Poverty and Education

David Berliner is an educational researcher after my own heart. In his 2005 speech at AERA's annual convention, he explores the relationship of poverty to school reform.

Those who blame poor children and their families, like Herrnstein and Murray, or those who blame the teachers and administrators who serve those kids and families in our public schools, like Rod Paige, Jeanne Allen, Checker Finn, William Bennett, and dozens of other well known school critics, are all refusing to acknowledge the root problem contended with by too many American schools, namely, that there is a 600 pound gorilla in the school house.

The gorilla is poverty.

As educators and scholars we continually talk about school reform as if it must take place inside the schools. We advocate, for the most part, for adequacy in funding, high quality teachers, professional development, greater subject matter preparation, cooperative learning, technologically enhanced instruction, community involvement, and lots of other ideas and methods I also promote. Some of the most lauded of our school reform programs in our most distressed schools do show some success, but success often means bringing the students who are at the 20th percentile in reading and mathematics skills up to the 30th percentile in those skills. Statistical significance and a respectable effect size for a school reform effort is certainly worthy of our admiration, but it just doesn’t get as much accomplished as needs to be done.....Schooling alone may be too weak an intervention for improving the lives of most children now living in poverty.

While the poverty rate in Orange County is 14.1%, one of the highest in the state, our childhood poverty rate is much lower than that of our neighbors.

Locality	Child Poverty	ChildPovRate
Alamance	4,063	13.3%
Chatham	1,358	12.7%
Durham	8,556	17.2%
Orange	2,127	9.0%
Wake	13,275	8.6%

Berliner asks "Why do we put so much of our attention and resources into trying to fix what goes on inside low performing schools when the causes of low performance may reside outside the school? Is it possible that we might be better off devoting more of our attention and resources than we now do toward helping the families in the communities that are served by those schools? That would certainly be a competitive strategy for solving the problem of low academic performance if it is simply poverty (along with its associated multitude of difficulties) that prevents most poor children from doing well."

Good questions. He identifies housing prices, real wages, job creation and tax revenues as the community factors affecting child poverty rates. What is the relationship between those factors and poverty in Orange County? I'm going to try and get data from the two school systems and from the county economic development commission to create a better profile of poverty in Orange before the November elections. We need a realistic understanding of the relationship between affordable housing, wages, community services (including education), and taxes (including the proposed district tax) may impact overall poverty and child poverty in order to make informed decisions in this upcoming election.