One of the best and most interesting recent articles about education disappeared beneath Thanksgiving leftovers and holiday shopping last Friday. It needs to be read and discussed. The Washington Post’s Jay Mathews tells the story of a young teacher who was rejected by the Philadelphia Teaching Fellows program, apparently for questioning the orthodoxy that good teachers should be able to raise the achievement of even the poorest kids. ”How do we address the outside influences if we pretend they don’t exist?” asks would-be teacher Erika Owens. Mathews is firmly in the “no excuses” camp, but to his credit he took Owens question seriously. ”It is too easy to make one side think they are being called racists and the other side think they are being called bullies,” observes Mathews, who opens his prodigious rolodex to ask a range of leading lights “Should teachers ignore poverty?”
“Full personal responsibility for student achievement and refusing to blame other factors does NOT mean we ignore the other factors,” KIPP co-founder Mike Feinberg wrote to Mathews. ”It simply means we view other factors as challenges and problems that require solutions, and we view the possibility of solutions as fitting inside our personal sphere of influences vs. shrugging our shoulders and giving up.”
“You have to know the challenges our kids come with, take them seriously, try to provide resources to address them but at the end of the day they CANNOT be an excuse for low achievement levels. That’s the bottom line,” writes Michelle Rhee, ever the lightning rod. “If a teacher doesn’t believe it’s possible for a teacher or school to overcome those factors, that is actually okay. Those teachers should teach in Fairfax County or somewhere where the challenges are not as great.”
As in most debates on education, there’s a false dichotomy at work. Surely there is a difference between the teacher who walks into the classroom assuming poor children can’t learn, and simply ascribing every student failure to a bad teacher. Poverty matters, clearly. And just as clearly it is unacceptable for a teacher to lower his or her expectations of a student’s capabilities based on economic status. But where this laudable belief leaves the rails is when you hold the teacher accountable if she fails to get every child to proficiency.
I think we would agree, that America would be well served if we could clone Rafe Esquith, the legendary Los Angeles 5th grade teacher and author of Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire, and put him in every classroom. But listen to this great and heroic teacher speak heresy: “People who believe that ‘all children will learn’ have watched too many Hollywood movies about teachers,” says Esquith. “The idea that all children will learn sounds wonderful, but these words need to be surrounded with a little bit of realism.” Based on this attitude alone, Esquith likely would have been rejected by the same program as the young would-be teacher who wrote to Mathews. It should go without saying that this is pure lunacy. “Never stop trying,” is an essential character trait for a teacher. “Never fail,” is a silly and ultimately self-defeating standard. Plan A is to hound our best and hardest-working teachers from the profession not for failing to believe they can work magic, but for actually failing to do so? What’s Plan B?
As Mathews correctly observes, attitude matters. But there is a world of difference between filling struggling schools with fiercely committed teachers willing to take on the hardest challenge in education, and labeling them as failures if they do not succeed with every child. By that standard, Rafe Esquith, arguably the best teacher in America, is a failure.
Finally, I can’t help but be struck by Mathews own take on the debate. “The prevailing view that impoverished children cannot be expected to learn as much as affluent children is poison in any classroom,” he writes. Sure, but let’s be clear about this: One of the reasons — perhaps THE reason — poor children don’t learn as much as affluent children has nothing to do with teacher attitudes.
The reason poor children learn less is because they are taught less.
The debate is couched in innacurate terms… or just one term. The issue isn’t really poverty. In a small percentage of cases poverty is THE main problem, but in most cases it’s an issue of culture and priotrities. If people in education actually spent more time in the hood and the barrios, they would see the women who have more time to get their hair and nails done than to make sure their kids keep up with their studies. Or they would hear young black boys talk about how many hours they worked to buy some useless jewelry and the latest pair of Jordans.
Since we live in PC-land, poverty has become a proxy for a culture. A culture where education is openly lauded only in quiet conversations by wistful adults. I’ll give you a very personal example:
On my father’s side of my family, every single young girl except me is an unwed mother. All but two (my sister [who is also an unwed mother] and I) haven’t completed their undergraduate degrees. No one ever comes out and congratlates us publicly. Likely because they don’t want to alienate the other girls. The result has been to make me, Ivy educated, ambitious, bookish, and making almost all the right choices, the black sheep of the family.
Instead of being the example, I’m the weird one. Except for the one time my aunt had the chance to speak to me alone outside of the hustle and bustle of our loud (because of all the kids with kids) family gatherings. She told me she was so proud of me for having made it so far and for not getting pregnant. She’s rooting for me, but only in quiet corners.
This is the sort of thing that needs to change. Curing poverty by just throwing money at people is just going to result in a lot of hood rich (look it up) people who still don’t know how to act.
Making judgements about the “culture of poverty” — even asking if there is such a thing as a culture of poverty — has obvious pitfalls as you note, Carol. I’m curious what you make of the KIPPs and Achievement Firsts. It seems they have chieved a fair amount of success by directly addressing the habits, and the habits of mind, of the poor, largely black and Hispanic kids they serve. Of course, they also, I’m pretty sure, would deny that they’re imposing new cultural norms on their students. Are they?
Both my grandfathers grew up dirt poor. My paternal grandfather even had to drop out of school at 13 to go to work to support his mom and younger siblings after his father died. But he still valued education so he eventually earned his high school diploma and bachelor’s degree at night. After serving in WWII, he used the GI Bill to attend law school, which became his ticket to an upper-middle-class suburban life.
My maternal grandfather used his brains to get himself off the farm and into a prestigious prep school on scholarship. He then attended Wesleyan, again on scholarship. Like my other grandfather, he too used the GI Bill to attend graduate school, and earned a PhD. from Harvard.
Why is it that I’ve heard lots and lots of these kinds of pulling-oneself-up-by-the-bootstraps stories about people in my grandparents’ generation but not so many in younger ones?
My suspicion is because we as a society have in recent decades become enamored with absolving people from taking personal responsibility for their lives…
There are plenty of Horatio Alger stories out there, CW. I have worked with an organization in New York City, Prep for Prep, that is rife with inspiring bootstrap tales. For example, one young woman in the program tells a story about growing up in a basement apartment with her single mom, who supported her education every step of the way. The young lady brought a thousand people to tears at a fundraiser at the Waldorf earlier this year when she brought her mom onstage to present her with her acceptance letter to Harvard.
But this is the unintended consequence of the no excuses/hyper accountability model: if the onus is on the teacher to ensure that every child achieves his or her academic manifest destiny, then the student’s role is….what exactly? We’re not absolving people of their personal responsibility so much as we’re usurping it.
I just noticed that my checking account was debited $85 yesterday for the health club that I haven’t set foot in six months. Would it be nice if someone called and said, “Hey, we noticed you haven’t been here in a while. How would you like a free personal training session to get you focused on getting in shape?” God yes. Is it the gym’s fault that I’m out of shape. No.
We can split hairs between “a” culture of poverty” or “the culture of poverty” or various “cultures of poverty,” but today is there any doubt that the phenomenon of culture(s) of poverty exist? It only took us 40 years before we could start to use the term.
I was ready to defend my dissertation in the 1970s when my advisor pulled me aside. I had used the forbidden phrase in a generic, dictionary-type sense about white Oklahoma sharecroppers at the turn of the century. Now, Malcolm Gladwell is able to make far more expansive statements about a sharecropper culture. Then it was more than a decade after the Moynihan controversy. My advisor warned me that using the phrase “culture of poverty” could ruin a career and had me delete it.
We’ve got the same gag rules today, and its refreshing that Erika Ownes had the guts to say what most of us believe. The gag rule is just as bad in regard to discipline for instance. You can read about the importance of discipline in the Core Knowledge blog, the AFT quarterly, and Obama’s policy, but try to raise the issue in polite company. (I don’t consider Obama to be impolite company and the AFT is beyond the pale, but I don’t know, Robert, if you are allowed so much honesty …) Public agenda polls often mention discipline, but notice the context. They mostly report on it after parents, teachers, and students volunteer their thoughts under “other.”
How can you build a winning team, and especially how can you build a winning educational team, if you can’t have honest communication? I’m so glad that the “High Expectations” litmus test is being exposed.
What the commenters here and elsewhere are missing – and boy, do they love waxing pseudo-philosophic on the big issues – is that there are two issues. Poverty, that meta-issue, and how the Teaching Fellows programs are selecting Fellows.
I think many both inside and outside education would be shocked at some of the criteria and how those are applied. Suffice it to say that a young, white Classics major from Yale, who happened to grow up in small-town America, misses out on a few bonus points in the selection process. Toss in an ideology that doesn’t ‘fit’ and his or her candidacy may be in trouble.
I think I’ve been pretty clear on this blog and elsewhere on my take on student discipline, John. Classroom diruption is the problem that keeps all other problems from being solved. The single greatest cause of the achievement gap, in my opinion, is the time lost to disruption in dysfunctional schools. It’s not cowardice that keeps me from ascribing that to a “culture of poverty” but ignorance. I’m simply out of my depth on its causes. But you’d have to be foolish or blind to pretend it’s not a factor in student achievement.
Now for Mr. Tabor. Matthew, you are one of my edublog heroes, but if you’re suggesting there is a demographic litmus test in alt cert programs, based on my limited sample I have to disagree. In my experience with both the NYC Teaching Fellows and Teach for America, I met plenty of young, white classics majors from good schools who grew up in small town USA. On ideology, you might be right, however. I’m not sure what TFA’s ideal psychometric profile in. But the NYCTF seems to want “realistic idealists” — people who are all about high expectations, but not likely to be disillusioned and quit.
Understood, will shoot you an e-mail. I’m not saying it’s impossible, or that they’re barred from the program – we both know they aren’t. It’s just that they’re less attractive candidates in ways that, to me, have nothing to do with their professional performance or potential as teachers.
@ Robert, I think KIPP style schools do something good for the kids with parents motivated enough to get them to and through the program. Something much better than many city schools can offer. Still, KIPP doesn’t measure itself against international standards, has too long a school day and I don’t like that they take up saturdays (ie I think students should have a childhood), and they rely too heavily on a model that overworks teachers. They say never say never… but I’m pretty sure I’d never put my (future) children in a KIPP school. And the mark of a good school/program for me is whether or not I would WANT to put my kid in the program, not if it’s the best option of the bunch for some other group of people.
As far as their approach to changing culture. Honestly, I am frustrated that so many people think that being able to pay proper attention in class is some special middle class value. And trying to create top down cultural changes that do not take into account students perspectives is a job even Sisyphus wouldn’t want to do.
These values aren’t unique to white middle class people. I wasn’t around for the 1960s, but it seems that there was this shift in the black community where suddenly being critical of destructive behavior became “racist” and uncaring. The hushed words of people like my aunt are a way of letting me know they approve without being branded uppity and bourgeois. Its not that these values don’t exist… its that this perverse cultural norm of being PC makes people uneasy with stateting them out loud… lest one end up outcasted like me.
As for bottom up cultural change. I think KIPP is heavy handed and isn’t letting that culture develop organically among its young people. In part because immediate results demand that sort of direct intervention. But a longer lasting solution would create a student culture where the coolest kids are the academic successes. I don’t know that KIPP is recreating that image of cool in or outside of its schools. Until students admire hard work and intelligence over bling, there will be no meaningful change in these communities.
@john, I have an idea for an after school program and I remember sharing it with someone who deals with business plans in education. She was well meaning, but the first thing she pointed out to me was that many people don’t like the term “poor” when referring to inner city kids (so much for that poverty meme). Nevermind the idea… I needed to go through and make my plan more PC! Please. This is one of the main reasons I roll my eyes about whether Rhee can save our public schools. She’s Korean American and can’t say a fraction of the things that need to be said to the black students and parents and here district… even if she knew what needed to be said (she doesn’t). Like you said, you can’t have a great education team if you can’t be honest about the problems.
@ Matthew, You bring up a good point… there is a huge difference between who can be a great teacher (someone with great content knowledge and the desire to share it regardless of that person’s race) and someone who can be the catalyst for change in the public schools. I could be wrong but I am pretty confident that the person who does that is going to need to be black or latino with a background similar to many of the people in the district. Otherwise there is just too much that cannot be said with enough authority to avoid the negative labels.
I apologize for the length, just wanted to get to most of the comments…
I’m not saying that there aren’t Horatio Algers among the younger generations, it just seems that there are significantly fewer of them than there used to be.
Someone like Charles Murray would probably say that those who are growing up poor today are simply dumber on average than those who were poor back when my grandfathers were kids, but that seems way too simplistic and pessimistic to me. I think the problem is more one of motivation & effort than one of ability.
What a terrific discussion. I would prefer to just read it rather than participate, but Carol’s post reminded me that even smart people have developed impressions of KIPP from what they read on the Internet that are quite false. I will take just one example, and hope Carol will look at my KIPP book when it comes out next month. She says KIPP goes too far with school every other Saturday morning, or so, and that kids should have a childhood. I don’t know if Carol has kids, but if she does, or has friends that have kids, I suspect many of them are doing soccer or ballet or searching the Internet or other such joys of youth in this era. And what are those KIPP kids doing on Saturday at school? Exactly the same things! The Saturday sessions are designed to give inner city kids the kind of Saturday mornings that suburban kids have. Now, if you think suburban Saturdays are also denying kids their childhood, that is an interesting point of view, but it is an entirely different issue. People who think they know about KIPP but have never visited a KIPP school should do so. They have an open to all visitors policy.
Carol,
“I could be wrong but I am pretty confident that the person who does that is going to need to be black or latino with a background similar to many of the people in the district.”
I’ll be polite and not address the validity of that claim. Instead, I’ll say that even if it’s 100% accurate, I’m not going to put up with it or accept that it’s likely the only way forward. Call it quixotic, but I go about things by looking at character, truth, knowledge, etc. before melanin or bank accounts.
Jay,
We both know that education debate on the internet is a funny thing, and some arenas are more skewed than others. For example, I’m thinking of Twitter, whose users voted in a massive poll using the Twitter API for Sen. Obama at a rate ~5.5x greater than Sen. McCain. Sen. Obama won the nation convincingly, but he didn’t win 5.5:1.
So we’re bound to see lots of misinformation about KIPP and the like. Speaking of Twitter, the other day someone on my followers list asked if anyone could explain the approach of Edison Schools. I commented that asking education Twitterites to answer that question is like asking Bill Ayers to explain Ronald Reagan’s approach. It was meant to be a joke, but it’s not far from the truth.
And Michelle Rhee… there’s an example of the internet population of education-folks having developed false impressions.
@Crimson, Charles Murray suffers from a belief that all you need is data to diagnose a problem. I can almost guarantee he doesn’t know or interact with poor black and latino adults and students and is missing a huge piece of the puzzle as a result.
@Jay, I’m not one of those that thinks that scheduling ballet and piano lessons means you have a “childhood” so I guess I do have an interesting perspective. To me having a childhood means kids have time for free play. I didn’t grow up in a home where we could afford any type of lessons so there is clearly some cultural disconnect here. Still, having also experienced part of high school life in a suburban school of mostly white students, I’m pretty wary of assuming that everything suburban parents do is something worth duplicating.
Saturdays were for morning cartoons and unscheduled hanging out. Trips to the mall… sometimes in IB we’d organize a “free” study at the downtown library, or we’d go bowling or to a movie. There was a real sense that the work we’d been doing justified a little bit of free time and it taught us more responsibility. In younger years it was also an opportunity to come up with creative ways to use our time. I’m still wondering when these KIPP kids get a chance to just hang out when you factor in the longer school days and the extensive homework I keep reading about.
But even if I did think scheduling activities on saturday was good, that doesn’t change the other things (overworking teachers, not internationally benchmarking, top down approach to changing cultural norms, etc.) that bother me about KIPP schools.
I wish one of the edublogs would do a poll of their readers and other bloggers and really see whether or not they would enroll their children in a KIPP school and why or why not. And again, not “if I were stuck in a troubled district then I would pick KIPP” but “If I knew I wasn’t taking a spot from a child who needed it, I would absolutely go out of my way to enroll my child in a KIPP school.” I think the results and the discussion that would inevitably follow would be fascinating.
@Matthew, Why be polire if you can refute my point? You’re right that it isn’t JUST about race… I would argue Obama is just as clueless about many of these issues as Wendy Kopp is due to his background. But I’d like to see a school district that has made incredible gains with black or latino students that is led by someone who isn’t black or latino and is enduring enough to last without that leader. Don’t get me wrong, there can be pockets of greatness with non-minority leaders, but I am talking about the seismic change that gets to the root of whats causing the problems in these schools in the first place. I just don’t think these communities are going to listen to someone who is white/Asian and from a middle to upper class background.
In the private sector you look at the great successes and you see people who lived their lives in one sector come up with the best ideas for that sector. Bill Gates, Peter Diamandis, etc. Its experience and passion that make up the biggest breakthroughs in an area. Why should education be any different?
People don’t like to hear this because they want to believe they can help (I’m not saying they can’t), but these groups don’t see the world in the same way. I remember very clearly expressing different concerns at Colgate U, Cornell, and at my suburban high school that most of my classmates simply could not relate to or understand. And there were, and still are, a lot of things I didn’t share because they were embarrassing or I couldn’t express properly, or that I thought might offend. Things are different now that I can think through these problems more clearly, but there is a lot of anger in the black community at things most white and Asian people don’t ever have to think about. I think many of these unspoken issues are at the root of our communities’ education problems. It doesn’t seem crazy to me to say that its going to take someone who can relate to these issues to help fix them.
Robert,
My attempt at humor failed. I believe it’s courageous, not cowardly, to challenge the norm. (after all, I quickly deleted the offending phrase from my dissertation and I’ve usually done the same ever since) Nobody can exclude Obama as being “polite company, just as I’m not getting included in polite company.” We are supposed to nod knowingly and agree with the theories that discipline problems would disappear if … Your blog is one of the few places where the dogma is challenged, and that was my point.
I’ve often challenged dogma in a discrete/wimpy way, Reading you helped give me freedom to articulate the unpopular opinions that you and I share. In official meetings and the like, I’ve always just gone along with the mantra on “Expectations,” just like most of the others in the room. Afterwards in the lobby or at a bar, we’d joke about the silliness of it all. I doubt many people who put on the just raise expectations “dog and pony show” actually believe what they are saying. Its just a convention for getting along, sorta like saying, “Yeah, its a nice day, but its going to get hot.”
But as I indicated, our beliefs aren’t unpopular outside of a narrow policy circle. They certainly are held by the majority of teachers.
Gosh, if your approach is cowardly, what would I call my compromise per day approach?
Still, I’m not craving the distinction of being “polite company” and something tells me that you don’t cut any of your opinions to fit the fashion. Besides, admitting that you don’t have all the answers isn’t fashionable in education right now. That’s another opinion that we share.
Not so firey John
I frankly don’t think the KIPP schools are aimed at children like mine. The whole teaching of middle-class norms thing would be wasted on them since they have been surrounded by those since birth. Also they already have access to the types of academic support and extracurricular activities that KIPP aims to provide its students. It’s not that I think KIPP schools are bad, it’s that so much of what they’re trying to accomplish is simply unnecessary for my children. The whole purpose of KIPP seems to be providing disadvantaged kids with the kinds of things that middle-class families like mine already do.
http://uncomfortableadventures.blogspot.com/2008/12/what-is-our-duty.html
I had too much to say
Culture of poverty or no, SES appears to matter a good deal more in the US than it does in some other countries like Finland, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan.
Finland, Hong Kong, and Japan have very homogeneous populations, with approximately 92-95% of their residents belonging to the majority ethnic group. Canada is also much less diverse than the U.S., with only 16% of the population of non-European heritage (roughly half the rate in the U.S.)
In homogeneous populations, SES is not conflated with cultural factors as much as in a very diverse population like here in the U.S.