Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It is not only poverty but the culture of poverty. I teach in a high FARMS school (not in DC). I think we are appr. 95% FARMS. Even if we gave money to the parents of the students, it probably wouldn't make a difference academically. Most years, 90% of my students have cars in their family. They never seem to go anywhere except stores and restaurants. Going on a field trip for them is eye opening. They could be visiting another planet for all they know. My students' parents believe that education happens in school. No matter how much we do to get parents to be involved (directly or indirectly) in their child's education, our efforts are mostly for naught. The only thing that gets parents into school is giveaways mostly in the form of gift cards. These students who qualify for free lunch sure do seem to have plenty of money for luxuries like cell phones (often newer versions than my own), electronics in the home like tablets, X-Box, etc. These same students often don't bring in school supplies. It is very frustrating to understand this culture when you don't come from it. But those who come from this culture don't go to college. We tout college and career readiness but I don't even know if college is what these families want for their kids. Some families in this neighborhood won't allow their high schoolers to go to magnet schools b/c the local high school is where they went and they turned out fine. Meanwhile, the local high school is near the bottom of our district. There are many fights and daily violence there. I want the best for my kids but many of the parents here seem to think the local option is good enough. Poverty is very concentrated where my school so too much poverty places a huge stress on the teachers, etc. I guess that is a districting/zoning issue. Attendance is an issue with kids not coming to school for reasons I used to laugh at when I first started here. Kids wouldn't come because 1) they overslept 2) it was raining/snowing, cold 3) their mom said they could stay home. All of our students live within walking distance except for special ed students who take a bus. None of our students go hungry (all get free breakfast and lunch and many get free dinner). We make sure all students have coats, backpacks, dental care, gloves, etc etc. I feel like the more we do, the more we are expected to do. I wish some of these students could be spread out into schools so they aren't all concentrated in one. Maybe if there were, they might meet kids who have plans for the future that involves higher education. I don't know if the solution is just one thing but I know that the teachers are tired and we just started. Back to planning.

This.

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The elephant in the room: poverty and low education level of the parents. The administrators are not willing to face it head on. The teachers are supposed to be miracle workers.

More like they can't. You can't force someone raised in generational poverty to see a way out of it. You can't make people want better for their kids. You can't make people care about education, spend money better, devote more time to their kids. They keep trying to plug the holes on their end but there HAS to be a family-community-school synergy to produce successful, motivated, high achieving (or plain old achieving) students. This is why the higher SES schools will always do better and produce better students- they have parents and communities who actively care and work WITH the school. The school CANNOT do it alone. But in places like DC, they basically have to.

NP. No they can't force parents to change but we as a society could be more honest about what the problem actually is: home environment, parent background, and SES. Then maybe politicians will start refocusing efforts on eradicating poverty (the true culprit) rather than expecting teachers to be miracle workers and blaming them when they inevitably aren't.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The elephant in the room: poverty and low education level of the parents. The administrators are not willing to face it head on. The teachers are supposed to be miracle workers.

More like they can't. You can't force someone raised in generational poverty to see a way out of it. You can't make people want better for their kids. You can't make people care about education, spend money better, devote more time to their kids. They keep trying to plug the holes on their end but there HAS to be a family-community-school synergy to produce successful, motivated, high achieving (or plain old achieving) students. This is why the higher SES schools will always do better and produce better students- they have parents and communities who actively care and work WITH the school. The school CANNOT do it alone. But in places like DC, they basically have to.

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Anonymous wrote:Love to hear from teachers. What are your top 5 reasons many metro D.C. schools are underperforming for so many years or have you noticed improvements?

State how many years you've been a teacher and whether it's Elementary, Middle or High School.

Parents you can share your opinion but remember to be fair and objective. You are not with the students as much as teachers.

I'm just trying to understand if this is a funding issue ( will more money fix the problem): a poor leadership issue( school level, city or state level) or it's a political issue( doesn't it matter if it's a democratic vs republican city or state) or it's a socioeconomic issue ( the rich want to stay away from the poor).

Thank you for your responses!

It's a low SES issue/failure of parents to prepare their children for school issue

DC has over 70% poverty in schoolage population

When you have a school with over 40% poverty there are going to be major problems. The only schools in DC that don't suck have less than 40% poverty. PS this is true in Montgomery County Fairfax County, Arlington etc

School performance is directly related to SES

Can you be more specific? I thought universal pre-k was supposed to take care of this problem. I'm not disagreeing with you, by the way. I'm just wondering what you mean by parents not preparing their kids for school.

Headstart was supposed to be the great equalizer, but then we learned that birth to age 3 is a more important than initially believed. This is excerpted from

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/04/22/key-to-vocabulary-gap-is-quality-of.html

By the end of the study, more than 85 percent of the vocabulary, conversational patterns, and language complexity of the 3-year-olds had come from their families, and children of professionals had vocabularies more than twice as large as peers in families receiving welfare.A follow-up ...showed vocabulary gaps in preschool predicted 3rd grade gaps in language-test performance.

By age 3, a child's IQ was more closely related to the number of words he had heard than to any other factor, including parents' overall education or income level.

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That being said, Pre-K cannot cure everything. I just assessed all of our K students (not just ESOL) on their ability to write their name, ID shapes, colors, numbers to 31, letters and letter sounds. Many of the students who had a year of Pre-K still knew very few of these concepts. Reinforcement at home is key, and it doesn't happen in many families. What we're finding is that many parents don't really engage in much vocabulary-rich conversation with their kids. And by vocabulary-rich at this age, I mean things like talking about the colors of the food they're eating or that the TV is shaped like a rectangle.

...

Then there are the students who were born in the US, can speak and understand English just fine, but come to school with extremely limited background knowledge. They come to Pre-K or K at 4 or 5 with very little vocabulary. They need to learn from the ground up. The curriculum (at least in my district) assumes that students have a certain amount of background knowledge from which to draw, but they just don't. So then content becomes more and more in depth and students fall farther and farther behind. Like 4th graders who are learning about different types of government, but don't know what a city, state, country or continent is and think that Barack Obama is the president of the whole world. This happens with ELLs and also students who don't speak or understand any language other than English.

I think these are incredibly important points that aren't well understood by many. There is an ENORMOUS difference in the way the average person of higher SES/education talks to her young children compared with how the average person of lower SES/education does. It cannot be overstated. Think about how and how much many of us talk to our toddlers and preschoolers all day long:

"Yes, that is a tricycle. Do you see how it has three wheels? One, two, three. Mommy's bicycle has only two wheels. One, two."

"Do you want to wear your purple shirt or your red shirt?" (Kid points to purple) "Purple it is! Purple is one of my favorite colors. Do you know what else is purple in this room? I see something purple on your bookshelf. Can you find it?"

"Oh my goodness, what could that loud noise be?! Did you hear it? There it is again! Let's go look. Do you think it's the trash truck? No? Maybe it's a fire truck!"

"Are you going to use your doctor kit to give me a check up? Okay. I wonder if I have a fever. Can you check my temperature with the thermometer? It goes under my tongue. No, thermometers don't go in people's nostrils." (Kid: What is a nostril?) "You know those two holes that everyone has in their noses? Those are nostrils. One nostril, two nostrils."

"Hey, look, there's the library. Maybe we can stop there on our way home. Do you remember the name of the librarian who helps us find our books? That's right, Miss Larla. What kind of books should we ask Miss Larla about?"

and on and on and on and on and on. All day, every day.

Look at the concepts and vocabulary in just those few sentences above. Now think about a home where these kind of conversations just don't take place. It is like this in many more homes than people realize. These children get to school and they are, literally, YEARS behind. And catching up is almost impossible, because the homes in which those conversations occur between adults and preschoolers become the homes in which adults and school-aged children talk about elections and the discovery of a planet in another solar system and how to calculate a batting average and what the difference is between a hurricane and a tropical storm and what ISIS is and what makes someone born a boy or a girl and why are some people transgender. And on and on and on and on and on. All day, every day. And so the children of the haves continue to pull away from the children of the have nots.

I think the culture of poverty can only be changed by trying to change the culture of *parenting* in poorer communities. But it is incredibly hard, because adults are shaped by the way they themselves were parented.

For the record, I don't believe Chinese parents talk to their kids like this (I'm white, married into a Chinese family). My DH is always shocked by how white American parents talk to their children. So, whereas as talking could help, it's not necessarily a simple cause-effect situation. In social work, it's believed that low academic achievement correlates with persistent trauma. In a way, it seems that poverty works similarly to PTSD, and PTSD-affected parents raise PTSD-affected children.

I'm the PP who wrote about the way American parents of a certain class/education tend to speak to their children, and I agree that this is probably not universal, but it does, I think, speak to why poor children are often far behind their peers when they start school. I wholeheartedly agree with the notion that living in poverty can have PTSD-type effects. Recent research strongly suggests that living in stressful conditions for prolonged periods of time can have life-long effects on health (including mental health) and well-being.