Hillary and Bernie: No Hope for K-12 Public Education

          I did not watch the first Democratic debate on October 13, 2015.  However, I did read and listen to some of the analyses that followed.  Among the topics analyzed were income inequality, health care, the Iran nuclear deal, gun control, Black Lives Matter, foreign policy, Benghazi, health care, bank bailouts, the economy, and more. 

         But one thing I did not learn from the analyses was the candidates’ thoughts and proposals regarding K-12 education.  Why?  Because the topic was never addressed.  And why was it not addressed?  Because, incredibly, ever since No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was passed in 2001 with overwhelming bipartisan support, there has been virtual unanimity among both Democratic and Republican politicians on governmental and corporate education policy and “reforms.” Debate topics on which everyone already agrees tend not to contribute to an interesting and fruitful debate. 

         Nonetheless, I remained curious as to how the Democratic candidates stood on K-12 education, especially since millions of students, parents, and educators across the country have been extremely disappointed with the direction of K-12 education policy during the Obama years.  In the interest of time, space, and sensibility, I looked into the education proposals of only the Democratic frontrunners, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.  Specifically, I wanted to know if the election of either of them would hold any promise for a change of direction in national education policy over the last seven years.  The short answer is “no.”  

         Here is what I found.

Hillary Clinton

         Clinton’s website (www.hillaryclinton.com) lists three main objectives concerning K-12 public education.  I have read and re-read these objectives.  If anything stands out with her policies, it is her embrace of the corporate “reform” agenda and her ability to speak in codes coated with liberal rhetoric so as to cast that agenda as something any good and obedient liberal would support.  Here in a nutshell is the Good and mostly Bad Hillary on K-12 public education.

         Clinton “believes in making high quality education a priority for every child in America.”  Hillary supports continued annual high stakes tests.   She rationalizes this support as a civil rights issue.  As the “liberal” logic goes, high stakes tests are the only guaranteed way to bring to light and address the achievement gap between our most privileged students and our most non privileged students.  At the same time, however, she says there is too much testing, test prep, and narrowing of the curriculum due to the fact that only math and language arts are consistently tested.  Madame Secretary, you can’t have it both ways.  You cannot simultaneously support and assail high stakes tests and expect to be taken seriously by enlightened public school students, parents, and teachers.

        Clinton also supports “high academic standards for all children.”  This is code for the Common Core.  The Common Core are elite, inflexible, universal, whitewashed standards that address only math and language arts, and in a very narrow and prescriptive manner.  What’s more, the Common Core are tailored to the cultures and academic needs and interests of white, English speaking, middle class Americans and are therefore far removed from the academic needs and interests of bilingual children and children of color, many of whom are the very children Hillary purports to want to help with continued high stakes tests that are now linked directly to the Common Core standards.  Hillary’s support of the Common Core, therefore, demonstrates a lack of support for the 51% of children of color who now populate our public schools.

         Clinton “wants to support educators.”  Hillary believes we need more high quality educators.  This rhetoric plays directly into the unsubstantiated myth of the Super Teacher promoted by Bill Gates and other corporate reformers.  Those who believe that Super Teachers are the solution to the education “crisis” and the growing teacher shortage assume that it is bad teaching that led us to this perceived education crisis and this very real teacher shortage in the first place, and bad teaching that has kept us there. 

         Where will these Super Teachers come from?  Apparently, Clinton is convinced they are not currently teaching in our public schools.  She believes in recruiting the “best and the brightest” into the profession.  This is code for Teach For America and other teacher preparation programs designed more to enhance the resumés of their graduates than the scholastic achievement of the “at risk” students they attempt to teach for an average of two years before leaving the profession permanently for law school, medical school, or Wall Street. 

         According to teacher workforce expert Richard Ingersoll, recruiting new teachers from the best and the brightest college graduates—or from the worst and dimmest graduates, for that matter—misses the mark when it comes to addressing the chronic teacher shortages now sweeping the country.  Ingersoll has stated emphatically to anyone who will listen that it is far more effective to find ways to retain knowledgeable and experienced teachers than it is to recruit new teachers who, by definition, are far less experienced and knowledgeable and who have historically left the profession at rates of 50% before their first five years.  But the myriad school reforms begun under Presidents Reagan and Bush I with a Nation at Risk, continued under Hillary’s husband with Goals 2000, and under Presidents Bush II and Obama with No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, have done more than anything else to drive the best, brightest, the most expert, and the most experienced veteran teachers from the profession.  If Hillary continues the education “reforms” of the past five presidents, there will be few knowledgeable and experienced veteran teachers to retain. 

         Hillary also supports more teacher “training.”  This is code for reformist brainwashing.  As any public school teacher can tell you, what used to be called professional development or collaboration is now called training.  Unlike professional development and collaboration of the past, which was controlled almost entirely by teachers, today’s “trainings” consist of school administrators and representatives from the corporate world taking over the agendas of teacher meetings and indoctrinating teachers with the latest corporate “reforms.”  Some really smart person once said:  Training is for animals; education is for people. 

         Clinton “wants to improve student outcomes.”   Yes, this is code for “outcomes based education,” the corporate reformers’ model for education.  Think widgets on an assembly line where all widgets are identical, proceed along the assembly line at the same speed, and all end up on the same shelves of Target or Wal-Mart.  Outcomes based education means curriculum is narrowed to include only subjects and lessons that produce finite and discreet quantitative answers that can be measured using standardized methods, such as high stakes tests.  What’s more, the outcomes are directly linked to teacher effectiveness, the assumption being, the greater the student achievement on standardized tests, the more effective the teacher, and vice versa.  No other factors are considered when it comes to determining student outcomes and teacher effectiveness; not poverty, language, immigration status, domestic violence, parents’ levels of education, the quality or existence of a school library, environmental dangers, school nutrition, length of daily recesses, etc.  It is all about teacher effectiveness as determined by standardized measures of student achievement.

Bernie Sanders

         Bernie Sanders’ main web page (www.berniesanders.com) lists the following as major campaign topics.  As you can see, K-12 pubic education is nowhere to be found.

Income and wealth inequality

College tuition debt

Big money and politics

Decent paying jobs

A living wage

Climate change and the environment

Racial and social justice

Fair and humane immigration policy

LGBT equality

Fighting for our veterans

Reforming Wall Street

Real family values

The Iran nuclear weapons deal

         After posting this list online, I received a tip from an educator and Sanders supporter who directed me to www.feelthebern.org.  Who knew?!  On that site, I found a rather in-depth discussion of K-12 public education that contained positions I, as an educator for over 30 years, both support and oppose.  I have therefore decided to discuss Sanders’ education proposals in terms of the Good Bernie I would support as opposed to the Bad Bernie I would oppose.

         Good Bernie.  Among the positions I support is Sanders’ opposition to the excessive testing and punitive practices of NCLB.  In his own words:

“I voted against [NCLB] in 2001, and continue to oppose the bill’s reliance on high-stakes standardized testing to direct draconian interventions. In my view, [NCLB] ignores several important factors in a student’s academic performance, specifically the impact of poverty, access to adequate health care, mental health, nutrition, and a wide variety of supports that children in poverty should have access to. By placing so much emphasis on standardized testing, [NCLB] ignores many of the skills and qualities that are vitally important in our 21st century economy, like problem solving, critical thinking, and teamwork, in favor of test preparation that provides no benefit to students after they leave school.”

Sanders’ website goes on to say “Instead of NCLB, Bernie has called for a more holistic method of education that gives teachers more flexibility and students more support systems.”

         Sanders also supports teachers’ unions, collective bargaining, and increased teacher pay.  He opposes all right-to-work legislation. 

         He is strongly opposed to private school vouchers which, as he correctly points out, redirect public funds to the private sector.  Furthermore, Sanders opposes income disparities between rich and poor districts and will work to reduce or eliminate those disparities, though he doesn’t say how the federal government might do this. 

         Sanders opposes the Student Success Act (SSA) which can be construed as a warmed over version of NCLB that includes many of the worst elements of RTTT and other Obama era “reforms,” including annual high stakes testing and the redirection of public funds to the private sector. 

         However,  like all complex bills in which political compromise is operative, the SSA contains many provisions my like minded colleagues and I would consider positive, such as alternative assessments for students with severe disabilities, relabeling “limited English proficient students” as “English language learners,” and a prohibition on federal government coercion as a means to force states to adopt national standards and curricula.  In opposing the SSA, Sanders is also opposing provisions within it that address elements of NCLB he finds the most objectionable. 

         Finally, Sanders supports the expansion of after school programs.

         Bad Bernie.  One area in Sanders’ education policy where I have some concerns is his support of privately run “public” charter schools, although he tempers his support of them with admonishments regarding accountability and transparency, two areas where many charter schools are woefully inadequate.  

         Another area of concern is Sanders’ continued support of annual high stakes standardized testing.  While he does say that testing has become excessive, he does not question the validity of the tests for measuring student achievement.  Nor does he question their usefulness to classroom teachers.  Educators across the country see no good at all in privately funded, off-the-shelf, standardized measures of achievement and would prefer they be abolished altogether.  There is no indication on Sanders’ website that he would support the abolition of high stakes standardized tests.

         The Bad Bernie becomes more evident in a recent vote on the Senate floor.  In July of this year Sanders and most of his Democratic colleagues voted in favor of the Murphy Amendment to the Every Child Achieves Act.  According to education expert and blogger Mercedes Schneider, this amendment would have revived or worsened the worst and most punitive elements of NCLB.  Needless to say, this does not square with Sanders’ vociferous opposition to the legacy of NCLB.  At the very least is represents political ignorance; at worse, hypocrisy.

         But perhaps my greatest concern about Sanders’ education policy is his support of the Common Core.  His own website states,

While Bernie has neither outright endorsed nor opposed the Common Core, he voted in early 2015 against an anti-Common Core amendment that would “prohibit the federal government from ‘mandating, incentivizing, or coercing’ states into adopting Common Core or any other standards.”

Without going into a discussion about the Common Core, let me just say that his opposition to the anti-Common Core amendment is indeed an endorsement of the Common Core.  What’s more, his support of the Common Core stands to undermine many of his other positions on education, including his support of children living in poverty, an expanded curriculum, reduction in standardized testing, and so on.  Like the opt-out movement, opposition to the Common Core cuts across partisan lines:  it appeals as much to Tea Party conservatives as it does to those on the liberal left, albeit for very different reasons.  If Sanders’ were to oppose the Common Core, he could win votes from across the political spectrum.  The Common Core is a rapidly sinking vessel.   Sanders would do well to jump ship now.

Conclusion

          My liberal, Democratic colleagues and I have been very, very disappointed with President Obama’s education policies and have spent most of his presidency fighting them.  Neither Clinton’s nor Sanders’ education proposals differ much from those of Obama (or from those of most of the Republican candidates, for that matter). We are equally disappointed with the myriad issues neither candidate addresses or on which neither takes a stand:  the growing parent-student opt out movement, punitive teacher evaluations, school grading, teacher "merit" pay, the needs and rights of English language learners and bilingual education, culturally responsive curricula, and so on.  These are the issues teachers, parents, and students are most concerned about.  These are the very issues that the candidates seem to be ignoring even in their inchoate attempts to address K-12 education.
          Consequently, if either of Clinton or Sanders is elected president, we cannot expect much change from Obama's education agenda.  Instead, we will very likely have to prepare ourselves for at least four more years of the same punitive, corporate education “reforms” their predecessor has so shamelessly promoted over the last eight years.  And while it is true that Sanders’ proposals hold more hope for public education that do those of Clinton, we should know by now what to expect of promises of Hope.

Round Up the Usual Suspects

Teachers are the problem in education.  The press says so.  School districts say so.  State legislatures say so.  The federal government says so.  Political pundits say so.  The Department of Education says so.   And, yes, President Obama says so, loud and clear.  The sole holdouts are, interestingly enough, teachers, parents and students, the only groups that really matter.


If you, like the rest of the public, accept the argument that teachers are the problem in education, then everything else makes sense: standardized testing, punishing school for low scores, boxed and scripted curricula, narrowing of the curriculum, merit pay, elaborate and excessive accountability schemes, and so on.  If, instead, you reject this specious proposition and challenge it head-on, you will be able to see quite clearly how incredibly baseless it is.

The perception that teachers are the problem in education is an obscene exaggeration of one simple fact:  there are indeed some really bad teachers in our country.  President Obama said so recently when visiting my fair city:  "If some teachers are bad, they've got to go."  Even here the President of the United States suggests that there may be some bad teachers.   At the same time, however, he seems to imply that if they exist, they must be the sole reason for all that is bad in education.  After all, he made his statement in the context of how to fix what is broken in education.  Fix the teachers and you've fixed the problem.

What President Obama, Arne Duncan, Bill Gates and other teacher bashers are not saying, even though they know it's true, is that the number of really bad teachers—those who might actually have a detrimental effect on the education of their students—is such an incredibly small percentage of the nation's teaching corps that they couldn't possibly constitute a group large enough to cause all the perceived damage to our educational system.  If some teachers are bad, that means most teachers are not.  And if most teachers are not bad—and many are very good to excellent—then we really don't have an educational crisis on our hands.  A minority of bad teachers does not a bad school or district make.  

It seems absurd but true:  we begin with a statement that virtually everyone can agree with—there are some bad teachers and "they've got to go"—and conclude that most teachers are bad and have to go or be radically retrained.  But the fact of the matter is, most teachers are not bad. There are good and excellent schools across the country with one or two bad teachers on every staff, but those bad teachers don't make the whole school bad.  Most of the nation's public schools are good to excellent because they have good to excellent teachers and despite the presence of one or two bad teachers.  

Even if we agree that there is a small contingent of bad teachers in America, we still have another problem:  defining "bad teacher"?  Is a bad teacher someone in whose classroom parents hope their children are not placed?  Someone who received a negative evaluation from her principal last year?   Someone who hates her job?  Someone who dislikes children?  Someone who focuses her energy more on retirement than on education?  Someone who doesn't seem to know the established curriculum, content and standards?  Looking at it from a different angle, is she someone who received a positive evaluation from the principal due to her adherence to program fidelity?  Someone who refuses to teach the boxed and scripted curriculum and dares to create her own curriculum and teach creatively?  Is she a teacher who gives equal weight to all subjects instead of teaching only reading and math in order to raise test scores?

The definition of a bad teacher probably depends on where you think public education should be heading.  In the end it doesn't matter.  All definitions but one are irrelevant in the minds of the critics of public education:  a bad teacher is one whose students receive poor results on state sanctioned standardized reading and math tests.  Period.  That's right.  Tests that are designed for the sole purpose of pinpointing a student's academic progress are being used to judge teacher quality.  Never mind the fact these tests were never intended to be used to evaluate teachers (or schools either, for that matter).  Beginning with the NCLB testing frenzy in 2002, schools and increasingly teachers have been evaluated based on student test scores.  Obama will soon attempt to sharpen the teeth of the accountability section of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, aka No Child Left Behind and soon to be Blueprint for Success) when it comes up for renewal before the end of his term.

If these tests are not designed to evaluate teacher quality and effectiveness, then why do we use them for that purpose?  Perhaps it is because we have objectified students to the point where they are qualitatively no different than a widget on the assembly line.  It is understandable that a factory worker be held accountable for and evaluated on the quality of her widget.  After all, everything about the widget can be controlled and manipulated by the worker.  The widget is an inanimate object whose ultimate form and function is determined solely by its maker.  Therefore, if the widget is defective or otherwise fails, it must be the worker's fault because it couldn't possibly be the wiget's.

But students are not widgets and teachers are not assembly line workers.  This image was cooked up and promoted by business interests such as the Chamber of Commerce who cannot conceptualize public education in any way other than the factory assembly line.  The image is false, misleading and damaging to our public school system.  Unlike the widgets in the  business world, students are living, breathing, dynamic, individual, multi-faceted, idiosyncratic, creative, spontaneous, unpredictable, free-willed beings who, despite what we may "do" to them, will likely "produce" results wholly inconsistent with the "worker's" desired outcome.  And since students are not widgets—or products—an evaluation of their worth cannot be based on the "productivity" of their "maker."

If the wrong measure is used to determine the quality of the teacher, the wrong fixes—merit pay, firing, meaningless accountability—will be applied to the perceived problem.  And if we are spending time and resources fixing the wrong problems and even problems that don't exist, we'll have a real mess on our hands.   Educational "remedies" based on measuring teachers with student test scores are inherently ill-conceived and will inevitably fail. 

This brings us full circle:  if you believe that most teachers are bad; that their "badness" is proven by student test scores; and that teachers are the main cause of the wholesale failure of the public schools, then the various and sundry educational solutions proposed by the critics of public education will seem wholly logical to you.  You will whoop and holler for the teacher bashers when you hear of their schemes to marginalize the role of the teacher in order to gain direct access to students.  That is precisely the role of standardized tests, standardized curricula, box and scripted curricula, school wide punishments, accountability schemes, and merit pay:  they are all attempts to circumvent teachers and get direct access to students so that teacher bashers can apply their simple minded remedies to the problems teachers have failed to fix.

If you have no faith in teachers' ability to evaluate their students, you imposed standardized testing.  If you have no faith in teachers' ability to teach, you force them to implement boxed and scripted curricula. If you have no faith in teachers' ability to account for their work, you dream up schemes that hold teachers responsible for the boxed and scripted curricula (this is known as "program fidelity").  If you have no faith in teachers' intrinsic value as trained and experienced professionals, you implement merit pay (based, of course, on their students' standardized test results).  If you have no faith in teachers, you blame teachers for all that is wrong in education and proceed to offer the wrong solutions to all the wrong problems.  

President Obama has no faith in teachers; otherwise he would not call his educational plan a Blueprint for Success—a title that invokes private industry ("blueprint") and implies failure ("success")—and he would send his daughters to public school.  The press has no faith in teachers; otherwise they would investigate other, more important factors of school "failure," such as language, parenting, parental level of education, parental investment in the education of their children, and of course the two big ones, TEST VALIDITY and POVERTY (see last post).  Policy makers have no faith in teachers; every fix they come up with, usually in the form of mandatory professional development, addresses the perception the only thing teachers need in order to improve student achievement is more training, more motivation, and an improved work ethic (lazy teachers; if they would only work harder!).  

Perhaps the most unfortunate reality of the teacher bashing is that the solutions to the bad teacher problem proposed by the nation's non educators lead to the production of more bad teachers and, consequently, more bad instruction.  When we dumb down the curriculum in order to make it accessible to the worst of teachers, and force all teachers—good, bad and in-between—to the lower standard of boxed and scripted curricula and "program fidelity," we may succeed in raising the effectiveness of the worst 25% among us, but we will also lower the quality and effectiveness of the 75% good and excellent teachers as they are pulled inexorably towards the new, lower standard.  

The subsequent dilution of the nation's teaching corps will inevitably accelerate the narrowing of an already narrowed curriculum to the point where only basic math and reading skills will be taught and tested.  When we reach that point—and many schools in the country already have—we will no longer be able to claim that what we are engaged in is education.  Instead, we will be engaged in a clinical and impersonal system of mass production wherein our teachers, like factory workers around the globe, will produce human widgets who can look forward to a life as a cog in the machinery of the global marketplace.  The absurdity of public education in America will then be complete:  we will have converted students into objects, teachers into producers, and a flawed system of measurement into the sole "truth" about education, the "truth" that convinced us that teachers are the problem in the first place.

And if you believe that, then everything else makes sense.

It's Poverty, Stupid!

     I have been writing this article for months in my head as well as on paper.  It has consumed hours of thought as I ride my bike to and from work, travel out of state, or lie awake in the morning before getting out of bed.  I've stayed up late at night fretting about wording, but especially about political repercussions, accusations of classism, and my own professional reputation.  I guess I have been waiting for someone else to say it first. 

     Recently two people who I would consider part of the mainstream of educational politics finally said it.  One of them was the superintendent of my school district.  In a front page article in our local paper he was quoted as saying that he is against dividing our large district into two smaller districts along a natural north-south axis because that would lead to one district having more poor kids than the other and therefore lower test scores. The other was a reporter for National Public Radio.  In a piece about why teachers receive most of the blame for all the perceived shortcomings of public education, he asked, "Do teachers and their unions deserve more of the blame than, let's say, shrinking education budgets, poverty or bad parenting?"

In both cases I waited for the backlash, but it didn't come. For the first time in my career I heard two people outside academia—one a highly placed public school official and the other a reputable national journalist—say publicly what most public school teachers have known for years: It's poverty stupid! With few exceptions, lower income public school students have poor test scores. As Stan Karp points out in his essay NCLB's Selective Vision of Equality: Some Gaps Count More than Others (2004): "Education research has established a strong link between student performance on standardized tests and family income. While income equality in a community is no excuse for school failure, certainly any serious federal plan to close academic achievement gaps needs to concern itself with trends in closely related areas, like the resources that families and schools have to work with."  Note that Karp emphasizes that poverty is not an excuse but an explanation of low test scores.  Those who would accuse Karp or anyone else of being a classist snob, or a "bigot of low expectations" (Bush, 2002), simply because he points out the link between poverty and low test scores, is simply not paying attention or is not yet prepared to accept the truth.

Like education researchers, teachers across the nation continue to encounter the same link between poverty and low test scores. The teachers at my school recently scrutinized results from standardized math and reading tests our students took this year. We disaggregated and analyzed the results from every possible angle, including gender, ethnicity, familial instability and mobility, and even language. And what did we find? Or, as the NCLB compliance cops would ask, "What did the data show?" The data showed that the ONLY consistent correlation one can make between children and their low test scores is poverty.

For example, we identified African American students with low, medium and high test results. But the African American students with the lowest scores were also the African American students from the families with the lowest incomes. The same was true for Native American, Asian, Hispanic and Anglo students; girls and boys; English and non English speakers. If we were asked to identify the kids in greatest need of test score improvement, all we had to do was apply a family income filter to the data, and the students with the low test scores would instantly be revealed. (The questionable validity of the tests, and the dubious ethical and political motivations for giving them, are addressed elsewhere by me and by dozens of other teachers, professors, authors and politicians.)

The original intent of NCLB was to prevent school districts from sweeping lower income and underperforming students under the rug in order to hide their low test scores, thereby preserving the school's reputation as well as the property values of adjacent homeowners. (This law could have been called NCLUR or No Child Left Under the Rug!) That was an admirable goal. Earlier in my career I witnessed first hand the wholesale disenfranchisement of entire groups of lower income kids (who Ronald Reagan referred to as "residuals") as they were asked by the school principal to stay home for a week while the other children were being tested.   I was disgusted by this practice even though I was and have always been a vocal opponent of standardized testing. In a strange and creepy way, this actually put me in agreement with one of the major tenets of NCLB:  if schools were going to test their students, then they should not cherry pick them based on who would give the school better test scores.  They should test them all.

As the saying goes, watch out for what you wish for because you just might get it.  Testing everyone—absolutely everyone—has not solved a thing. In fact, it has created a multitude of more serious problems, more than anyone could have anticipated. (Diane Ravitch details these problems and offers some solutions in her new book The Death and Life of the Great American School System.) 
     Now that we have lifted the proverbial rug and exposed the fraud, we as conscientious citizens need to take a hard look at who was under the rug and consider ALL the data they generate, not just their reading and math scores.  If we considered all the data generated by all students, we would find problematic demographic data that are undetectable by standardized tests and unfixable by schools alone.  These data would inevitably include extreme poverty and everything associated with it: low level of parents' formal education; home languages other than English; limited access to educational resources; lack of preschool enrollment; and a dearth of meaningful learning experiences that cost money, such as belonging to a sports team, joining Girl Scouts, taking piano lessons, flying to Washington D. C. for Spring Break, and so on. The advocates of NCLB have been trying to convince us that data doesn't lie.  Well, in this case, I couldn't agree more.

If we were to focus on student demographic data in addition to the data generated by reading and math scores, we would be forced to admit that poverty is the main cause of low academic achievement as measured by standardized tests.  After that important step we could then begin to initiate a national debate on the causes of poverty and its effects on academic achievement. From that debate we might be motivated to design concrete solutions that directly address student poverty instead of solutions that until now have only addressed the consequences of poverty manifested in schools.

If, on the other hand, we continue to deny the obvious link between poverty and academic achievement, as measured by test scores, and continue to believe that schools can singlehandedly eradicate the academic wounds inflicted by endemic poverty, then we will continue to be complicit in the perpetuation of the achievement gap between the haves and the have nots.

Through a national debate on poverty and its effects on public school students, we might be better able to understand that even though public schools have been touted as one of society's great equalizers—environments where the playing field is level and all students, regardless of family income and education, have access to the same material and intellectual resources—middle and upper income students come to school with material and intellectual head starts that lower income students could only dream about. The belief in the public school classroom as a level playing field is in truth a cruel illusion, one that seduces us into believing that what is equal is also fair, even though we know it's not.

For example, our more financially fortunate public school students usually come from homes where English is the home language. This gives them automatic membership into the dominant culture and access to that culture's greatest intellectual archives. These same students likely have parents who have not only graduated from high school, but who often have one or more diplomas from the university and therefore work as professionals in any number of fields that enjoy great social, political and cultural status in the dominant culture. This gives the students an enormous advantage when asking for help with homework, school projects at home, and finding extracurricular experiences that might enhance what they are learning at school. Middle to upper income students likely have traveled to far away places in airplanes or mini vans for pure enjoyment or for educational purposes, not just to visit extended family or to renew visits across the border. These travel experiences give what they learn in class automatic and concrete associations that enrich their learning immeasurably. Finally, their privileged financial status means they never have to worry about fees for Girl Scouts, piano lessons, soccer team, baseball team, dance lessons, art lessons, etc., all of which enrich a child's academic experiences, greatly increase her personal and academic confidence inside and outside of the classroom. By the time these students enter the classroom, the field they are playing on is already heavily groomed to their advantage.

Diane Ravtich writes, "Our schools cannot be improved by those who say that money doesn't matter . . . Our schools cannot be improved if we ignore the disadvantages associated with poverty that affect children's ability to learn.  Children who have grown up in poverty need extra resources, including preschool and medical care.  They need small classes, where they will get extra teacher time, and they need extra learning time.  Their families need additional supports, such as coordinated social services that help them to improve their education, to acquire necessary social skills and job skills, and to obtain jobs and housing. While the school itself cannot do these things, it should be a part of a web of public and private agencies that buttress families."  She goes on to say,  (from In Need of a Renaissance, American Educator, Summer 2010).
     Ravitch gives us a good start, but her plan does not go far enough and is not adequately specific.  If we were to sincerely address the causes of poverty in an effort to genuinely raise children's academic achievement levels (whether detectable by standardized tests or not) and level the playing field inside and outside the classroom, then we might seriously consider some or all of the following:

• Require businesses to release employees with pay so they can attend ESL or GED classes or volunteer in their children's classrooms once a week.
• Require businesses that receive tax breaks or incentives for locating in a particular community to adhere to a business model for Annual Yearly Progress that shows employee progress towards increased pay, benefits, training, education and working conditions (thanks to Stan Karp for this idea).  
• Require businesses that distribute coupons, gift certificates and other consumer incentives to students, to contribute, in actual dollars, half the redeemable value of each incentive distributed to the PTA or proportionally to every classroom.
• Require the state to exact a 1/8 ¢ profits tax on all out of state businesses to fund preschool programs in every public school.  (Pre school attendance, along with family income and education, is a key to academic success and is generally one thing middle and upper income students have that lower income students don't have when entering kindergarten.)
• Require all organizations that offer extra curricular activities—such as music, art, dance, martial arts— to public school students to accept sliding fee scales for payment.
• Require after school sports teams to offer scholarships to low income students that include fees, uniforms and transportation to and from practices and games.
• Require the state or school district to either give, loan or subsidize computers, printers and internet access to families of public school students who qualify for free and perhaps reduced lunch.
• Require school districts to subsidize or pay for at least four out-of-town field trips for students at Title I schools.
• Require school districts to offer free after-school tutoring by volunteers or paid professionals for lower income students either at the school site or at the students' homes.

Is this socialism? Is this communism? Is this another way of creating a new welfare state in which lower income families feel they are entitled to what others work hard for? Probably not. There is nothing communistic or socialistic about demanding that poor students have an opportunity to avail themselves of what more financially fortunate students already have and will probably continue to have. We are not talking about a full scale redistribution of wealth. That would likely escalate interclass tension and animosity. Regardless of how critics might characterize solutions such as those listed above, our efforts to raise academic achievement and test scores solely within schools are falling woefully short of the mark primarily due to the fact that we are not addressing the inequalities in the world from which our students come. If schools are treating all students equally and the disparity in test scores still exists between upper and lower income students, then it is obvious that schools are not the main problem; we need to look outside the schools for causes and solutions to these problems. It is time to treat our students fairly, since treating them equally only maintains the status quo while seducing us into thinking we're playing on a level playing field.

It's poverty, stupid! But until poverty is addressed thoroughly and comprehensively by the public and private sectors of our society, our public school students will continue producing test scores that show not how much they know, but how much money their parents make.