Once more on poverty and education

It's been well-documented that when it comes to test scores, the main thing holding America's students back is poverty. The corporate reformers have been attempting for decades now to boost test scores through their tough love measures of "rigor," "accountability," and "privatization," but despite their best efforts, their precious scores haven't budged. Meanwhile, schools that serve middle and high income populations continue to produce "world class" test results, while those serving lower income populations produce low ones. It has become quite obvious, if it wasn't before, that the most effective way to fix so-called "failing" schools is to fix poverty: this is not a problem with schools, but with our wider society.

But no, the neoliberal idea, the one embraced by every politician, left, right, and center, including Clinton, is that poverty can be magically fixed by fixing our broken schools according to their ideologically driven notions of "reform." You see, in this world view, poverty is the fault of those who are poor, rather than economic policies that we've enacted over the past three decades that have caused 100 percent of income growth to go to those who are already in the top 10 percent. The poor are just too uneducated to figure it out, so we'll drill and kill their kids in the hope that test score results will somehow lead to economic prosperity for all . . . Or something like that.

Teacher Tom, "What Hillary Clinton Said"

I've been enjoying this blog, by a teacher at a progressive preschool, for a couple weeks now; I've been mulling over the ineffectiveness of directive statements and trying to give more informational statements to kids at the library -- "Your voices are a bit loud for the library" rather than "Please lower your voices." Libraries are different from schools -- you're not really in a loco parentis role even with very young children, you don't really have any more authority over children than you do over adults -- but it's interesting as a way to think about things.