I don't understand in a personal way the challenges that poverty creates for families, and schools and teachers…I don't ever want to minimize it. Poverty is a terrible obstacle. But we can't let it be an excuse.
So says Bill Gates and almost everyone else who is involved in the corporate ed reform movement. For an interesting rebuttal, see this Jim Taylor piece from which the above quote.
I often hear people argue that we cannot use poverty to let schools off the hook because to do so is to give in to the soft bigotry of low expectations. I listen patiently; I understand their concerns. I understand that low expectations can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I recognize some schools and kids beat the poverty odds. But their successes are not scalable. They are statistical outliers. And they will remain so until something changes at a more fundamental level regarding structural, systemic poverty. There's a reason that all these top-down ed reform measures don't work and won't work in the aggregate unless, in the aggregate, fundamental things change for kids who grow up in poverty.
The ideology of Republican and Neoliberal Democrat policy elites in D.C. is Social Darwinist. These elites think the market will solve everything, and as long as that mindset prevails, we will never get at the root causes of poverty because. That ideology is all about rewarding winners and punishing losers, and it insures that there will always be losers. That ideology assumes that if you are a loser you deserve to be–no excuses. How can that be seriously entertained as an approach that can work to solve the problem of underperforming kids and schools? How does that even begin to make sense?
I like the sentiment behind the phrase "No Child Left Behind", but the policy that has flowed from it has little to do with the sentiment. The Obama/Duncan slogan "Race to the Top" is more honest. Both slogans articulate American commonplaces, but they work in opposition to one another. Whoever gets to the top, obviously, leaves everybody else behind. And isn't that what we're seeing–schools and kids getting left behind as more and more educators game the system to win in the high-stakes testing competition? Even the winners are losers in this distorted scheme because to accept the rules of this ridiculous game to begin with is already to have accepted defeat.
In the end, there are no top-down solutions; there is no way to guarantee success–there is only the effort to create the conditions that allow for the greatest possibility of success. There is only working with one kid at a time, and the cumulative, particular success stories in the long run add up. The top-down, one-size fits all corporate mentality that now reigns does not create the conditions for a broad range indvidual success stories; it wants one success story, and it has to be measureable according to strict criteria.
Are you familiar with the Taylor Mali bit about "What Teachers Make"? In it he talks about how he can make a C+ feel like winning the medal of honor for one kid, and for another make and A- feel like a slap in the face because it wasn't his best work. Maybe the same applies to schools. A C+ for some schools is a major accomplishment given the poverty-related challenges such schools and their teachers have to contend with.
I'm not for making excuses for schools or teachers who are not doing their jobs. I am for recognizing that success is relative, that the successes of many schools and teachers, the small miracles that they frequently effect, are real, and they are not measurable by some standardized test. Quantitative metrics cannot measure quality, and in the end quality is all that matters.
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