There seems to be something about improvements in student achievement inspires the word, On May 7, 2009, New York Times columnist David Brooks penned the latest, Harlem Miracle. The marvel was that, in 2008, 8th graders at the Harlem Promise Academy had scored higher in mathematics than the New York City average for white students. The Promise Academy had eliminated the black-white achievement gap. A miracle. Or, at the very least, a refutation, in Brooks' eyes, of the establishment claims schools alone can't do it all: Some experts, mostly surrounding the education establishment, argue schools alone can't produce big changes. The problems are in society, and you have to work on like economic inequality. Reformers, on the other hand, have argued school-based approaches can produce big results. Reformers believe in excuses and the Promise Academy proves them right. Or does it? Out-of-School Issues First, consider some of the broader issues work against the production of education miracles in poor neighborhoods. David Berliner has summarized research on a number of what he calls out-of-school factors affect in-school performance. In all instances, the factors fall most heavily on poor families. Poor kids get off to a bad start because their mothers don't get adequate prenatal care and are more likely to compromise the fetal environment with a variety of brain-damaging drugs. They are more likely to have low birth weight children (LBW). Modern medicine has increased the numbers of all LBW children who live. ... But these children have many more cognitive and behavioral problems--problems schools (generally public schools) must accommodate (2009, p. 9). poor children lack access to health care and, consequently, children have many more undiagnosed visual, auditory, and dental problems. These can lead, respectively, to reading problems, apparent lack of attention in the classroom, and an inability to concentrate. Hungry kids don't learn well, and Berliner reports food insecurity (the usual euphemism) is 3.4 times higher in households below the official poverty rate, 2.7 times higher in households headed by women, and twice as high in black and Hispanic households as in white (p. 15). Schools have meal programs to offset this problem, but as Linda Perlstein reported in Tested (2007), Many children in poverty are given bottles of sugar water as infants or Oodles of Noodles broth, Froot Loops as toddlers and by the time they show up at school, they're often overweight, undernourished, and plagued with rotting teeth (p. 64). Perlstein describes kids who arrived at school with sodas from McDonald's and laughed when she asked them if they had to drink milk at home. Poor people's air is likely to be more polluted, notes Berliner. Most heavily trafficked roads don't run through wealthy areas, which might account for the epidemics of asthma in some poor neighborhoods. Poor people are much more likely to live near medical incinerators, municipal waste incinerators, and coalfired power plants. They are, therefore, more susceptible to deposits of mercury, which causes brain and nerve damage in fetuses and young children. More common is the problem of lead. It is now understood, writes Berliner, that there is no safe level of lead in the human body and lead at any level has an impact on IQ (p. 21). An extensive and devastating analysis of the impact of lead--and the government's refusal to pay sufficient attention to it--has been conducted by Michael Martin of the Arizona School Boards Association (2009). Berliner reports violence and stress are more likely to occur in poor families and in black and Latino families. Too often, these children show higher rates of aggressive behavior, depression, anxiety, decreased social competence, and diminished academic performance. …
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Open Access
Jul 29, 2011
Joan R Villalbí + 5
