Education Week - August 6, 2014 - 24

COMMENTARY
WAR ON POVERTY: Perspectives
Levers of Change for
Low-Income Students and Schools
By Greg J. Duncan & Richard J. Murnane
C
hanges in the American economy pose enormous
challenges for America's public schools
and the dream of socioeconomic mobility for
low-income families.
By upgrading the skills required by hundreds
of middle-class occupations, technology
has increased what the nation asks of
its schools. At the same time, growing income
inequality has affected where families live and how much
money they can spend to nurture their children's abilities.
These changes have placed great strains on America's decentralized
approach to public education, particularly in schools
serving large numbers of children from low-income families.
An obvious advantage of a higher family income is that it enables
parents to spend more money on books, computers, highquality
child care, summer camps, music lessons, private schooling,
and other enrichment opportunities for their children.
Researchers have reported that, in the early 1970s, the richest
20 percent of families spent about $3,000 more per child per year
(in 2012 dollars) on child enrichment than did the poorest 20 percent.
By 2006, this gap had nearly tripled, to $8,000 per child per
year. This adds up to a $100,000 spending gap over the course of
a child's primary and secondary school career-a huge amount.
ABOUT THIS OCCASIONAL SERIES
To recognize this year's 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty, Commentary
is running an occasional series of Perspectives on the initiative and its impact
on schools and children today. The series continues with Commentaries by
Greg J. Duncan and Richard J. Murnane, and Irwin Redlener.
iStockphoto.com
Enrichment experiences matter because they help children
acquire the vocabulary and background knowledge critical to
achieving the high levels of literacy needed for many kinds of
well-paying work.
Less obvious is that, as income inequality has increased, so has
the residential isolation of low- and high-income families. Relative
to 40 years ago, poor families are now more likely to be surrounded
by other poor families, while high-income families are
similarly isolated. Because most children still attend schools close
to their homes, rising residential segregation has led to increasing
concentrations of low- and high-income children attending separate
schools. The resulting changes in the composition of student
enrollments have shaped how schools function and contributed
to the increasing gap between the achievement and completed
schooling of children growing up in families at opposite ends of
the income scale.
It will be extraordinarily difficult to reverse the growth in inequality
in educational outcomes in the United States. Yet, there
are educational initiatives, conducted at considerable scale, that
have improved results for low-income children. Our recent book
Restoring Opportunity features three such initiatives: the Boston
pre-K program, the campuses of the University of Chicago charter
school, and New York City's small schools of choice. Rigorous evaluations
show that these innovative and quite-durable programs,
all of which change children's daily school experiences, improve the
life chances of children from poor families.
All of these initiatives operate in environments characterized
by consistently strong school supports and sensible accountability.
A Healthy Child
Is a Better Student
By Irwin Redlener
"I
want to be a paleontologist," my
young male patient said, squinting
at a wrinkled clipping from
the newspaper of a dinosaur skeleton
at the museum as I examined
him. An impressive aspiration for
a 10-year-old who looked like he
needed glasses, but more so because
his family was homeless and had none of the
resources that could propel a more fortunate child toward
his goal. But like the tens of thousands of kids
living in poverty that we see on Children's Health
Fund mobile medical clinics across the country, he had
a dream and deserved a chance to pursue it.
They all do. That is why it is unacceptable to me
that we allow millions of children across America to
struggle with health conditions that undermine their
potential to succeed in school. Kids are sleeping at their
desks after being up all night wheezing with untreated
asthma. They are failing tests because they don't have
the glasses they need to read a lesson on the blackboard.
They are being held back a grade because they
can't hear the teacher. They are acting out because they
are traumatized by extreme stress in their home. These
are the health burdens of poverty that weigh on children
in classrooms every day.
"
We need to
bring laser-like
focus to ...
health
barriers, so
that every
child is healthy
and ready to
learn every
day. "
If education is their ticket to a better future and
the key to breaking the cycle of generational poverty,
then we need to ensure that these children are
healthy and ready to learn. No matter how substantial
our social investments in curricula, class-size
reduction, teacher training, and other strategies for
the transformation of K-12 education, we are not
going to be able to close the achievement gap until
we deal with the factor of health in the equation of
school success.
Children's Health Fund, the organization I
founded with the singer-songwriter Paul Simon, has
brought health care to the nation's most medically
underserved children for 27 years. Our fleet of mobile
medical clinics, each a complete "doctor's office
on wheels," brings health care to kids at hundreds of
schools, as well as to homeless shelters and community
centers. So we know firsthand that many of the
poorest children are likely to suffer disproportionately
from health-related conditions, compounding
the academic challenges they face.
In New York City's South Bronx, in neighborhoods
like Hunts Point and Mott Haven that are particularly
economically disadvantaged, the rates for children
who are hospitalized for asthma attacks are
double that of the city as a whole. School principals
there tell us that they call an ambulance as often as
once a week to respond to a child with an asthma
attack. Asthma is a major cause of school absenteeism,
with some children missing 30 or more days of
school each year when the disease is not diagnosed
or treated properly. How can a child sustain academic
momentum with that kind of absenteeism?
Research also tells us that more than 20 percent
of schoolchildren have some degree of visual impairment,
and that 37 percent of children with mild
24 | EDUCATION WEEK | August 6, 2014 | www.edweek.org/go/commentary
hearing loss repeat at least one grade. And data
confirm that hunger, dental pain, lead exposure,
anemia, and behavioral-health problems all have
a serious impact on a child's cognitive development
and engagement in learning. Along with asthma,
which causes kids in the United States to miss 10.5
million school days each year, these conditions constitute
what we have identified as the eight "health
barriers to learning."
Taking care of health problems in a school setting
is not a new idea. School-based health centers
provide primary care for kids with a whole range
of medical conditions. But a school nurse, when one
is available, is not enough to provide the intensive
screening for, and management and treatment of,
the most serious conditions that are known to interfere
with effective school performance.
There are also some good targeted programs for vision
screening, asthma intervention, mental-health
counseling, and other specific health conditions.
Because kids in poverty often suffer from multiple
health challenges, a more coordinated and comprehensive
approach is urgently needed to focus on the
health barriers to learning.
Otherwise, if you provide glasses for a child, but
don't treat the asthma that keeps him out of school,
you haven't solved the problem. If you ensure there
is school breakfast available so kids are not distracted
by hunger, but a child has a hearing defect,
you haven't solved the problem. We need to bring laser-like
focus to each of these health barriers, so that
every child is healthy and ready to learn every day.
Unfortunately, the education and health-care communities
often work in silos. To do right by kids,
we need to pull the silos down and change the way
education and health-care professionals work with
http://www.iStockphoto.com http://www.edweek.org/go/commentary
Education Week - August 6, 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - August 6, 2014
