Poverty Does Not Restrict a Student's Ability to Learn

Abstract

In the early 1800s, the prevalent theoretical construct in the U.S. was genetic determinism, that is, who you were and what you could become were determined by what you had inherited. With the socialist movements in government came the theoretical construct of social determinism, that is, who you are and what you can become are determined by systems and social access. determinism also became the underlying theoretical construct for many social justice and multicultural studies. In the late 1980s, state assessments and school accountability began to surface, leading to the federal No Child Left Behind Act in January 2002. In essence, what NCLB said was this: We don't care whether you believe in genetic determinism or social determinism. Every child will learn and will learn to a level of proficiency against a standard knowledge and skills set. Period. The underlying theoretical construct became cognitive determinism (my terminology)--that is, everyone has a mind, and we will develop every mind. This development was being driven by the knowledge-based economy focusing on the development of intellectual capital (Stewart 1997), the new form of economic currency. Many educators grieved at the onset of rigorous state assessments and accountability. A number of the educators I worked with were either leaving teaching or becoming depressed. They said things like There's nothing I can do. It's hopeless. In the mid-1990s, I wrote A Framework for Understanding Poverty to help educators better address the issues in poverty. The underlying theoretical construct for the book is learning, a concept advanced by Lave and Wenger of Columbia University (1991). In essence, this theoretical approach says that virtually all initial occurs in situated learning environments that have context, language, relationships, and tasks where you reason with stories and act on situations. When a person goes from a situated-learning environment to formalized schooling, becomes decontextualized; the relationships and context are largely taken away. In formalized schooling, students reason with laws and act on symbols (numbers, letters, drawings, etc.). The purpose of Framework was to explain the situated-learning environment of generational (not situational) poverty and the bridges and strategies needed for students to make successful transitions to the decontextualized environment of school. To survive poverty, one must be an incredible problem solver. The decontextualized environment of school requires students to use an abstract representational system of knowledge that is learned and usually not available in the situated-learning environment of generational poverty. CRITICISM OF THE BOOK Then the criticism of the book started. Virtually all of the criticism comes from nontenured professors of higher education and a few practitioners who are firmly wedded to social determinism. Social determinism has gained much ideological purchase, especially among liberal academics. Indeed, it has largely become a political doctrine that has given up any pretense of being scientific (Levite 1996). Deficit is one of the phrases used by critics. It is a theoretical model that doesn't have a statistical research base. In other words, you can say the glass is half full of water or half empty. Regardless of which terminology you use, the level of water doesn't change. Deficit tends to be assigned to any model developed by a person of the dominant culture (I am white) that looks at what a student cannot do. To prepare students for state assessment, a teacher must know what they can and cannot do. The 2005 edition of Framework includes an additive model. The very first point states that the model honors internal assets of people from all economic classes, including poverty. …