Before assigning homework, ensure that students have a home
Fixing the achievement gap comes second to meeting kids’ basic needs
We had to wake up at 5 o’clock in the morning because our school was far away. Sometimes we had to go to school late, because we had to wait for the bathroom. But since it wasn’t our house, they could use the bathroom first,” Kimberly, 12, told the child advocacy organization Children’s Defense Fund for their The State of America’s Children 2014 report. But at school, she was labeled truant. “I could not go to recess because of this.”
One out of every ten New York City public school students lived in temporary housing in 2017, according to a sobering October 15 article by The New York Times. That amounts to 114,659 students sleeping in hotels, motels, others’ couches, temporary shelters and the unsheltered streets of New York City. The article showed that the total number of homeless students was more than the entire population of Albany, the state capital. Put closing the achievement gap bombast to bed till students have one to sleep in.
Rhetoric around the need to close the achievement gap feeds into a warped notion of individualism — that students need to pick themselves up by their academic bootstraps — and misses the real needs that kids have, which should be supported through policy. Students and their families need secure, affordable homes in safe neighborhoods and a living wage, which can be addressed through policy. Student homelessness of this magnitude is not an individual failure — it’s a failure of policy to address families’ basic needs and made worse by the systemic problems of unaffordable housing and Continue reading: Before assigning homework, ensure that students have a home
