Leadership Matters February 2014

Poverty: Elephant in public education classroom By Michael Chamness IASA Director of Communications prenatal care and preschool. Of course, schools must improve; everyone should have a stable, experienced staff, adequate resources and a balanced curriculum including the arts, foreign languages, history and science.

Poverty. It’s the elephant in the classrooms of public schools across Illinois. Generational poverty is a vicious cycle. Many children in poverty are at a distinct disadvantage when they start school and that learning gap grows. If they fail to get a college degree or good education and they can’t find decent jobs to support their families, then their children start school behind other children. The cycle repeats. Ask front-line educators about the greatest predictor of school success and many will tell you that it is what happens or doesn’t happen in the home. Standardized tests simply confirm the prognosis. Consider the words of Diane Ravitch, a research professor at New York University and author of “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.” In a column published by the New York Times in May of 2011, Ravitch wrote: “The achievement gap between children from different income levels exists before children enter school… Families are children’s most important educators. Our society must invest in parental education,

If every child arrived in school well-nourished, healthy and ready to learn, from a family with a stable home and a steady income, many of our educational problems would be solved. And that would be a miracle.” How prevalent is poverty in Illinois schools? Using the federal eligibility guidelines for the free or reduced lunch programs, almost half (49.9 percent) of the K-12 students in Illinois were considered to be from low-income families in 2013, up 33 percent from 2002 (37.5 percent). Theories abound as to why kids from low-income families struggle in school, from middle-class teachers not understanding how to reach children from poverty-stricken backgrounds to the more obvious notion that children who are hungry, scared or without family support systems may be thinking more about survival than English or math. “Illinois’ proportion of low-income students has grown from 37.5 percent of the enrollment in 2002 to (Continued on page 6)

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