Poverty and Educational Achievement: the importance of having enough

Everyone knows that, on average, poor kids do worse in school and on reading tests. Poverty is highly correlated with school success, and in fact despite the perennial search for unicorn schools that can magically bring poor kids up to the level of rich kids, I have never seen any evidence of a school that can bring a non-cherry-picked population of poor students to the level of achievement of many schools full of non-poor students. I've written about this here and here. Today I want to highlight a couple of studies that point to why poverty has such powerful effects. But first, I want to highlight a few common but misguided responses to the fact that poverty plays a huge role in educational achievement. 

The first response is to write off the difference as simply genetic, and therefore impossible to change. Beyond being probably just wrong, this response is not socially acceptable, so you don't see it said explicitly very often, but I do think it's an unspoken assumption that underlies some of our inaction.

Another response is to blame the individual students or their families. If they aren't rich, it's their fault, because they didn't follow Benjamin Franklin's precepts: work hard, be abstemious, and save money. Like the genetic response, this is a mostly unspoken excuse for inaction.

A third response is to blame teachers, or teachers' unions, or schools. This is absurd, since there is literally no school that actually manages to overcome poverty and educate non-cherry-picked students up to the level of low-poverty districts, but its absurdity doesn't prevent its being a favorite idea of education reformers everywhere. They get to cloak their elitism and greed in the guise of social justice.

A fourth response, which is in some ways the most interesting, is to suggest that what sets the rich kids apart is that they are given extra help and cultural "enrichment" by their families. I hear this one all the time from well-meaning colleagues. Rich kids get trips to Europe, and to museums, while poor kids go to the broken down playground down the street. Rich kids go to artsy summer camps in Maine, while poor kids go to the Y. Rich kids get tutoring, while poor kids sit in front of the TV. There may be something to this, but it makes it seem like the difference between poor kids and rich kids is that the rich kids get something extra, and I don't think that's true. 

It's not that rich kids are getting something extra, it's that poor kids aren't getting enough.

When I was a kid, my family did not go to Europe. I didn't attend expensive summer camps. My mom was on food stamps for a while. My parents worried about money. They ended up doing fine, but they were always incredibly frugal. I never had a tutor (though to be fair I did have highly educated parents who were around a lot). What I did have was about a million books, and lost of time to read them, and not many worries about my material comfort. I was pretty sure I was going to get enough to eat.

Two recent studies show the importance of getting enough:

1) Study 1: Kids read better when they're fed better

SNAP is the government program that gives low-income families a debit card with which they can buy food (people still refer to the program as "food stamps"). This is a great program, but it doesn't provide all that much money (less than $150 per person per month). The debit card is credited once a month, and families often find themselves running out of money as the month goes on.

In North Carolina, the money is credited to different families at different times, depending on the last couple of digits of the recipient's social security number. This allows for cool natural experiments like the one in the paper I read. A study by a Duke professor compares students' standardized test scores to when the students' families received their SNAP benefits. It turns out that scores are at their worst just before and just after the benefits are credited, and the scores are best about two to three weeks after the money arrives.

In the words of the study authors:

Student reading test scores appear to peak in the period from the 15th to 19th day post-SNAP receipt, and student math test scores appear to peak in the period from the 20th to 24th day post-SNAP receipt.

This interesting result suggests that nutrition matters to testing--and, by extension, very likely matters to learning as well. It doesn't matter a huge amount (something like 3% of a standard deviation), but it is easy to imagine a relatively small effect snowballing over time and creating a reverse Matthew effect, since if you fall behind by even 0.5% every year, by the time you're a senior in High School you will be behind by 6%, and it's likely that even at peak performance, kids whose families receive SNAP benefits will be less well-fed and more stressed in general.

2) Study 2: The stress of poverty takes up mental bandwidth

This study, by a few economists, two of whom wrote a book about this effect, is a bit further from education, but has larger effect sizes. These scholars did experiments designed to study how the stress of worrying about money affects cognitive performance. The results were more dramatic than I would have expected.

In one set of experiments, the authors asked shoppers at a mall in New Jersey to consider how they would handle a financial issue--for example, “Your car is having some trouble and requires $X to be fixed. You can pay in full, take a loan, or take a chance and forego the service at the moment... How would you go about making this decision?”)--and then, while they were considering the financial issue, to perform some basic cognitive tasks. If the financial issue was relatively easy (e.g. the car only required $150 to fix), then rich and poor people performed equally well on the cognitive tasks. If the issue was more difficult (e.g. the car required $1500 to fix), then rich people scored much, much better on the cognitive tasks, probably because the poor people were worrying about how they would come up with the $1500.

In another experiment discussed in the same paper, the authors gave cognitive tasks to small-holding sugarcane farmers in India before and after the harvest. This is a naturally randomized experiment, since different farmers harvest their sugarcane at very different times, over a several month period, according to when the sugarcane mills, which have a limited capacity, can process their cane.  The time before the harvest is not a time of poor nutrition, but it is a time of financial pressures (for instance, the farmers pawn items at a much higher rate). In this time of financial pressure, the farmers were much, much worse at cognitive tasks than they were during the relatively flush period after they harvested and sold their crop.

In these experiments, poor people who were thinking about money pressures performed far worse on cognitive tests than when they weren't thinking about money, and worse than people who had enough money that they didn't have to think about it.

Fortunately, these studies point to a relatively simple solution: reduce poverty!

It seems obvious to me that the solution to the poverty problem is not better education; rather, the solution to the education problem is less poverty. Just as we know, from studying public health, that the most important factors in a population's physical health and longevity are not the quality of the hospitals and doctors, so, in education, the most important factors in academic performance are not the quality of the schools and teachers. Just as my cousin wants to be an excellent doctor, so I want to be an excellent teacher. But as a society, we need to pay more attention to educational public health, and restructure our society so that, as in other rich countries, poor children are less poor. As a bonus, these policies would make us healthier, too!

Why does Kim Marshall promote the idea that schools can overcome poverty?

My department chair subscribes to the Marshall Memo, and I usually read all of it. I like the way it reminds me of what's important. This week, though, Kim Marshall included a piece called "Pushing Back on Eight Outmoded Beliefs." In the piece, originally published in the official publication of the Michigan Association of School Boards and written by Marshall himself, Marshall declares that it is "outmoded" to believe that "poverty is destiny."

In some sense, okay, poverty isn't destiny and never has been. Ben Franklin, Frederick Douglass and a lot of other heroes of mine have shown that some people can escape the fate that poverty usually points to. But to say that the idea is "outmoded" is pretty galling, not only because it implies that this idea is just a sort of trendy fashion, not only because there is no reason to think that poverty is any less determinative than it has ever been, but also because a more pervasive and pernicious myth is that schools CAN rectify the injustices of an increasingly unequal society.

My first impulse, on reading Kim Marshall's article, was to curse at my computer. But then I thought, well, maybe in fact progress has been made. It's been a few years since I looked into the question of whether schools can overcome poverty. Last I looked into it, I found that, No, in fact, schools cannot overcome poverty. But maybe that conclusion is "outmoded." According to Marshall, "some schools are turning this dynamic around and closing gaps; Education Trust’s website showcases a number of these beat-the-odds schools and what they are doing: https://edtrust.org/dispelling_the_myth/ .

So, okay, I went to the Education Trust's website. I was skeptical, but willing to look at it. If schools were succeeding at overcoming poverty, I wanted to see what they were doing.

Unfortunately, what I found when I looked into it was typical of what I found a few years ago, and typical of education discourse in general. It's the kind of thing that finally got me frustrated enough that I stopped paying much attention to education discourse and research: an absence of evidence that bears even the most cursory examination.

I will try to be brief. The Education Trust is an organization that seems to spend a lot of time and energy showing that schools can overcome poverty. Every year, the Education Trust gives "Dispelling the Myth" awards to schools whose "success dispels the damaging myth that schools can do very little to help students overcome the barriers of poverty and discrimination."

To be clear, this organization looks around the ENTIRE COUNTRY to find schools that overcome poverty.  So you might expect that the award-winning schools would have both high poverty, as measured in the standard way by the percentage of students whose family income qualifies them for Free or Reduced-Price Lunch, and also success, as measured by graduation rates and test scores and so on. I looked to see if this was true. But, mirabile dictu, I didn't actually ever even look to see if the award-winning schools had achieved any academic success, because as I started looking at the high schools that had won this award, I was shocked to find that the first two schools listed (there were only three overall) were serving student populations that actually had significantly LOWER POVERTY than the state or national average.

Let me say that again, because I still can't believe it myself: most of the schools that Kim Marshall and the Education Trust cites as showing that schools can overcome poverty actually have SIGNIFICANTLY LESS poverty than average to overcome.

I don't really know what to say about this, except that I hope Kim Marshall puts out a correction in his memo, and spends some time explicating the more important and very pernicious myth that schools can beat poverty. They can't. Schools can work with and nurture the students we are given, but the only real solutions to poverty lie outside the schoolhouse walls.

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Notes about the particular schools:
The Education Trust lists only three schools. The first, Imperial High School in California, has 40% low-income students. Statewide 58% of students are low-income (meaning they qualify for Free or Reduced-Price Lunch). At the second, Jack Britt High School in North Carolina, 28% of the students are low-income. Statewide, that number is 58%. That's when I threw my hands up and started to write this blog post. But I did go back and look at the third, which though it's called "Pass Christian High School" seems to be a secular public high school in Missouri. Pass Christian actually does have more low-income students than the state average, if not by much (56% as compared to 50%). But still. If Education Trust combs the country looking for schools that beat poverty, and this is what they come up with, I don't think we've proved that poverty can be overcome at the schoolwide level.

ETS calls for Graduate Schools of Educational Public Health and more attention to poverty

ETS (!) has sponsored an excellent report on poverty and education.  Written by Richard Coley of ETS and Bruce Baker of Rutgers (and schoolfinance101), the report says what should be obvious to any observer and what many other excellent reports have said over the past forty years: that poverty is a problem for education, but education alone is not a solution to poverty.  Most of the report does the noble work of making (again) a detailed case that there is way too much poverty in the US, that we don't do enough about it, and that this poverty has serious negative educational consequences. The whole report is worthy, but I noticed a couple of things in particular:

A call for a focus on educational public health
The report's executive summary contains a wonderful sentence expressing a sentiment I wish we saw more often:

Given the strong connection between educational success and economic disadvantage, we might
expect education policy to focus on ways to overcome the effects of poverty on children.

In other words, they want schools of Educational Public Health!

What to do
Despite the report's clear implication that fixing poverty would be a good way to improve educational outcomes, the authors unfortunately choose, apparently from modesty, not to recommend any non-educational measures: "There are other strategies that fall outside of the education arena — tax policy, job creation, minimum wage policy, etc. — that also are outside of the purview of this report." The report does, however, make seven specific suggestions for actions within the "education arena", all of which ought to be common sense:

Increasing awareness of the incidence of poverty and its consequences. Child poverty costs the United States hundreds of billions of dollars per year. Current poverty levels, combined with the growingwealth gap between those at the top and bottom of the distribution, threaten to destabilize our democracy and limit the upward mobility of children of future generations.
Equitably and adequately funding our schools. The economic downturn has taken a toll on state school funding and on targeted programs like preschool that can help disadvantaged children. There is a need for better coordination of federal and state education programs targeted at poverty.
Broadening access to high-quality preschool education. High-quality early childhood education programs improve the educational outcomes of all children, but particularly for low-income children. The administration’s proposed major expansion of preschool programs across the country should be supported.
Reducing segregation and isolation. Many of the nation’s schools are increasingly segregated by race/ethnicity and income. Each student should have the opportunity to attend schools with peers from diverse social and economic backgrounds.
Adopting effective school practices. School policies that have been documented by research and practice to be effective should be broadly adopted. Examples include class size reduction, longer school days and years, and tutoring.
Recognizing the importance of a high-quality teacher workforce. Attracting and keeping high-quality teachers in high-poverty classrooms should be of the utmost priority and may require special incentives. 
Improving the measurement of poverty. The poverty rate is an important social and economic indicator that is used to allocate resources for scores of federal, state, and local programs. Work should continue to expand the official definition of income to include government spending directed at low-income families and to recognize cost-of-living differences across regions.

These aren't new ideas, but as the poet says, it is necessary to write about the same old things
in the same way, repeating the same things over and over. And who knows, maybe this report will get a lot of attention, and we'll stop spending so much time designing ways for schools to compete for the richer students (in Hirschman's terms, we need a system where change is based on voice, not exit).  And, yes, we need a lot less poverty.

The New York Times Discovers Educational Public Health!

I'm racing to read my huge stack of student papers before Wednesday's grading deadline, but I have to note an excellent post that went up at the NYT this past weekend.  It's from a Stanford professor who's doing good work on income inequality and education--good work that would fit well into my fantasy graduate school of educational public health.  The post is called "No Rich Child Left Behind", and it makes the very important points that:

A) Educational outcomes are and have always been very, very dependent on class.

B) The disparity in achievement between rich and poor has increased over the past fifty years, with the big difference coming because the performance of rich kids has significantly increased since the 1980s, so that whereas in 1980 there wasn't much difference between the rich and the middle class, now there is a significant gap.

C) Test scores of poor kids are not dropping--on the contrary, they are increasing, and the widening gap between rich and poor is because the test scores of the poor and middle class are not improving as quickly as those of the rich.

D) School narrows the gap: over the nine-months of the school year, the gap narrows, but then it increases again (and a bit more) in the summer.

E) According to the author, some of the growing gap comes because of the significant increase in inequality over the last few decades, but some of it also comes because the rich have been devoting ever more resources to the support and have been engaging in, to borrow a phrase from other researchers, "concerted cultivation" of their children's cognitive resources.

In a wonderful section of the post, Reardon writes:

It’s not clear what we should do about all this. Partly that’s because much of our public conversation about education is focused on the wrong culprits: we blame failing schools and the behavior of the poor for trends that are really the result of deepening income inequality and the behavior of the rich.

[...]

Meanwhile, not only are the children of the rich doing better in school than even the children of the middle class, but the changing economy means that school success is increasingly necessary to future economic success, a worrisome mutual reinforcement of trends that is making our society more socially and economically immobile.

We need to start talking about this.

Yes, we do need to start talking about it, and Reardon starts talking about it in a very important way: rather than talking about how schools can narrow the gap, for instance by using schools to provide social services (something I've argued is silly), he talks about, not only  investing in quality early childhood care for  kids of working parents, but also on providing families with the time and resources to take better care of their own kids.  "Let’s invest in parents so they can better invest in their children," he writes, and goes on to suggest the eminently sensible idea of providing more support for parental leave from work. In this spirit, I have suggested that raising the minimum wage and having a better national health insurance system should also be seen as important educational initiatives.

Reardon also mentions that the American Educational Research Association has decided to make the theme of its annual conference this year be "Education and Poverty: Theory, Research, Policy and Praxis."  That is of course good news, and although the conference's theme is a bit mealy-mouthed, some of the responses to the theme are interesting--my favorite of the ones I've read so far is the obvious but necessary "The Poverty of Capitalism" by a UCLA prof named Peter McClaren, who says important things even as he conforms touchingly, as I think Noel Coward once wrote, to type (check out his picture in the appendix below), but I also like the idea that we have conversations with our poor students about how "poverty is a prejudiced construct sustained by those who are led to believe that “venerated” institutions are the preferred, superior and normative legislator for values and morals because of their power to grant and reproduce intellectual, academic, able-istic, gendered, classed, religious, environmental, ethnic, linguistic and heternormative capital within dominant culture."

Overall, however, what I'm seeing on the conference website looks a bit more like a backwater of clever theory than anything that will build the institutions we need to combat either capitalism or its constructs.  Again, what we need is a proper, scientific graduate school of educational public health. I think we need to speak the language of the society we live in, not plan for a revolution that may never come, and which, if it did come, would have nothing at all to do with our planning.  That's why I prefer Sean Reardon over Peter McClaren.  But I could be wrong!

In any case, I'm very glad to see the post at the Times, and I'm glad that some people are thinking and talking about the way poverty matters.  I look forward to reading some of McClaren's research.

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Appendix:

For those who like visuals and want to be touched in that Noel Coward way, here's Peter McClaren, the revolutionary critic of Capitalism (or has Tom Petty found a second career?):

Peter McClaren

And, in a picture conforming a bit less touchingly to type, here's Sean Reardon, the Director of Stanford's Interdisicplinary doctoral Training Program in Quantitative Educational Policy Analysis and my hero for this week:

Sean Reardon

Students who need to read in school

It works to make kids do their homework in school

Leafstrewn has just gone through a remarkable episode in which the headmaster's proposal to cut the administrator of an alternative program for kids who are having a lot of trouble in school was met with such opposition from the faculty that she changed her mind.  The episode was remarkable mostly for the teachers' support for a program serving a small fraction of our students, support that will mean losing teacher jobs, but also because the headmaster admitted, quite gracefully, that she had made a mistake.  Everyone came out looking pretty good, and I was proud of our school.

The episode also reminded me of how effective this particular alternative program has been. Five students from my ninth grade classes last year are now in the program, and four of the five have spoken to me positively about it (the fifth I haven't happened to bump into). As the potential cut to the program was in the balance over the past week, I've been thinking a lot about what has made it so successful for my former students.  It certainly helps that the program has very good teachers and a caring and very hands-on administrator, but perhaps the key element of the program is that the students are made to do their homework in school.  As one of them told me recently, after I'd asked if he was doing the assigned reading, they have to get the work done, or they don't get to go home at the end of the day.

This is a simple but extremely important practice.  It seems indisputable that the number one proximate cause (as opposed to indirect factors like poverty) of student failure at Leafstrewn is failure to do homework.  Having an even better teacher might help, being more genetically gifted might help, and coming from a richer and more educated family certainly helps, but the line separating passing from failing is basically whether kids get their homework done. Certainly for my five students from last year who are now in our alternative program, had they all done their homework, they all would easily have passed English for the year.  (Another program here, the "Tutorial" program, essentially gives students time, space and encouragement to do their homework in school.) This makes me wonder, again, about the value of homework, and it makes me think that Bruce Baker is right and the (modest) success of programs like KIPP is mainly due to spending more money on, among other things, a longer schoolday.  It also makes me think, again, about the value of reading in school.

A student who doesn't read

I had a chat today with a former student who isn't in this alternative program.  I'll call him "Billy."  Billy is a bright, polite, very appealing kid whose family has not had it easy, to put it mildly.  When he was in my ninth grade class two years ago, Billy told me regularly that he wanted to drop out of school so that he could get a job and help support his family.  Like everyone else, I told him that he would be able to help his family better if he stayed in school.  Billy passed my class, barely.  He read virtually none of the assigned reading or our whole-class texts.  He did, however, read four or five Alex Rider books (which are at about a fifth grade level).  Those may have been the only books he has completed in high school.

Billy told me he had failed English in 10th grade and he was in danger of failing this year as well. I asked why. He said: "Because I don't do my homework."  I said, "Do you do the reading?"  He said, "No.  Never."  I said, "But you read in my class.  I remember you reading Alex Rider."  He said, "Yeah, because we read in class. I don't read at home.  I never read at home in your class either."  I don't think that's strictly accurate--I remember him reading Alex Rider at home as well--but it gets at an important truth.

Reading is the most important academic skill.  As I wrote last year, "Our school has kids under its control for over six hours a day.  There is no good reason we can't have them sitting and silently reading books for at least an hour each day.  Nothing else we do with them is as important; nothing else would be as efficient, productive, and individualized." Or, as a Mexican novelist recently wrote in the New York Times, "One cannot help but ask the Mexican educational system, “How is it possible that I hand over a child for six hours every day, five days a week, and you give me back someone who is basically illiterate?”"

If we think reading is valuable, we should be using time in school to have them do it. That a child as bright and wonderful as Billy--a student who devoured Alex Rider books during a six-week independent reading unit--can have read fewer than ten books over his whole high school career is shameful for our school.  We have taken care of Billy in many ways, and we have always treated him with gentleness and respect, but we have mostly not done for him what we would do for our own children--given him books he can read and time to read them.

Homework in School and Social Justice

The proximate cause of these students' failure is that they don't do their homework, but they all share a deeper cause as well: Billy, the students I had last year who ended up in the alternative program, and every student I have this year who is in danger of failing, all come from families that are at the low end of the economic spectrum.  If we really want to "reform" education in a way that will help poorer children succeed, we should start by finding a way to do what our excellent alternative program here at Leafstrewn does, and give kids time to do their homework--especially their reading--in school.

Poverty matters in Wisconsin: No poor school achieves as well as any rich school

Corporate ed reformers like Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee always argue, as in their "manifesto" on "How To Fix Our Schools," that poverty can be overcome by schools and teachers.  That manifesto asks us to start with what they call "the basics" of what they call "failing schools":

     "the single most important factor determining whether students succeed in school is not
     the color of their skin or their ZIP code or even their parents’ income—it is the quality
     of their teacher.”

This is, of course, a straight-out lie.  Unfortunately, lies this convenient are zombies that need to be disproved over and over again. I recently saw, on the blog of a retired math teacher, a graph that (re-)does the job quite neatly.

The graph, gratefully reproduced below, shows very clearly the relationship between poverty and educational achievement.

The state of Wisconsin makes available a lot of data about all of its schools, and the retired math teacher blogger has made a chart comparing the average "student achievement score" for a school (a composite of the math and reading scores on the state tests for all students in a school) with the % of students who are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch.  Each blue dot represents a school; its vertical position represents student achievement, while its left-right position represents the % of "economically disadvantaged students."  (The curved lines are the first and third-degree functions that fit the data best--you can ignore them if you like.)

(From http://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/2013/01/21/poverty-isnt-destiny/)

What I like about this graph is its beautiful symmetry. Look at the top left hand corner of the graph, and you will see that there is not a single rich school (i.e. less than 10% of students eligible for free or reduced price lunch) in the entire state of Wisconsin whose "student achievement" the state measures at less than 54.  Similarly, there is not a single poor school (i.e. FRPL>90%) whose student achievement is above 53. In other words, there is ZERO overlap between the rich schools and the poor schools.

This graph, like the compelling ones compiled by UT physicist Michael Marder, shows that in the real world there is no school--not a single one!--that has succeeded in educating its poor kids to the level of even the lowest-achieving rich-kid schools.  It may be theoretically possible, but as far as I can tell it has never been done, and to say, as Klein, Rhee and their ilk do, that "the single most important factor" determining success in school is not parental income but teachers is offensive to teachers, to kids, and to anyone who cares about truth, science, data, or reality.