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?

Educational Success is About $$: Improving Teacher Quality in Poor Schools

I'm new to blogging, and am just learning the power of its flexibility. I suppose one way to make an impact is to write about things I know. A later entry (although it would be more appropriate today, since it is the day of al Nakba) will discuss the 60th "anniversary" of the state of Israel, and why it is as much to celebrate for Arab peoples as Columbus Day is to Native Americans.

For today, I wish to post some thoughts I have about educational quality in the United States, particularly as it relates to the poor, and how the infusion of capitalistic features could make a difference. Let us first say that these ideas are not ideas I would propose internationally. However, love it or hate it, America's primary deity is the dollar, and so much of the disparity in educational quality and outcomes is related to how our behaviors represent true worship of our god.

There are three elements of our educational system that can be explained as resulting from our lack of consistency in applying the power of our capitalist worldview to all of our citizens. By extension, these undesirable symptoms of this lack of total application can be ameliorated by making the assumption that people who grow up under the influence of this religion (we can call it a $pirituality, if you wish) will make decisions in line with this upbringing. Each day, I will discuss one of these three threads, and make my argument that a focus on money, and understanding that people want more of it, can be used to improve education in the United States.

1) Teacher quality: It's no secret that teacher quality in poor schools is "poorer" than in more affluent schools. One reason for this has to do with the policy of using the seniority system for filling teaching positions. In Philadelphia, where I worked for 4 1/2 years, teachers with the most years of teaching get first pick of all the vacancies. It's not 100% true that experienced teachers are better at their jobs than new recruits, but it is a truism. You can imagine the combination of safety concerns and race/class attitudes that make it harder to fill schools in impoverished areas. So, by the time the newer teachers get their turn, guess which schools are the only ones left on the list?

Another terrible policy that Philadelphia has (and many other urban districts. See the reports on the funding gap by EdTrust here: http://www2.edtrust.org/EdTrust/Product+Catalog/main.htm#ff) is a budgetary practice that has got to go. Schools are given an amount of money for teaching staff. The way this line item is calculated is to take the number of students in the school, and divide it by a predetermined student:teacher ratio (for example, we want our schools to have 1 teacher for every 25 students).

Now here's the problem: Instead of then calculating an amount of money that the school can spend, perhaps by multiplying the number of allotted teachers by the average salary in the District, schools are just given an allotment of teachers. This means that, if you are a school in the best neighborhood in Philadelphia, and consequently, all the teachers that sign up for your school are the most senior teachers (which means they are the most highly paid. Salaries are set by your degree and years of experience), then your budget for teachers will be extremely high.

If you are in the worst neighborhood, and all of your teachers are rookies, your teacher budget will be extremely low. Both schools have the same number of teachers, but the amount of money that the more affluent school spends on its teachers can be much, much higher than the money spent on teachers in the poorest school.

Here's an example: In 2006, when I did a study of the funding gap in Philadelphia, I found that the average number of years of experience in the poorest schools was about 9, compared to 16 years of experience in the most affluent schools. Using actual teacher salaries, I determined that the schools in the lowest quartile of poverty for the District, paid teachers an average base salary of $61,905.45. By contrast, schools in the highest quartile of poverty paid teachers an average base salary of $53,234.12. This is a difference of $8,671.33 per teacher! For an average school with 30 teachers, this represents $260,139.90 in teacher salaries every year. What does this mean for students? If a low income high school student has 6 teachers per day, she is taught by teachers paid a combined $52,027.98 less per year than her counterparts in a wealthier high school in the District. From the time this low-income students enters high school until she graduates, our District spends $208,111.92 less on her teachers than on the teachers serving wealthier students over the same period of time, If this student attended the highest-poverty schools from kindergarten through graduation, the District will have spent a combined total of $676,363.74 less on all her teachers than on the K-12 teachers serving the city’s most affluent public school students.

How does this happen? It is actually quite simple. When teachers with more experience migrate to lower poverty schools, they take their higher salaries with them. The result of this system is a massive transfer of funds from our less-advantaged to our most-advantaged schools. The use of salary cost averaging hides this “reverse Robin Hood effect” from the public eye.

According to one team of economists, “Estimates of teacher performance suggest that having five years of good teachers in a row could overcome the average seventh-grade mathematics achievement gap between lower-income kids and those from higher-income families.” Considering the powerful relationship between educational attainment and future earnings, it is understandable to conclude that educational equity is “the civil rights issue of our time.” We must, if only for ethical reasons, address these inequities immediately.

First suggestion: Pay teachers more money to work in the schools in need of the most help.
Second suggestion: Allot an amount of money - NOT a number of teachers - for each school. Principals I have spoken to said that they would prefer some say in the teachers that work with them. Further, that they would choose a mix of newer and more experienced teachers in their faculty. Changing the budgetary practice would force school administrators to counterbalance more experienced teachers (who cost more) with lower teacher: student ratios (by hiring less expensive teachers).