Children can’t eat test scores. Why school reform isn’t good enough.
No, it is not "all about the kids."
Education reformers are missing the point. To them, the only thing that matters is school quality and performance, and they’re right that those are crucial goals. But they are intermediate ones – means to a bigger end: Lifting up an entire community. Any school reform that doesn’t also help parents, local businesses, and other stakeholders is a reform that is destined to fail.
Children can’t live wholly in schools; they need strong communities to thrive. The United Nations Development Program’s Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) published in the 2010 documents the “overlapping deprivations suffered by people at the same time.” The authors found that income, schools, health, and policing impact whether or not families’ needs will be met (to say nothing of housing, access to quality foods, employment, and other challenges faced by the American poor). Place matters because the range social determinants that influence life are concentrated in specific neighborhoods. For instance, the Orleans Parish Place Matters Team, along with the National Collaborative for Health Equity, found that life expectancy in the poorest zip code in New Orleans is 54.5 years; life expectancy in the zip code with the least poverty was a quarter century higher, at 80 years.
Terrible schools in specific zip codes aren’t what’s trapping students. (Zip code hasn’t stopped middle- and upper-class families from having educational choices.) So let’s be clear about what’s really keeping families from climbing the ladder – poverty. Socioeconomic status is a function of having access to healthy food, adequate housing, energy, employment, quality educational options, safety and health care. Our lives depend on participating in, and benefiting from, the collective institutions that govern our lives. Over the last 60 years of solid education research, income and wealth remain some of the strongest predictors of academic success.
The rhetoric has calmed, but education reformers haven’t come to grips with earlier claims that “truly effective teaching” can “overcome student indifference, parental disengagement and poverty.” They still say that a laser focus on school improvement will help the entire community. “It’s all about the kids,” they say, in a favorite catchphrase. Sonya DiCarlo, director of communications for the Alabama Opportunity Scholarship Fund (school voucher fund) recently used exactly that language in an op-ed defending her the state’s voucher policy. “If this really is ‘all about the kids,’ not the school, the parents, the teachers or the politicians, but the children — then the Alabama Accountability Act is handling that idea soundly,” she wrote.
Likewise, ed reformers love rhetoric suggesting that their opponents just want to keep control because they love power. (“How long are we going to deal with adult power issues,” lamented Joel Klein a few years ago.) This is Children can’t eat test scores. Why school reform isn’t good enough. - The Washington Post:
