Poverty Isn’t an Insurmountable Obstacle to Education
Kay S. Hymowitz is the William E. Simon fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to City Journal. She is the author of “Manning Up.”
UPDATED FEBRUARY 9, 2014, 6:55 PM
With inequality and social mobility the subject du jour and the American education system still floundering in mediocrity, the question on many people’s minds is how to give poor children a real chance at success. It’s an important discussion, but one frequently accompanied by the mistaken assumption that poor parents doom their children to a future behind a McDonald’s counter.
Even over-stressed low-income parents can instill a belief in education and a sense of discipline.
That belief could use some pushback. It is true that 43 percent of poor children stay stuck in the lowest quintile of the income scale. But that still means a good deal more than half do not. We know a few things about those who make it. They grow up with parents with high expectations for academic achievement. Their parents believe strongly in education as a path to later success, making it more likely that they’ll go to college, which in turn makes them 2.5 times more likely to move out of poverty. We know that their parents have kept things orderly at home; the more domestic “transitions” – new parental partners, stepparents or siblings – the more kids, especially boys, have academic and behavioral difficulties. We also know that if those homes have a television and video console, they are generally turned off.
Of course, higher-income parents are in a much better position to provide “enriching” experiences for their kids, things like visits to museums and theater, foreign trips, music lessons and perhaps even Mandarin-speaking nannies. They tend to have large vocabularies and experience with abstract thinking, which they can model for their children at breakfast and dinner. Their higher status social networks can also help when internships and summer jobs are needed for the college resume.
But beneficial as those enrichments are, they are not absolutely essential to making it. To take just one familiar example: the children of poor, low-skilled Chinese immigrants, most of whom do not speak English, are thriving in (public) school and the labor market. What explains their success? Families that provide stability and discipline while prizing academic achievement above all.
Parents Value Schools, but Society Doesn’t
Brian Jones has taught in New York City public schools for nine years and is now pursuing a Ph.D. in urban education at the CUNY Graduate Center. He co-narrated the film “The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman” and contributed to the book “Education and Capitalism: Struggles for Learning and Liberation.” He is a member of the Movement of Rank and File Educators and writes a blog.
UPDATED JUNE 10, 2014, 11:37 PM
Before we start wagging our fingers at parents, chastising them for their values (or lack thereof), let’s take a look in the mirror. The United States, as a society, doesn’t treat children very well, and someone ought to ask whether Uncle Sam takes schooling and child development seriously enough.
To sneer at parents takes real chutzpah. If the country cared, it would provide all children with the learning environments wealthy children enjoy.
About one out of every four children in this country live in poverty. Most parents lack any paid maternity or paternity leave from their jobs, and arranging for quality child care — especially for infants — is an extremely resource-draining proposition. Since we now know that four out of every five adult Americans will experience poverty at some point during their lives (also conservatively defined as $23,021 a year for a family of four), we can expect a large number of their children to grow up in profound economic and social stress. Add to this long hours of work, long commutes, people forced to work more than one job because of stagnant pay or the ways that mass incarceration breaks up families and you might begin to contemplate the heroic efforts required to raise children in this country.
To give just one example that illustrates who “takes school seriously,” in the 2011-2012 school year, 1,168,354 American children entered school while homeless. Our society couldn’t find them a place to rest their heads, but their parents found a way to get them to class.
Should parents demand more of the schools? Absolutely. But let’s not pretend that they have been quiet up to now. Their persistent calls for smaller class sizes, more arts education, more physical education, well-resourced science laboratories and libraries, and fewer standardized tests, fewer school closings, fewer in-school suspensions and arrests, have, over many decades, largely fallen on deaf political ears.
To look down one’s nose at the country’s parents — many of whom are effectively working miracles to present their children in clean clothes at the school door every day — and huff about whether or not they “take school seriously” requires serious chutzpah, to say the least.
Parents value their children and their education far more than our society does. If the country wanted them to succeed, it would leverage our tremendous national treasure to support the work and expense of being a parent and create for every child the kind of humane, relaxed, resource-rich, joyful learning environments that wealthy children already enjoy.
Correction: An earlier version misstated the level of homelessness among school children. The figure is for students in kindergarten through 12th grade, not pre-kindergarten.
Parents Need to Set Standards for Children
LaShanda Henry is the creator of the Black Parenting Blog and Mahogany Momma Magazine.
UPDATED FEBRUARY 9, 2014, 7:29 PM
Education begins in the home. I grew up in Brooklyn, the child of Jamaican parents who, like most immigrants, moved here to create better lives for their children. In the inner city failing schools are unfortunately very common and yet I was able to excel and obtain a degree from Columbia University. How was that possible? High educational standards were instilled in me from a very early age. By the school board standards 65 was passing, but at home my mother expected nothing less than a 95.
My immigrant mother worked two jobs and still pushed me to push myself, and the standard stuck.
Even when she was working two jobs, she would wake me up as early as 2 a.m. to check homework and make corrections. She pushed me to push myself and the standard stuck. It was her diligent focus on my studies that helped get into Brooklyn Tech one the best public schools in New York City and beyond.
I strongly believe that more parents need to be involved in the educational process. Learning doesn’t stop when the school bell rings. If that means more cell phones need to be confiscated and homework needs to be checked, so be it. I have my own set of practice lessons for my son at home, plus I am in constant communication with his teachers via email and conference meetings. We all know where he is excelling and exactly where he needs help. We are always proactively working with the teachers to create plans that work best for him.
Parents need to push their kids to do better as well as expect better from the school system. Granted, more money has to be put into public school education across the board. Every school, regardless of demographics should have better funding, better curriculum, better parent / teacher support. But at the same time being involved in the schools and being proactive about making them better should be an essential part of the parenting process for all us.
We’ve got social campaigns for anti-bullying and child obesity; I think we need more campaigns encouraging proactive parenting specifically with respect to education. When parents get together and expect more from both their children and their schools a great deal of positive change can be made.
Blame the Policy Makers, not Parents, for Poor Schools
Leonie Haimson, is the executive director of Class Size Matters, a board member of Network for Public Education, and a founding member of NY State Allies for Public Education.
UPDATED FEBRUARY 9, 2014, 6:55 PM
Recently, President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have exhorted parents in order to promote their education agenda. In his State of the Union address, Obama called for “more challenging curriculums and more demanding parents.“
Place responsibility where it belongs: inequitable school funding, high class sizes, soaring poverty and failed leadership.
Earlier, Duncan critiqued parents who are rising up against the imposition of an increasingly harsh testing regime as “white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.”
While speaking before the National PTA, Duncan disparaged parents, and urged them to be more like those in South Korea who are “relentless” and have “the highest of expectations – insisting their children receive an excellent education.”
In truth, there is little evidence that South Korean schools provide a better education. The average South Korean family pays 20 percent of its disposable income on tutoring and private “cram” schools. The competitive drive to succeed on high-stakes exams is so overwhelming that their youth have extremely high suicide rates, and, according to O.E.C.D. figures, are the unhappiest students in the world. Even the South Korean president and the education minister have warned us against emulating their system – and many Korean families move to this country to escape its unwarranted stress.
At the same time, parents here are increasingly rising up and rejecting a set of federal and state policies that impose a regime of centralized and unpiloted standards, high stakes testing, tracking and disclosing personal student data and other damaging and oppressive experiments. These policies violate children’s privacy and deprive them of a well-rounded education in favor of scripted and rigid lessons, developmentally inappropriate standards, and excessive test prep.
Rather than insisting that parents should get with the program and put more pressure on their kids, Obama needs to recognize that parents are now demanding more of him. They are challenging him and other policymakers to wake up to the damage being done, reverse course and institute proven reforms that will strengthen our schools rather than stifle children’s creativity and independent thinking, by forcing them into a cookie-cutter mold.
Blaming parents for struggling schools or low student performance is inaccurate, unfair and shifts the responsibility from where it should be: inequitable school funding, high class sizes, soaring poverty and failed leadership.
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