Although this study wants to attribute the problem to "poverty," in my experience the real issue causing poor school performance is culture, and those cultural factors and characteristics that cause poverty also cause student to fail to value education. Cultures that teach children to value hard work, achievement, and success have little problem with either educational performance or poverty. Those that denigrate school success and instead value violence and indolence encourage failure. That would correlate far better as an explanation than simple poverty. To ignore the effects of culture on school performance is to seek to avoid identifying the real problem, which in turn would require the educational elites to call out the pathological cultures for what they are: the causes of both poverty and poor educational performance.
When performance in the classroom is corrected for "poverty," we learn this:
America does not have a general education crisis; we have a poverty crisis. Results of an international student assessment indicate that U.S. schools with fewer than 25 percent of their students living in poverty rank first in the world among advanced industrial countries. But when you add in the scores of students from schools with high poverty rates, the United States sinks to the middle of the pack. At nearly 22 percent and rising, the child-poverty rate in the United States is the highest among wealthy nations in the world. (Poverty rates in Denmark and in Finland, which is justifiably celebrated as a top global performer on the Program for International Student Assessment exams, are below 5 percent). In New York City, the child-poverty rate climbed to 30 percent in 2010.
I suppose we should be surprised that we even make the middle of the pack given how many cultural hindrances many of our students have to endure.
Precisely what do you mean by culture? Asian students (as a racial demographic) consistently score in the top 10% nationally. Or is it racist to suggest that?
ReplyDeleteDetroit is the model for all liberal progressives and vast sums have been dumped into the education mill there and in Chicago (the Detroit clone). How are they measuring up?
Academic achievement is the last color blind meter stick in America. It's not poverty. There is a tide in the groves of minor academe and it has but one bitter taste.
ReplyDeleteThis study seems to address only public schools. I wonder what change would occur if private schools and/or homeschoolers were added to the scores?
ReplyDeleteCS, Figures lie and liars figure. If you add parochial schools, private schools and home school results, it would skew the numbers. Likewise, if you eliminated "inner city" endemic poor achievers, the numbers would skew radically. The inner city schools don't lack for resources so much as they lack a culture that values education. Asians in inner city schools are in the top 10%...
ReplyDeleteSubstitute "black" for "poverty" and you have it. What do Denmark and Finland have that we don't? A dominantly white population. No cities full of people that aren't like them (though the moslem problem is growing even there).
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