Schools Matter: Guess Who Said It...

Schools Matter: Guess Who Said It...

Guess Who Said It...

by Kenneth Libby

From an e-mail list...

This is almost worthy of a STOP THE PRESSES: I actually AGREE with Diane Ravitch about something! In her appearance on The Daily Show recently, she said, “I don’t think America is overrun by bad teachers. I think America is overrun by too much poverty, too much poverty among children.” We can quibble over the meaning of “overrun” – there are WAY too many bad teachers, which Ravitch refuses to acknowledge – but she’s right that childhood poverty is a crisis in this country, which is, in general, a moral outrage, but it also has a profound impact on the ability of children to learn. What got me thinking about this was watching a 60 Minutes segment that aired on March 6^th (www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/03/06/60minutes/main20038927.shtml) entitled “Homeless children: the hard times generation,” which profiled numerous families and kids in Florida who’d lost their homes and were living in cars or motels. It broke my heart.

Here’s a summary of the statistics from the National Center for Children in Poverty