Could this tie in to the recent NYT series on gender-based education differences? Isn't the real issue here the education of urban males from lower socio-economic levels. Maybe what we need to do is to completely rethink education for those groups. The model is not serving their needs and therefore the needs of the broader society. Anything should be on the table, from all male schools to alternative schedules (time of day, length of school year) and alternative programs. We have the ability to fix this problem if we have the will to do so.

You can add lack of sleep and inability to find time/place to study. A very good friend teaches 3rd grade in a high-poverty school. Her students regularly fall asleep in class at around 10am. When asked, many kids say they cannot go to bed before 11pm, due to crowding and noise in the home. Many kids cannot find a relatively quiet place to study - no room at home, library hours are shortened due to budget cutbacks.

The US went from an era entertainment included shows like "Cosby" where education was linked to success to one in which a lack of education is the goal. Current career trends emphasize the long shot athletic or entertainment career rather than math and science.
One solution may be funding libraries to serve as study centers and internet search sources for impoverished communities.
Ad campaigns promoting the role of education in success to provide a small counter to the message that education is a "White-thing" that is pervasive in many communities. Role models such as Mae Jemison and the current crop of minority
NASA astronauts could be used. (Roll camera opening sequence the scene from Roots where the father holds the child above his head and says "behold the only thing greater than yourself" camera follows from fathers body to his arms to the baby to the sky to a spacecraft with education message from astronaut via interior shot. Of course this is why I'm not a Hollywood director, but hopefully you get the general idea.)
Targeting minority entertainment venues (cable channels, magazines, TV and radio) with messages about available community centers to use for study and available resources etc. The cost would be much cheaper than the cost the cost of an under-educated person.

I don't think it's a gender based issue, in my daughter's old high school most of the kids of both sexes were very poor, there were friends, both male and female of hers who worked long hours, more than a few had to live on their own, pay rent, utilities and the like because their parents were alcoholics or drug users.. one of Annie's friends ended up dropping out of school, despite actually being in AP classes because his grades started to suffer because he had to support himself and the long hours interfered with school work... he worked some nights, but also was being forced into earlier day shift hours as well.. he couldn't give up his job or he'd have been homeless.

Not getting enough to eat plays havoc on ones ability to concentrate, there are also fewer jobs, which starts to erode kids of both sexes faith in that there is a future for them.. reducing the importance of education in their eyes.. not to mention that colleges and universities aren't exactly visiting poor schools, the poorer kids schools are more likely to receive visits from military recruiters over and over again during the school year... which is what happened at my daughter's old school.

Budgets are being slashed, poor schools are overburdened with rising costs, so there aren't enough text books for crucial subjects like math and science. Believe me, gender based education isn't going to deal with this.. and quite honestly, it never worked well in the past. We're talking about problems in education due to poverty.. the economic situation is what needs to be dealt with.

There are still vocational/technical high schools, but because of budget problems, they are in the same boat as regular public schools. Frankly, there aren't enough of those type jobs any more for adults, let alone for trainees/apprentices.

A local voc/tech school here which serves northern RI is so swamped by applicants, more than ever before it can't keep up with demand. A recent controversy at that school was that it had to start cutting enrollment because the school couldn't afford to offer the same number of placesments due to the fact that their costs for ESL had risen so astronomically, it was eating into and already strapped budget.

ESL is another problem, the costs just keep rising, with very little positive outcome. What was supposed to be a one or two year per student program is turning into almost five or even longer years of ESL per student, and then most of those students drop out any way, which doesn't help them in any way. The issue needs to be dealt with, changing the program to being more outcome based, rather than what it has become, a long term bi-lingual education program. Schools in poor areas simply cannot afford the costs. In my state, arts and music education, both subjects which actually help raise math and science scores, started being cut after the implementation of ESL. There has to be give and take on both sides, but that doesn't seem to be happening.

The problems start long before the child gets to school.

The culture of idiocy and disrespect deserves much of the blame, and I have no idea how to fix it. The culture also doesn't value good parenting. In an ideal world, the education system should be able to help children who are unfortunate enough to have idiots as parents. Both private and charter schools don't address this problem; their solution is to filter out some of the children with incompetent parents.

I would suggest that resources need to be directed at helping parents do a better job. Long work hours, long commutes, and weak community support all reduce the quality of parenting for today's children.

There are some countries where the achievement gap between well off and poor children is not as great as ours and the UK's (I think Finland is one). We could look and see what they are doing that would be feasible for us to imitate.

Health care is a very important issue here. As we saw with Katrina many poor families have severe chronic health problems in the family.

I totally agree about the baleful effects of an exclusively commercial culture. Investing in human capital means also investing in cutural resources. The market is as inadequate to this task as it is for education and healthcare.

There was no evidence for support of private (that is religious) schools doing better. It was just another flim flam (like vouchers) to get the government to pay for religious education.

There are problems with inner cities kids that make schooling them more difficult, but a problem that can be solved is giving them enough money. Here in NY, in spite of decades of battles by the big cities to get more money for schools (which the courts have ordered) there is still a 2:1 ratio between per capita school funding for the richest to the poorest public school districts.

In NJ the situation is so skewed that the courts have ordered the legislature to fix things, also with no results.

If school funding were statewide instead of being supported by local property taxes then the shortchanging of poorer communities would not be so blatant. Communities could be allowed to impose a supplementary local tax for "enrichment" if they wished, but the basic level of funding should be uniform.

It's always about money, regardless of what people say.

--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape

There are always a small number of exceptions and success stories in any failing venture. What a proponent of an educational theory needs, however, is a long-term accumulation of facts (educational results) in its support.

To believe that these success stories are out there but that no one has glomed on to them or used them in their own programs appears to smack of wishful thinking.

Note: The "Marva Collins Industry" is, long-term, short on actual success stories.

It's not just parents- Most schools now can't afford to have too great of an economic mixture either, due to no child left behind. Schools that pass are flooded with children from 'failing' schools- only most of the time, it's the kids who are in fact failing, due to all of the reasons that have been talked about here. A harsh fact is that if a child is at a 6th grade level in 10th grade, a mere change of building is not going to automatically make him pass. It just brings down the schools' scores. When high-stakes pass-or-fail testing is the only thing that matters, lower scores result in schools having less money and less resources. So any administrator or teacher concerned about his school will naturally resist overbalancing his school- otherwise, he'll not be able to help the kids he already had, let alone teach the new ones.

So, yes- any rational parent or administrator, in the current educational climate, is going to resist economic integration because the schools are totally unequipped to handle it, and most efforts to do so actually get punished. And you can't really blame them- their primary responsibiity has got to be to their own kids (whether biological or under their administrative care).

Has no one noticed the NY Times' headline?
"Public Schools Perform Near Private Ones in Study"
This, in fact, is not what the study found. It found that public schools actually outperform private schools almost across the board. So much for the NYT being a liberal rag.

Anyway, one of the reasons those who seek to attack public education have been so successful is that those who wish to promote public education have to play a similar game. If education leaders said our system is just fine as it is, there would be no urgency in funding it and that system would lose tax dollars at a rate even faster than it already has. In other words, no crisis, no moolah, and then there really is a crisis. So both sides tell horror stories.

I'm firmly of the opinion that school quality has very little effect on educational outcome. I grew up in a neighborhood where taking a dead body off your front porch wasn't an unusual occurrence, and I was a National Merit Scholar. My soon-to-be Ph.D. wife went to horrible rural schools.

By the way, we already have school segregation. I'm just pulling this off the top of my head, but I remember a recent statistic that said the typical black student goes to a school which is 99% minority, while the typical white student's school is 6% minority. A good ten or fifteen years ago a Newsweek columnist had the balls to come out and write "when we say 'schools are bad', we very nearly always mean 'schools are black'".

Thanks very much for this post. I could have used this study in a verbal joust I had with another poster on the thread on the NLRB rulings and Nurses rights to organize. 

Two other factors need some thought I think, one of which relates to the poverty issue, one of which doesn't. 

• Mobility and transience are factors which need to be factored in.  I've seen studies correlating transience and academic success, but I can't remember where.  The argument was that poor students moved more frequently:  consequently their education was disrupted more often and they had poorer educational networks.
• Consolidation of schools into mega-structures with very large student bodies.  The saying was, "It takes a village to raise a child," not a city.  There may be certain economies of scale, but weighed against the costs of busing children to school, I'm not certain that those economies are actually realized.  I think large high schools are matters administrative convenience, and not much more.  I know that when I went from a junior high school which had a population of 2,000 to a senior high school with a population of about 600 my grades skyrocketed.  I lost my ability to be anonymous.

Mike

Currently, poor children's academic progress is slowed; within a few years of school entry their performance is judged far behind the national average for their age group -- thus, nothing to worry about purposefully slowing them down; the schools, life itself, are doing the job already.

That one child's maturing brain may not construct as many or as efficient neuronal pathways as another's might does not mean that that child is "brain damaged." It means that the child has a deficit which may and likely will impact his or her learning ability.

Doubtless, parental interest in and enforcement of standards for their children is helpful, but without knowing what's going on -- and I don't think we do -- placing the onus for the child's success on the parent comes close to blaming the victim.

I encourage anyone interested in this subject to read any book by Jonathan Kozol, particularly "The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America" and "Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools." He moves beyond canards about poor people not valuing education (they do) and how the schools their children attend are adequately funded (they are not).

The biggest ideas you take away from his work are how bad systems inevitably ruin good kids, and how our society, from liberals to conservatives, is content to have it be so.

Yes!  But take it one step further.  No Child Left Behind was never fully funded, and Ted Kennedy and others have been screaming about this from the get-go.

But this is an old trick in Congress, and one of the principal reasons why the hinterlands have come to distrust Washington.  Unfunded mandates make the mandaters look like they're on the side of noble causes, but these leave governments at the state and local level scrambling and resentful.  State and Local governments have limited sources of revenue (property taxes, sales taxes, income taxes, licensing fees) and constitutional requirements to balance the budget yearly (no 300 billion dollar deficits for them).  So, up go the taxes, and up goes the resentment against Washington. 

I need to make it clear that I approve of many, if not all, of the underfunded programs (I have major reservations about No Child Left Behind--but we'll never see what it could have done with proper funding because it never has had proper funding.  What I don't approve of is the deliberate creation of mandates at one level without providing the means to fulfill those mandates.  It's sneaky, it's nasty, and it undermines confidence in the government's ability to achieve anything.  (Which party wants to create the impression that government is the problem, not the solution???)

Mike

Let's not put on our tinfoil hats too quickly -- :-)

Have you (I haven't) looked at the votes in support of NCLB and especially, in the House? Was Bush's "compassionate conservative" measure passed, in fact, as a Democratic Party policy without any agreement from conservative House Republicans (who'd be happy to get rid of the Department of Education, if they could) that future funding would be made available?

Seems that Teddy Kennedy got sandbaggged by campaign rhetoric. He shoulda knowed better; he shoulda listened to Texas liberals who did know better -- who knew that GWB and Rod Paige were all hat and no cattle.

My tinfoil hat is safely protecting a bowl of leftover fruit salad in the refrigerator. I assumed that the answer to the rhetorical question would be "The Republican Party". Edit out the last line in your mind, if you've a call to.

I know that neither party is guiltless when it comes to creating unfunded mandates. Shame on both of them. I think, however, that at least republicans of the Grover Norquist ilk are quite willing to do this deliberately instead of out of a kind of timidity. The consequence is that persons like myself--is there anyone like myself?--are likely to feel government simultaneously overtaxes us and under-serves us.

Polls show that people are willing to support programs to clean air or water even if this means a tax increase. On the local level they support bond issues for capital improvements, knowing that the borrowing will adjust their property taxes upward...in some localities the amount upward appears in the ballot question at the time one votes.

So perhaps Ted Kennedy would have been wiser and listen to Texas liberals. I wonder if he reads Molly Ivins as religiously as I do? (I love Molly Ivins.  Wouldn't she make a crackerjack addition to the guests who post here regularly?) But maybe the wisest thing of all would be to reform the legislative process so that all bills which require a separate governmental level to do something also require the requirement to be fully funded at the level which created the requirement. For one thing, that would equalize the burden on the richer and poorer parts of the country. Now, how does one shrink that idea into a sound bite and photo-op?

Mike

The Fruit Salad was really good.

You are right Mike,

Transportation costs are miscategorized because they don't influence education per se. But do not underestimate the bus drivers influence in local elections.

The real sadness is that the teaching profession is being pulled into the gutter. Innovative teachers have nowhere to go and animal trainers have been elevated to classroom geniuses.

Sad.