Public School Failure and the Poverty Connection

"If you're a child born into a poor household, you're more likely to exhibit psychological symptoms than if you were born to a non-poor household - symptoms that are a direct result of being born poor.

Thought it would be interesting to juxtapose two articles:

This is Your Brain on Poverty: What Science Tells Us About Poverty and The Myth Behind Public School Failure

The latter article provides a a nice summary of the strategy to place the blame for "failing" schools on public education and offer privatization as the heavenly manna. Nice quote from Chris Hedges:

The federal government spends some $600 billion a year on education—“and the corporations want it. That’s what’s happening."

This is Your Brain on Poverty speaks to the research behind understanding the effects of poverty on brain development. In the article two researchers posit the bandwidth metaphor as a way of understanding the effects of poverty.

The human brain has a finite amount of bandwidth. If one is forced to spend that worrying about poverty, it will necessarily have less capacity to spend on other tasks. 

Now - let's take a look at a third article by William Galston,* entitled "Is there a Crises?" Galston puts forward that there are actually two public school systems in America, one is suburban and relatively well-funded and the other is urban/rural, and relatively underfunded. Galston reaches an interesting conclusion:

When anyone speaks of the distinction between the suburbs and the cities in America, and the distinction between suburban school districts and urban school districts, one is speaking to a significant extent about race and ethnicity and class. If we do not close the gap between the two systems of public education in America, the system that could and should be better, but which is not failing its students, on the one hand, and the system that is failing its students on the other, then we will be condemning our society to the perpetuation of the distinctions and the inequalities across lines of race, ethnicity, and class that we've been struggling to overcome in recent generations.

My conclusion: If we are serious about providing equitable opportunities for all youth in the public sphere (this is not to say that people of wealth can't go to private schools, only that the public sphere should be equitable) then we need to:
* Provide all schools with the same resources
* Tackle poverty in America as a starting point through (a) raising the minimum wage to a living wage; (b) ensuring that all people have affordable health care; (c) providing free childcare to all working parents; (d) providing job training opportunities and expanding subsidized apprenticeships and adult education.


* Professor and director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at the University of Maryland School of Public Affairs

See Also

 "Historic Use of the Term Failing School"

"Is American Culture to Blame for Failing Schools"