Education popped back onto my radar this week, propelled by two separate online sources. An article at CityLab failed, crashed, burned, and then disintegrated as it took claims made in a report by an equity in education think tank and, in essence, unknowingly made the case that every claim which the report made was refuted by the facts. In the other an interviewer and interviewee reveal that they have spent millions of dollars, in the case of the former, and decades of their life, in the case of the latter, to finally arrive at the conclusion they could have garnered from any one of my “It’s the Schools, Stupid” series: we reverse cause and effect when it comes to educational outcomes and students.
In “The Whiter, Richer School District Right Next Door” Adam Harris selects the Waterbury, Wolcott, and Plymouth school districts in Connecticut to highlight how disparities in funding create disparate outcomes between students. Unfortunately for him a commenter discovered that Waterbury, the “poorer, browner” school district outspends each of these Whiter, Richer School Districts Next Door on a per pupil basis according to ctfinance.org. I was unable to find that data myself and so I just put “per pupil spending” and the names of the towns into Google and got the same results.
Furthermore, in looking into the report itself I noticed this little tidbit: In Massachusetts, Springfield isn’t analyzed. Hmmm, could that be because the city gets so much state funding that it dwarfs the spending of most of the surrounding communities? Instead, working class but hardly poor Chicopee is made the poster child by comparing it to neighboring Ludlow. I’m not sure, but I think that might be what’s called “cherry picking” your data.
I agree with the basic argument that poorer districts should be able to fund their schools at levels which correspond to surrounding communities, but pretending that balancing out those inequities, where they exist, will lead to similar outcomes belies ALL OF THE DATA. The single greatest determinant of educational outcomes is parental incomes regardless of per pupil expenditures.
Poor schools need more funding because poorer kids are harder to educate. You don’t increase resources in an emergency room in hopes that you can make the outcomes correspond to those of your GP, you do it because the ER needs resources, and you judge what’s done with those resources by looking for overall improvement, or comparing outcomes to those of other equivalent emergency rooms.
Two people from opposite ends of the political spectrum have a conversation on the podcast Pitchfork Economics in which they arrive at the same conclusion. Diane Ravitch, Assistant Secretary of Education under George H.W. Bush, and Nick Hanauer, self proclaimed progressive admit that they were both misguided in their attempts to reform the American educational system, and that in the end they both have done more harm than good. They’ve determined that the overall economy and salaries drive successful schools and not vice versa.
I’ve read Diane Ravitch’s book Reign of Error and recommend it, but I was surprised to hear her say in an aside during the interview that “integration was successful”. She must mean that during the brief period before the dynamic impact of integration, White flight, occurred, there were some positive outcomes. Forced integration wasn’t even successful at forcing integration. Having failed to actually create integrated schools, how could it be successful at doing anything else?
I further recommend the Jacobin Radio interview last week with Lily Geismer on Race and Class in the Liberal Suburbs. It more or less covers the same ground I did in my Crossing the Divide (minute 51) presentation. In essence wealthy liberals talk a good game when it comes to integration, but they pay enormous premiums to make sure their kids don’t go to school with Black and Hispanic kids unless their numbers and characteristics, those of the minority children, are carefully vetted.
To conclude this media centric post I recommend Chuck Marohn’s interview with Chris Andrade. There’s a lot of there there and not all of it relates to my situation in Springfield, but the idea of staying in a particular community is one which resonates with me. It isn’t that I feel that anyone who moves away from their hometown is maladaptive or evil, but seeing value in a non-superstar place is often viewed as abnormal by folks in the “front row”. It is a much more common sentiment expressed in the MSM and by elites; it was only a little while ago that Richard Florida in particular commented in an extensive essay that the desire of many people to remain in their communities was an obstacle to be overcome. Apparently more of us need to move to San Francisco or Cambridge. What could go wrong?
(Photos by Luna)
My wife just got home from the Food Zone with Luna. The closing of the more mainstream Food Mart at that same location some years ago initiated talk of a food desert here in Springfield. It’s hardly a place where you see a lot of White middle class folk; like my wife and LuLu. But it is right on one bus route and a block from at least two more. It doesn’t stop there, they will not only deliver food to you, but they’ll deliver you to the food if you can spend $50! Non sequitur? Not really. Listen to the podcast with Chris Andrade. Food Zone isn’t Albertsons. I’m not gonna lie, I don’t know what half the stuff they sell in Food Zone even is. But I think most of the people in the neighborhood do. It’s not a food desert because I can’t buy a rotisserie chicken or get a nice bottle of wine.
What? I can get a bottle of wine there?
That can’t be good.
I like to ask a different question. What happens when formerly middle class families experience reduced circumstances and can no longer buy their way in to the “better” school district? As more and more Americans slide downhill there’s a desperate scratching and clawing at what was believed to be their rightful status based on individual hard work, virtue, etc. So what happens when people work hard, are virtuous, blah, blah, blah yet no longer have access to the comfortable home on a cul-de-sac and a premium school?
The weirdest thing to me about that podcast interview was the extent to which both Hanauer and Ravitch implied or (in Hanauer’s case) openly stated that American educational results were worse now than they used to be, and that it’s because the schools have more poor brown children in them. It was so strange first of all because it’s not true that test scores are any worse than they used to be and second because even if the Houston public schools aren’t as white as they were when Ravitch was a student there, the public schools in the country as a whole still represent the overall demographics of the country’s population, and there’s no more poverty in the country now than there was in the fifties. Very strange stuff, even if it’s nice that they both belatedly figured out the obvious fact that the schools reflect society rather than the other way around.
As a Cambridge resident, I have to say that while it’s great to stay in your hometown (I did!), I still wouldn’t mind having a lot more people move here. I just hope they come from suburbia, not places like Springfield.
eric:
Just like that except for a few outlier cities (and even there, the problems are often very concentrated geographically) the modern fixation on crime belies the realities. Banning tetra-ethyl lead did wonders for public safety?
People now posting things like “I am afraid to drive to attend the local event because of mass shootings” ignore the statistical reality that driving is dangerous, too!
Can certainly see you all’s points about school achievements. Family structure, income, and culture do matter, even if some of the problems can be tied directly to the country’s history (ongoing) of systemic racism.
Re: Hometowns.
Have to say while I still follow Fort Wayne politics and urban development from afar, I was a nerdy little bookish “fag” who absolutely hated growing up there and don’t have much angst about leaving decades ago. LOL. Although Fort Wayne actually has done or is doing some neat urbanist things over the past few decades. One can get an awesome espresso downtown now!
And this is amazing: https://fortwayneelectricworks.com/
if they can pull it off.
Still….I am a fanatical recreational cyclist and not that big a fan of corn and soybean fields. I will take my northern California location, despite many problems. 🙂
“ The single greatest determinant of educational outcomes is parental incomes regardless of per pupil expenditures.
Poor schools need more funding because poorer kids are harder to educate.”
I think that in a lot of discussions about teaching, schooling and education, there are often underlying assumptions that are rarely discussed, language used that is not defined, and just a whole lot of vagueness.
What exactly are we trying to impart to children during their 8 or 12 or 16 or more years of incarceration? What educational outcome are we trying to achieve through our school system?
The overwhelming majority of everything everyone learns in life is learned outside of formal schooling. The overwhelming majority of what is learned during formal schooling, apart from some of the hard sciences, is close to useless for helping prepare children to become happy, satisfied, productive, caring, motivated, curious and intelligent adults.
The reason why children of rich parents do better, (by some metrics) than children of poor parents has everything to do with their life outside of school. They are going to go on vacations, be supplied with tutors to help them navigate the system, hear more intèresting conversations arôund the dinner table and from neighbors and so on. Their money will buy them access to a world that will enable them to “succeed” despite their schooling.
Poor kids don’t have that access, but that sure as hell doesn’t make them harder to “educate” although it may make them harder to school. Mark Twain hinted at the distinction when he vowed never to let schooling get in the way of his education.
Let’s not confuse process with substance, or conflate teaching with learning or schooling with education.
My wife just started teaching third grade last year here in Detroit. Her class showed the biggest improvement year over year and had the highest overall scores for her grade in the charter system she teaches in. The students are 95% black and 100% poor. A third of them don’t want to be there but they can’t be thrown out so they continuè to disrupt the classes every day. Many of them have parents who care and those kids will continue to do well, despite their economic situation. The ones who don’t have anyone in their life who gives a f***will do poorly at just about everything regardless of their color, economic situation or parents’ income.
My wife comes from a “poverty” (in Kenya) that is unimaginable to most Americans. The difference with her “poverty” and the poverty of the kids here in Detroit is that there was no such stigma attached, and no victim status attached to it. You weren’t regardless as hopeless and difficult to teach because your parents didn’t have money.
Her father wasn’t present, there was little to no food, no electricity, no running water, no money.
Today she is teaching English and math and social studies to American kids, in English, which is her third language. She wasn’t hard to teach, because she was eager to learn. She wasn’t burdened by the low expectations that we Americans tend to have for “underprivileged” children, so she could rise more easily to the topnrough hr hard work. Her school had no money and her mother even less but there were no allowances made for that. You either performed or were sent home.
The American school system is a disaster at so many levels, for so many reasons that there isn’t room to go into it here, but one thing we do NOT need more of is money, not for the schools’ and not for the parents and children.
In one sense you are right about not needing more money, in that more money won’t ever bring student achievement in poor-kid schools up to the level of that in rich-kid schools. In another sense, however, you’re wrong, in that the poorest and most troubled kids are the most in need of extra time and attention (as your wife’s experience attests). If it were up to me, I wouldn’t spend much energy trying to reform our schools; I would try to reform the society in a direction of greater equality of opportunity (which to me means single payer health care, a higher minimum wage, some kind of reform of the labor-capital relationship, making zoning and property development more libertarian while also building some socialized housing for the poorest people, etc.), but whatever we choose we should realize that we aren’t going to change the society by changing the schools. The cause and effect goes mostly the other direction.
You are absolutely correct that troubled kids need more attention (I’m not so sure about poor ones though) but what does that have to do with money? They don’t need professional nannies who are paid to pretend they care, they need someone, one adult at least, who actually, really gives a f***. You can’t buy that with more staff. It has to come from parents, mentors, or neighbors.
Admittedly this is a small sample, but none of the kids in my wife’s class and none of the kids I know on my street have any problems that can be solved by money.
They all have problems that could be solved by better parenting, a school system that was more interested in learning than teaching, and so on.
And no, the schools aren’t going to change society, no matter how many trillions of dollars we pour into them.
No argument from me on the content of most of this. I understand what you mean in differentiating education from schooling and I can see for myself(and have written about it)that helicopter schooling may very well put kids in harm’s way. Unfortunately the school are judged on how well they get young people to conform to the expectations whether those expectations are meaningful or not.
I would push back even a little more on any claims that poorer kids are not harder to educate even leaving that other argument behind. In Springfield only 6% of kids arrive in kindergarten with the expected knowledge of the alphabet, numbers, and shapes. I’ve seen the environments these kids come from: a classroom where 24 out of 25 kids don’t have the basic tools and struggle to be adequately fed is, yes, “harder to educate” than a class in the community where I teach and perhaps 2 or 3 might arrive without that knowledge and/or dealing with a home where there is food insecurity.
I concur, money isn’t the problem, but adequate funding is necessary to give teachers what they need(usually smaller class sizes) to succeed. The “superwoman” argument doesn’t do it for me. We need to help the teachers we have succeed. Counting on a system that demands that every teacher be some kind of wonder man/woman is not a replicable system.
When you write that unfortunately schools are judged on how well they get students to conform to the expectations set for them ,meaningful or not, I think you touch on the larger, vitally important question of: what actual purpose do schools serve in Amèrica? Teaching conformity? Social control? Babysitting? If we can’t even clearly define what our objectives are, how on earth are we going to know how to proceed, and how to judge success or failure?
And yes, it is hard to learn on an empty stomach, but here, at least, the problem seems to be what the poor kids are eating, which is 99% sugar and salt snack garbage, not that they are not eating. And no matter how many more millions are spent on “healthy” food options at school, nothing can compensate for the inherent stupidity of the mindless robotic automatons at the school cafeteria who instruct the students to put their apples and healthy snacks immediately into the garbage pail after having received them from the cafeteria line because “time is up” for lunch, since four of the classes are scheduled at the same time, and food is not allowed to be brought into the classroom. Once again, you could have gourmet organic fair trade meals catered by five star chefs, but if you have uncaring mindless, soulless idiots scheduling lunchtime, the kids are still going to be hungry. No money issues here.
And I have no idea what is going on at home that children don’t know their colors and shapes or whatever, but I do know that it doesn’t take years and millions of dollars to bring them up to speed.
My whole point here is that one or two generations ago, here in America, just about everyone, including those whose parents didn’t speak English, learned how to read and write and do math at a high enough level to succeed quite well, at a cost that would be a tiny, tiny fraction of what we now spend per capita to “educate” our children. The only difference now, besides the dramatic price inflation, is that with all this additional spending, students now are demonstrably, undeniably less literate and lessa blé to do basic math than the students of two generations ago.
I’m suggesting that we don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but maybe look backwards to see what used to work, and try that again. We could save a lot of money in process.
About my wife…..I wasn’t advocating for super woman….quite the opposite. My point was that anyone, anyone from any background who
1. Is motivated
2. Gives a f***
3. Has one adult in life who cares
Can and will outperform anyone else regardless of trillions of dollars being spent on the unmotivated, rich or poor, emotionally neglected, regardless of race, neighborhood, background, dollars per child spent and so on.
One side constraint though that colors the data about per-student spending is that “poor” school districts often have way higher populations of special education and ESL students, whose costs are substantially higher than other students. So, while the overall per-student spending might be comparable or higher, it’s not necessarily true that each student has equal resources available to them.
More school spending isn’t a magic bullet to cure all social ills, but I do think that if it didn’t provide any returns at all, wealthier towns wouldn’t fall over themselves taxing themselves (and others) to pay for it.