THOMPSON: Challenging the Poison of Poverty

Attempting to fix inner city schools without fixing the city in which they are embedded is like trying to clean the air on one side of a screen door. - Jean Anyon.

David Berliner's "Our Impoverished View of Education," provides a corrective to the post modern, counter-factual speculations of the recent McKinsey report.  Building on generations of social science, Berliner offers fresh insights into the "600 pound gorilla" of closing the achievement gap - zip codes. The challenge is the interacting complexities of neighborhoods including low birth weight, lead and mercury poisoning, stress, poor nutrition, asthma, crime and domestic violence, mobility, inadequate child care, alcohol and drug abuse, and mental illness.  After all, a poor child spends 1000 hours per year in school and 5000 hours at home in the neighborhood.

Berliner is impressed with two studies that show how increased family income affects student behavior and school achievement. In one study, children whose families' income went up showed increased school readiness and scored as well as the students who had never been poor. In another study, after four years of moving out of poverty, formerly poor children had no more psychiatric symptoms than children who had never been poor. - John Thompson

Comments

[Tom Hoffman]

I usually put it like this: Creating a living school in a dead neighborhood is like trying to keep a liver alive in a corpse.