Poverty Isn’t Destiny?

Quite a few Ed Deformers say that Poverty Isn’t Destiny. They say that it doesn’t matter if a child has been subjected to lead poisoning, separation from parents, violent or otherwise cruel child abuse, inadequate nutrition, and has lacked dental or health care and the love and care of a family during the first, crucial years. All it takes is for a Bright Young Thing fresh out of college to work her butt off for two years before she goes to work for a bank — and all of those handicaps will be overcome, with no extra dollars invested, and maybe even less!

Or maybe not.

Lots of teachers have been working their butts off for many decades, doing their best, believe it or not (for the most part).

Here are two three graphs from Wisconsin that show how close the connection between the poverty rates and student achievement levels, at all of their schools for which they provide data. My data come from here and are for SY 2011-2012. In fact, you can download the entire spreadsheet for the state of Wisconsin if you click on this link:

http:reportcards.dpi.wi.gov/files/reportcards/xls/2011-12reportcarddata.xlsx

In both all three graphs, the percentage of students at the schools is along the horizontal (X) axis. In the first two, the average achievement score at the school is along the vertical (Y) axis.

In this first graph, Wisconsin uses a 100-point scale for overall student achievement.

That is an incredibly strong correlation between poverty levels and student achievement. The fewer the proportion of poor students at a school, the better the achievement scores at that school.

I had Excel compute two correlation “trend” lines – one straight, in black, and one curved, in red following a third-degree polynomial, since it looks like we have a serious “Matthew effect” going on here. In either case, the R-squared and R values are very elevated, showing that, in fact, poverty is in fact destiny for a lot of kids.

The next graph is for reading only, but it shows essentially the same trend. School reading scores go from 0 to 50.

There are very few real-life correlations between two entities stronger than what you see in these two graphs.

This next graph is a little different, for two reasons: the y-axis is math, and it’s the percent of students deemed ‘proficient’ on whatever test Wisconsin is using. It also shows a very strong correlation.

Widening US Educational Achievement Gap Between Rich and Poor?

A Stanford professor has analyzed data for the past 50 years, concluding that the gap in educational achievement between the wealthy and the poor has become considerably wider since about 1960; it’s now roughly twice as large as the black-white gap, when it used to be roughly the reverse!

A quote from his article,  http://cepa.stanford.edu/content/widening-academic-achievement-gap-between-rich-and-poor-new-evidence-and-possible

The widening academic achievement gap between the rich and the poor: New evidence and possible explanations

…

In this chapter I examine whether and how the relationship between family socioeconomic characteristics and academic achievement has changed during the last fifty years. In particular, I investigate the extent to which the rising income inequality of the last four decades has been paralleled by a similar increase in the income achievement gradient. As the income gap between high- and low-income families has widened, has the achievement gap between children in high- and low-income families also widened?

The answer, in brief, is yes. The achievement gap between children from high- and low-income families is roughly 30 to 40 percent larger among children born in 2001 than among those born twenty-five years earlier. In fact, it appears that the income achievement gap has been growing for at least fifty years, though the data are less certain for cohorts of children born before 1970. In this chapter, I describe and discuss these trends in some detail. In addition to the key finding that the income achievement gap appears to have widened substantially, there are a number of other important findings.

First, the income achievement gap (defined here as the income difference between a child from a family at the 90th percentile of the family income distribution and a child from a family at the 10th percentile) is now nearly twice as large as the black-white achievement gap. Fifty years ago, in contrast, the black-white gap was one and a half to two times as large as the income gap.

Staff Seniority Versus Percentage of School in Poverty

I was under the impression that our highest-poverty, lowest-achieving students were being saddled with our most inexperienced teachers.

Apparently, that’s not quite so.

Brand-new teachers abound everywhere in DCPS, and continue to quit in droves in the middle of the year or after just one or two years. It’s not just in high-poverty schools: it’s everywhere.

This graph shows the lack of correlation between the median hire date of all staff at all DC public schools that I could find data on, and the percentages of students deemed eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. The latter status is generally used as our only way to judge the students’ families’ poverty level. The median hire date is the date where half of the staff were hired before that date, and the other half were hired after that date.

I tried running a linear regression, and the correlation was so low (o.o2) that it’s not worth considering.

What is significant is the fact that we have in DCPS about twenty schools that have less than 50% of their students in poverty, and we have about a hundred (yes, roughly 100) schools with very high poverty rates.

Here’s the graph:

Comments?

A rant concerning education

There is fraud in many, many realms of work and human enterprise. Including lawyers, doctors, businessmen, accountants, engineers, policemen, nurses, painters, taxi drivers, politicians, ‘reformers’, housewives, babies, children, students, the retired, stockholders, hunter-gatherers, soldiers, officers, spies, writers like me… (Sorry if I left out your favorite group; I got tired of typing this list) We are all sometimes crooked, no? Including some teachers.

But I think the problem is deeper. Yes, there is an awful lot of corruption and outright graft in education (as it is in many other areas). But I think that education and upbringing of the next generation is one of the most important things we can do. The last thing we really want is to have gangs of unemployed, disengaged kids hanging on street-corners, engaging in thuggish and criminal behavior, getting locked up for various offenses, engaging in violence and so on … regardless of whether their freaking math and reading test scores were ‘proficient’, ‘advanced’, ‘basic’, or ‘below basic’ – that’s not really important. What’s important is, are they becoming good human beings, or otherwise? And is it the sole job of the classroom teacher to fix all that? I don’t think he or she could if they tried. And, lord knows, they have been trying. And in the past 10 years they have been forced to work harder and harder, to no real human avail nor real improvement.

One could easily make the argument that we don’t spend nearly enough money on education. Heck, every single student should begin learning a foreign language soon after they learn to write their own. Plus, they should get really good coaching in some sort of physical endeavor (not necessarily a sport). Plus, they should all learn to play a musical instrument and to cook good food. And to appreciate good literature, music, and other cultures. And learn how to use various tools (metal, wood, software, and much, much more).

And to learn how society actually does function, and how it SHOULD work, why it works the way it does instead of the way it should, and to try to figure out ways from get from the actual present situation to an improved situation.

We are doing very little of any of this with our most underprivileged young society members. The kids who are raised in our ghettoes very seldom get to learn any of that stuff. Instead, society waits until they do something really, really wrong, and then locks them up. But it’s really, really expensive to keep someone locked up for 30 or 40 years – at about $20,000 per prisoner per year, that’s six hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand dollars ($600,000 to $800,000) per prisoner. It would have been a lot cheaper in the long run to invest in after-school programs to seriously engage students in sports, music, and much, much more, including lots of field trips to museums, zoos, mountains, beaches, factories, farms, and much, much more.

Instead, we are narrowing our educational goals more and more onto things that really don’t matter very much at all. (Have you actually LOOKED at the inane questions they ask on these dinky standardized NCLB tests? They were written by people who have absolutely no experience in the real world, or chose to ignore everything they ever learned about it.)