade of policy failure. Instead of changing the disastrous direction of federal education policy, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's waiver process allows states to reproduce some of the worst aspects of NCLB's "test and punish" approach while continuing to ignore real issues, like reducing concentrated poverty or providing equitable funding and high quality pre-K for all schools.

No one seriously disputes the fact that students from disadvantaged households perform less well in school, on average, than their peers from more advantaged backgrounds. But rather than confront this fact of life head-on, our policy makers mistakenly continue to reason that, since they cannot change the backgrounds of students, they should focus on things they can control.

In New York City public schools, a student's educational outcomes and opportunity to learn are statistically more determined by where he or she lives than their abilities, according to A Rotting Apple: Education Redlining in New York City, released by the Schott Foundation for Public Education. Primarily because of New York City policies and practices that result in an inequitable distribution of educational resources and intensify the impact of poverty, children who are poor, Black and Hispanic have far less of an opportunity to learn the skills needed to succeed on state and federal assessments. They are also much less likely to have an opportunity to be identified for Gifted and Talented programs, to attend selective high schools or to obtain diplomas qualifying them for college or a good job. High-performing schools, on the other hand, tend to be located in economically advantaged areas.

One pattern of failure in education reform is that political leadership and the public focus attention and resources on solutions while rarely asking what problems we are addressing or how those solutions address identified problems. The current and possibly increasing advocacy of charter schools is a perfect example of that flawed approach to improving our schools across the U.S. Let's start with two clarifications. First, the overwhelming problems contributing to school quality are pockets of poverty across the country and school policies and practices mirroring and increasing social inequities for children once they enter many schools.

When the Richmond and Louisville metro areas reached a school desegregation crossroads in the 1970s, they went in different directions. After the Supreme Court prevented a plan to consolidate Richmond's schools with those in Henrico and Chesterfield counties, the city was left to pursue a futile desegregation plan on its own. White and middle-class flight continued unabated. Meanwhile, a court-ordered consolidation of the Louisville-Jefferson County, Ky., schools produced Ku Klux Klan opposition. But the fuss eventually died down and the region took ownership of its desegregation policy without court supervision. Metro Louisville ultimately implemented a voluntary student assignment plan based on the geographic distribution of students by race and poverty. The benefits have extended beyond education. From 1990 to 2010, black-white residential segregation in Louisville-Jefferson County fell at nearly twice the rate as in metro Richmond, according to research by Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, an assistant professor in the Department of Education Leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University.