Teachers Can’t Fix Poverty or Problems Like Housing Eviction
For twenty years, our society has embraced a theory of school reform whose driving idea is that if schools expect more and teachers work harder, test scores will rise among the students who struggle. It is a theory that expects public schools themselves to compensate for growing economic inequality and structural racism. The idea is that schools are primarily responsible for closing the gaps in children’s opportunities.
Social scientists, on the other hand, tell us that children’s standardized test scores seem to correlate not so much with their schools as with their families’ economic circumstances. Anincome inequality achievement gap has grown rapidly during the past half century. Here is the theoretical explanation of Andrew Grant-Thomas and John Powell: “A social system is structurally inequitable to the degree that it is configured to promote unequal outcomes. A society marked by highly interdependent opportunity structures and large inter-institutional resource disparities will likely be very unequal with respect to the outcomes governed by those institutions and structures… In a society that features structural inequalities with respect to opportunities and institutional resources, initial racial inequality in motion will likely stay in motion.” (Andrew Grant-Thomas and Gary Orfield, editors, Twenty-First Century Color Lines, p. 124)
Although we are a society that features structural inequality and structural racism, most of us are not personally familiar with the lives of families on the edge. Because our American ethos credits success to individual grit, we struggle to understand why hard working teachers can’t get the children in their classes to pull themselves up more quickly. Michael Harrington tried to help 50 years ago by describing The Other America. To that same end, from time to time this blog is exploring—in Grant-Thomas and John Powell’s words—“highly interdependent Teachers Can’t Fix Poverty or Problems Like Housing Eviction | janresseger:
