Educational Success is about $$ - Part 2: Increasing Student Achievement and Parent Involvement in Poor Schools

In a capitalist system, everyone worries and thinks about money. Poor people especially. But the worries are compounded and compressed. Will I have enough for good food? Will I have enough to pay the rent? Will I have enough Will I have enough Will I have enough?

Then, the perennial worries about safety. My wife taught at a charter school in North Philly, and says that many of her students really didn't believe that they would be alive too long after they were 18.

So now, two things to discuss here: 1) If you are a parent in this situation, what do you do? 2) If you are student, what do you prioritize?

As a psychology student, I learned about Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs. In a nutshell, Maslow posited that there were different needs that humans had, arranged in a hierarchy of importance. When you hit the level of need that is not being met, all the needs above it are ignored, in favor of the need that is missing. The first thing people have to have is a comfort with their physiological needs: food, water, shelter and clothing. Next, a person needs to feel safe in their home and in their society. The needs that follow are love, esteem, meaning and purpose, and then self-actualization.

Maslow stated: "We should never have the desire to compose music or create mathematical systems, or to adorn our homes, or to be well dressed if our stomachs were empty most of the time, or if we were continually dying of thirst, or if we were continually threatened by an always impending catastrophe, or if every one hated us."

So here you are, living in a shitty neighborhood where you don't feel safe, wondering whether you'll be able keep your head above water. Are you thinking about the PTA meeting? Does it cross your mind to ask your child about your homework? These concerns are above the more basic level of survival on which some people must focus.

Let's switch to a student who thinks that his life is destined to an early grave, or an early prison. Are you focused on getting good grades, studying hard, thinking about how your course selection will look to a College Review Board? We couldn't expect any of us to do so, in the same situation. Maslow believed that all humans were very much alike. Our strategies for dealing with the satisfaction of our needs may differ, but that we have certain needs that preoccupy us until they are satisfied, this cannot be doubted.

Humans have before anything else the need for water and food in order to survive. That's why the physiological needs are the strongest of all the needs. When a person is hungry the area of consciousness is filled with the desire to eat and all the other needs step into the background and in a way become non-existent. What happens when there is always food on the table? A person has the "room" to think about satisfying the need for security. If the world isn't secure, the needs above security do not exist.

I hear well-fed, secure people in loving relationships, who are pursuing endeavors that make them happy, complain about bad parenting, and a lack of long-term thinking on the part of poorer students. If Maslow is right, put these people in North Philly, making a few hundred dollars a month, and see where their focus is. (Of course, these people have grown up with the social capital and understanding of where and how to find resources outside North Philly, so... probably not a good experiment. Nonetheless, raising this parenthetical issue solidifies my point.)

What's to be done? Knowing that an education has the strong potential to life a child out of poverty, how do we get students and parents in poverty to care more?

Here are my premises:

1. Everyone in a capitalist system worries about money;
2. If you are worried about satisfying lower level needs, your worries about money will be more concrete than abstract; and so consequently
3. Prioritizing education is unrealistic, if what we want is for people to sacrifice now for the longer-term benefits of college degrees and high test scores. Too long-term. Removed from the pressures of current reality. If we want students and their parents to prioritize education, we cannot do so with potential rewards that are too far in the future.

I have two suggestions for how to tie capitalist yearnings to the satisfaction of the lower level needs to which the poor must attend. Both of them are probably too radical for US culture, the first more than the second. One or the other, or both, will work.

First suggestion: Provide a safety net for people, such that worries about food, water, clothing and shelter will be met for all, as a basic human right. Regardless of whether you fuck away your life on drugs and never do a goddam thing. If everyone had enough to eat, and a roof over their head that they knew wouldn't be taken away, poorer communities themselves could turn their attention to safety, and crime would be reduced internally. As it is, crime in poor communities is a symptom of the indignity of poverty.

A colleague of mine at the Philadelphia School District, on noting the rather meager results of the programs we were evaluating, felt persuaded that you could get rid of the programs, and spend the same money on giving people food and housing, and you'd get the same results. Maslow, I think, would concur.

Second suggestion: Condense the amount of time between behavior and reward. Give people money for educational involvement. I can hear the detractors saying that it's not fair for parents to get paid to come to school meetings, or for students to get paid for doing well in school, while they do it without getting paid. My argument is that the only thing that will motivate someone (parent or child) who is worried about satisfying his/her basic needs is something tangible that has a direct effect on alleviating that worry.

Wouldn't we be an even greater society if we could have the compassion to simultaneously provide some help to someone who was hungry, or thirsty, or homeless AND give them the longer-term strength that an education would provide? It doesn't have to be one or the other. Both/and is so much better than either/or, isn't it?