GOP Austere Governments Ignore and Exacerbate Link Between Poverty and Educational Achievement.

While Republicans successfully sell school choice by supposedly empowering parents and encouraging innovation, the truth about education is less to their liking, because it requires strengthening and increasing the middle class. That means higher incomes and placing a higher value on employees. That's not a GOP option, so the plan is to ignore the major link between poverty and educational achievement:

Secretary Paul Reville: I have been working on education reform in Massachusetts for a long time, from my days as a teacher through my current position as Secretary of Education. We must confront the reality of student outcomes such as these on the 2010 MCAS tests ... Consider: 

·         Grade 3 math: 54% of Low Income students scored in the two lowest performance the categories compared to 23% of non-Low Income students

·         Grade 4 English: 70% of Low Income students scored in the two lowest performance categories compared to 34% of non-Low Income students

·         Grade 4 math: 48% of Low Income students scored in the two lowest performance categories compared to 23% of non-Low Income students

·         Grade 5 English: 59% of Low Income students scored in the two lowest performance categories compared to 26% of non-Low Income students

....

·         Grade 10 English: 40% of Low Income students scored in the two lowest performance categories compared to 13% of non-Low Income students

·         Grade 10 math: 43% of Low Income students scored in the two lowest performance categories compared to 16% of non-Low Income students

·         Grade 10 science: 59% of Low Income students scored in the two lowest performance categories compared to 25% of non-Low Income students

Unfortunately, these results are neither new nor surprising. We readily recognize the consistent, ironclad law of association between poverty and educational achievement and attainment. However, we persist in school reform strategies that, despite success at the margins, regularly fail to address the factors associated with poverty that, on average, tend to impede student learning.


Some want to make the absurd argument that the reason low-income youngsters do poorly is that, mysteriously, all the incompetency in our education systems has coincidentally aggregated around low income students. In this view, all we need to do is scrub the system of incompetency and all will be well. It is now blatantly apparent to me and other education activists, ranging from Geoffrey Canada to Richard Rothstein to Linda Darling-Hammond, that the strategy of instructional improvement will not, on average, enable us to overcome the barriers to student learning posed by the conditions of poverty.