Forget test scores: fight poverty and keep education public
Two opinion pieces in last Saturday’s Chronicle-Herald, one an editorial and the other by Paul Bennett, spoke of the difficult learning conditions in some of Nova Scotia’s most impoverished neighbourhoods. Both are to be commended for highlighting the clear connections between poverty and school success (Be bold first in education, Radical intervention for faltering schools; both April 19).
But in the Ivany-report-inspired rush to “be bold,” we should be cautious about some of the solutions proposed.
For example, Paul Bennett, a fellow with the business-friendly Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS), says Barack Obama has “blazed the policy trail” in education with initiatives to lift urban neighbourhoods out of poverty.
But he ignores the fact that Obama’s education “reform” agenda has been opposed by a large, and growing, movement of teachers, parents and students across the United States, for a simple reason: it doesn’t work.
The “Promise Neighbourhoods” initiatives Bennett references, which offer “cradle-to-career services” to needy families, are indeed regarded positively by just about everyone. But education historian Diane Ravitch notes that the funds allotted to the small number of neighbourhoods with this program are “a tiny drop in the bucket” compared to the millions the U.S. pours into harmful high-stakes standardized testing and corporate curriculum streamlining via the Common Core state standards.
A distressing pattern has emerged in poor neighbourhoods throughout the U.S.: public schools are starved of funds for years, then declared “failing schools” when their students fail to score highly on standardized tests; and finally, replaced by semi-private, sometimes for-profit, charter Forget test scores: fight poverty and keep education public | The Chronicle Herald: