The article Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success outlines six factors that point to potential educational problems, which are conveniently ignored by the federal No Child Left Behind mandate. They are: prenatal non-genetic factors, inadequate medical care, food insecurity, environmental pollutants, family relations and stress, and neighborhood characteristics. One of the things I found interesting about this is that the NCLB law assumes that all school achievement can be directly attributed to the school. For example, a low achieving school is low achieving because it is a "bad" school. This article tells us that academic achievement may not be something entirely up to the school. The article states that students spend about 1,150 waking hours per year in school and 4,700 waking hours per year in their neighborhood. This tells us that in some places the negative effect of the neighborhood can greatly impact the students, even more so than any positive influence the school environment can provide.
I see these children in my classroom every day. I usually don't know much about the prenatal and other medical care of my students, but I see those with not enough to eat. I see the impact of family issues when they come up. Most striking to me in the reading was the impact of the environment on the students. The neighborhood I work in is home to a dying steel industry. There is an empty lot that is across from the school that is an enormous slag heap. (Slag is a steel production waste product. ) Elsewhere nearby are factories spewing smoke, commercial barges floating the nearby waterways, and the expressway buzzing above. It does not surprise me that over half of my students have asthma. This causes them to miss school more often, which can cause them to fall behind. I don't even want to get into other neighborhood influences of drugs, gangs, and violence.
Another alarming fact I found in 2005 a NCES report gave some dire statistics for African-American and Latino students. 49% of black and 48% of latino students were eligible for the federal free/reduced lunch. The federal free/reduced lunch statistics are the typical reporting measures for classifying a school as "high-poverty". So, for so-called "minority" students, the situation is dire- about half of them live in poverty and are forecasted for potentially low educational achievement. Can't we do better than this? Doesn't our government have a responsibility here? This is where many people point to charter schools and other alternative schools to help solve the problem of educational achievement. Pull out the best, most promising students and give them a chance at a quality education, right? But what happens to those left behind in the faltering neighborhood schools? The Poverty and Potential article suggests the same thing that happens when upwardly mobile families move out of a disadvantaged neighborhood. It creates a drain on role-models for the whole community. This perpetuates the environment and keeps the cycle going.
What is to be done about this? The article suggests that increasing the school contact time for students is about the only direct method to influence students. This means giving access to pre-school programs, after school programs, and summer programs. Is this enough? Probably not. It seems that we not only have to increase school access time, but also increase the quality of life in the neighborhood, and in the entire world too. I hope that in the very near future we can begin to address these factors in education. For too long we have been making the assumption that all students come to school every day ready, willing, and able to learn when we know that this is simply not the case. That African proverb "It takes a village to raise a child" that Hilary Clinton made popular some years back is distinctly and literally true. To help children learn, the entire community needs to pitch in. It is about time we look to our communities in a new way- for schools to change, the whole community needs to change.
