‘The Limits of School Reform’
On Monday, The New York Times published a column about the dangers of thinking teachers can cure the disease of poverty in our public schools. The basic thesis of the piece is this: Good teaching alone can’t overcome the many obstacles a student faces when he is not in school and when his family is struggling economically.
While the idea that teachers cannot overcome all the issues in a student’s life makes sense to the majority of thinking people, it seems to be a fact forgotten by the education reform crowd, most of who seem to believe that “good teachers” can overcome any and all out-of-school issues faced by their students.
Going back to the famous Coleman report in the 1960s, social scientists have contended — and unquestionably proved — that students’ socioeconomic backgrounds vastly outweigh what goes on in the school as factors in determining how much they learn. Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute lists dozens of reasons why this is so, from the more frequent illness and stress
