By Chris Fitzsimon
Despite what we are told is a healthy economy and relatively low unemployment rates, the percentage of poor students in public schools is on the rise in North Carolina and the South. It is yet another reminder that helping poor families remains the most important education reform.
A report released this week by the Southern Education Foundation finds that poor kids make up the majority of student populations in public schools in 11 Southern states. Forty-nine percent of students in North Carolina public schools are from poor families, up from 40 percent just seven years ago. And that is far from the whole story.
The overall percentage of poor kids in school is 49, but that number varies widely from school district to school district and from school to school within districts.
One thing that varies far less is the correlation between family poverty and graduation rates and students’ scores on standardized tests. Putting aside the valid concerns about standardized testing, and there are many, the relationship between poverty and student achievement and performance is clear.
Schools with high percentages of poor students don’t do as well as schools with fewer poor kids, even when the measurement is improvement from year to year, not simply raw test scores.
A McClatchy story on the new report noted that test scores of poor students were as much as 30 points lower on math and reading tests that are part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The same is true in North Carolina at the school level, where schools are ranked on a variety of criteria, including the improvement in student test scores
The highest designation is Honor School of Excellence. The 2006 version of the testing program named 51 schools with 20 percent or less of their students eligible for free or reduced lunch as Honor Schools of Excellence. No school with a student population of at least 80 percent poor children earned the designation.
The same is true for the schools at the bottom of the ranking, with 19 low-performing schools having at least 80 percent poor students. Only two schools with less than 20 percent of students eligible for free or reduced lunch were low performing.
It all makes a compelling case that anti-poverty efforts must be at the center of any education reform, something that continues to be conspicuously missing from the policy agenda and speeches of most of the political leaders in the state.
They do talk about helping children, and early-childhood programs are important, but are clearly not enough. Just as vital are efforts to help families with child care, affordable housing and access to health care so they can begin the slow climb out of poverty.
That is not a new message, but one that continues to be ignored. This week’s report also makes the case for more efforts to identify and help struggling students who are overwhelmingly students of color and students with special potential caught in a system stacked against them.
Call it affirmative action if you want, but don’t dismiss it until you consider this item in the latest book from economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.
Krugman cites a study by the National Center for Education Statistics that tracked a group of students in the 8th grade in 1988 and divided them into different groups based on their math scores and their family income.
The study found that students in the top 25 percent of family incomes that scored in the lowest 25 percent on the math test were more likely to graduate from college than students who scored in the highest 25 percent on the test and came from the poorest 25 percent of the families in the group.
In other words, a higher percentage of the lowest-performing wealthy students graduated from college, compared to the highest-performing poor students. The inescapable conclusion is that poverty not only matters in how well a student performs in school, it adds huge barriers for the poor students who, against all odds, manage to do well.
Poverty matters in school. And the percentage of poor students in our schools is increasing. The question remains: when will our policymakers finally talk about it?