Class Matters — In and Out of School

Abstract

LOW achievement and high dropout rates among poor and minority students continue to U.S. society. And we say plague purposefully, because these children are all our children, and our nation will profit by or pay for whatever they become. While much attention over the past quarter century has focused on reforming the schools these students attend, little or no progress has been made in actually closing the achievement gaps or reducing the number of dropouts. Why? Aren't Americans a can-do people? We eradicated the childhood scourge of polio, built the best road system since the Romans, put men on the moon, outlasted the Soviet Union, and created universities that are the envy of the world. But the problem of underachievement by poor and minority students has confounded us. High-level commissions issue warnings, governors hold summits, think tanks produce reports, scholars write books, and Congress passes laws. But the U.S. has failed to deliver on its promise to provide a high-quality education to every child. In the 1960s, Martin Luther King, Jr., forced our nation to face the inequities of race, poverty, and war. But today, these three inequities still exist in this country. RETHINKING THE PROBLEM Surely schools need to be improved, especially the schools that serve poor and minority children. But school improvement alone will not suffice. We believe in the power of good teaching, but educators alone cannot do a job so large. We can inspire individual students to break through the boundaries of social class, but we cannot lift a whole social class of students to a higher level of achievement. Low achievement and dropping out are problems rooted in social and economic inequality--a force more powerful than curricula, teaching practices, standardized tests, or other school-related policies. Richard Rothstein summed it up best: For nearly half a century, the association of social and economic disadvantage with the student achievement gap has been well known to economists, sociologists, and educators. Most, however, have avoided the obvious implication of this understanding--raising the achievement of lower-class children requires amelioration of the social and economic conditions of their lives, not just school reform. (1) Once acknowledged, this truth has profound implications for educators and policy makers alike. If all efforts to close achievement gaps concentrate exclusively on schools and school reform, they will fail, leaving schools and teachers to shoulder the blame. In turn, good administrators and teachers, who are doing their best under difficult circumstances, will be driven out of the profession, a prospect that can only make matters worse. As Gary Orfield sums it up: Doing educational reform while ignoring the fundamental cleavages in society is profoundly counterproductive. (2) A useful way of visualizing the remedy for the chronic problem of low achievement of poor and minority students is to return to Abraham Maslow's 1954 hierarchy of needs for self-actualization. We have patterned a hierarchy of needs for a self-actualized society after Maslow's (see Figure 1). AFFORDABLE HOUSING IN STABLE NEIGHBORHOODS Nearly one-third of the nation's poorest children have attended three different schools by third grade. Such high mobility depresses achievement. One study found that reducing the mobility of low-income students to that of other students would eliminate 7% of the test-score gap by income and 14% of the black/white test score gap. (3) Other studies have shown that low-income families and children benefit when integrated into middle-class neighborhoods. This integration requires housing subsidies for poor families. (4) After Brown v. Board of Education, flight became common across the country. Middle-income white families moved to the suburbs, leaving only poor families in the inner cities. …