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I always cringe when I hear so-called reformers say poverty is "no excuse" for lack of student achievement. It is not because I don't subscribe to that belief, but because I know politicians will use that message as an excuse for not "leveling the playing field" for poor children. To believe that you can treat and fund all schools in the same way meets what many call the definition of insanity--doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. From collective bargaining contracts to federal law, poverty has to be a factor in every decision that affects the education of poor children and those who educate them.

In our present economic climate, where it seems that politicians are completely disconnected from the people who voted for them, schools have a serious issue with poverty. It doesn't matter whether it is a rural, urban or suburban school district; the number of students living in poverty is rising, which can be devastating to their education.

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.

Last night in President Obama's State of the Union address, he repeated a familiar refrain about the importance of teachers. A great teacher can offer an escape from poverty to the child who dreams beyond his circumstance. But it seems that it is those in power who are actually using teachers to escape from the realities of poverty these days.

Federal social programs are keeping nearly 2 million American children out of poverty, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's first new poverty calculation measure in more than four decades.

"A while back, in a report from the NJDOE, we learned that outliers are all that matters. They are where life's important lessons lie! Outliers can provide proof that poverty doesn't matter. Proof that high poverty schools - with a little grit and determination - can kick the butts of low poverty schools."

"...We readily recognize the consistent, ironclad law of association between poverty and educational achievement and attainment. However, we persist in school reform strategies that, despite success at the margins, regularly fail to address the factors associated with poverty that, on average, tend to impede student learning. While the past decade-plus of school reform has seen a necessary and laudable increase in emphasis on the need to improve curriculum and instruction for all students, we continue, for the most part, to look the other way when it comes to addressing out of school factors which get in the way of students benefitting from optimized curriculum and instruction..."

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.

In "It's Poverty, Not Stupid" I proved that we should seek to raise the achievement of all students, but that our national focus should be on our poorest, under-resourced schools and students, who are the reason for our "average" international ranking. The following post includes excerpts from an article by Marcus Pohlman in the Washington Post and by my personal experiences leading two high-poverty schools

"...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. "

"School reformers often say that great teaching can overcome the effects of poverty. Here, Arthur H. Camins, director of the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., discusses problems with this reform narrative."

Tests, tests and more tests won't fix the problems with our nation's schools. More funding would certainly help in an era of widespread state budget deficits. But the real problem, says Stephen Krashen, is poverty.

Connecticut's SB 24 appears to be little more than boilerplate reformy legislation which, like similar legislation in other states, creates a massive smokescreen concealing the very real problems facing Connecticut school districts. I addressed in a previous post my concern that SB24′s emphasis on charter expansion as a solution for high poverty districts is misguided, mainly because most of those successful charter schools in CT are currently achieving their successes at least in part by NOT serving high poverty populations. And another part may be the additional resources of these schools, used for such things as increased school time, supported by increased teacher salaries.  But SB24 comes with few resources attached. The other major elements of SB24 involve teacher "effectiveness" with significant emphasis on use of student performance measures for teacher evaluation. For numerous posts on this topic, see: http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/category/race-to-the-top/value-added-teacher-evaluation/ A few points are in order before I move on.

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.

Here's my operational definition of screwed for this post. A district is identified as screwed (new technical term in school finance… as of a few posts ago) if a) the district has more than 50% higher census poverty than other districts in the same labor market and b) lower per pupil state and local revenues than other districts in the same labor market. As I've explained on numerous previous occasions, it is well understood that districts with higher poverty rates (among other factors) have higher costs of providing equal educational opportunity to their students. I then tally the percent of statewide enrollments that are concentrated in these screwed districts to determine the share of kids screwed by their state. And here are the rankings… or at least the short list of states that screw the largest share of low income students

As the United States emerges from difficult economic times, the challenges of increasing child poverty, revenue declines and state budget cuts appear more daunting. Yet, so too is the national challenge of ensuring all students, especially low-income students and students with special needs, the opportunity to receive a rigorous, standards-based education to prepare them for today's economy. In order to address the challenges of concentrated student poverty and meet the needs of English-language learners and students with disabilities, states must develop and implement the next generation of standards-driven school finance systems, expressly designed to provide a sufficient level of funding, fairly distributed in relation to student and school need.  The inaugural edition of the National Report Card, issued in late 2010, served to focus attention on these important issues. This second edition, which analyzes data through 2009, seeks to continue and sharpen that focus. Amidst the ongoing effort to improve our nation's public schools, fair school funding is critical to being successful and sustaining progress. Creating and maintaining state systems of fair school funding is essential to improving our nation's public schools.

"Poverty continues to be the No. 1 impediment to educational success, as children of poor families are more likely to drop out than wealthy children, and the report suggests that solutions have yet to be found for high-poverty school districts: School budgets are tied to property taxes. This is why schools in poor neighborhoods get about half as much money per student than schools in affluent neighborhoods. To make generational progress for students from low-income families and prepare them to be successful in secondary and post-secondary education, many say change must be student-centered. But nationally, education standards are intimately tied to income."

This paper examines whether teachers in schools serving students from high-poverty backgrounds are as effective as teachers in schools with more advantaged students. The question is important. Teachers are recognized as te most important school factor affecting student achievement, and the achievement gap between disadvantaged students and their better off peers is large and persistent.

Gonna get wonky here... I have to admit it: Amanda Ripley really got under my skin. Twice. So much so that I went back to her blog to look at her two recent posts - here and here - about how much American schools suck and how people who tell you that poverty is the overriding cause are selling you magic beans.

I want to be brief, but I think it is time that the "No Excuses" Reform movement answer some questions that simmer beneath their claims of "no excuses" and "poverty is not destiny." I want to move past the data and to why that data exist, and it is in the why that what claims the "No Excuses" Reformers are making become clear.