Soaring Child Poverty in DC

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I understand that THE ROLE OF SCHOOLS IS TO EDUCATE CHILDREN.

Do you understand that THAT CAN'T HAPPEN AMONG POOR CHILDREN UNTIL POVERTY IS ADDRESSED?

And that TEACHERS CAN'T OVERCOME POVERTY ANY MORE THAN SCHOOL SYSTEMS CAN, SO SHOULDN'T BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR ITS EFFECT ON THEIR STUDENTS?

That if you REFUSE TO SEE THAT, then you are HURTING CHILDREN while FEELING SUPERIOR and FEATHERING YOUR OWN NEST? assuming that you work for DCPS, that is.

And frankly, I don't hear parents defending DCPS leadership anymore. Even if they were once hopeful, they've seen that it's not been successful.

Unlike DCPS employees, parents' primary interest in DCPS is not collecting a paycheck or clinging to a failed ideology. Parents care about their kid's welfare first.

Really?! So the argument here is that poor kids can't learn from good teachers OR excel in school via self-motivation? Should we just throw in the towel, then?! While child poverty has been associated with lower academic achievement, I would ask you to please cite one study that shows that all children living in poverty are under-performing. Teachers SHOULD take responsibility for all of their students, regardless of socio-economic status. It is an educator's ethical responsibility to take each student as a whole child (family situation, socio-economic status, culture, customs, and background included) and discover the genius within. Obviously teachers can't save the world, but to infer that a child is simply uneducable because he/she is poor is giving up, and it's just plain insulting. If a teacher doesn't believe in his/her under-served/privileged student, who will??

As a long-time educator, I agree with every single word you've written. There's one exception, however--innocent children whose brains have been damaged by their drug-using moms. Even the best teachers in the world can't overcome the effects of a brain damaged during pregnancy. Certainly, we can help them learn--but to the same degree as we would want.

The problem is that there is not evidence that brains of the kids are that damaged by crack or most drugs surprisingly. Alcohol has demonstrable effects but that is not what you are arguing. There is evidence that poorer children have less working memory which affects all types of learning due to poor housing (lead etc), violence and anxiety, but this is not the aftereffects of the crack epidemic that we are fighting.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:DC's poverty rate is an legacy of our region's de facto system of apartheid whose legal underpinnings were effectively ended in 1970 with the Fair Housing Act.

At some point in the not-so-distant future, it's going to be cheaper to live in the suburbs than it is in DC, and our poverty rate will look very similar to the suburbs. This will be a good thing for DC, the poor, and in the end, the suburbs as well.

Yes, and they will all get 40 acres and a jet pack!