The Best Thing We Could Do About Inequality Is Universal Preschool

The latest research, from a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by James Heckman and Lakshmi Raut, concludes that a policy of free preschool for all poor children would have a raft of cost-effective benefits for society and the economy: It would increase social mobility, reduce income inequality, raise college graduation rates, improve criminal behavior (saving some of the societal expenses associated with it), and yield higher tax revenue thanks to an increase in lifetime wages.

Keep such a policy in place for years, and its benefits accrue from one generation to the next. Put a child in preschool, in other words, and that improves her chances of graduating college. But it also improves the future education and earnings prospects of her children and grandchildren. Obviously, the quality of a school that a child attends later in life matters, too. And we'd be foolish to invest in preschool without continuing to invest in poor children as they age.

But this mounting evidence suggests that we should be front-loading our investment in the most disadvantaged children during the ages 2-4, when their brains develop at an extremely high rate, and while they're learning social, motivational, cognitive and analytical skills. Preschool is when kids first learn to work together in teams, to resolve problems, to listen and cooperate – all skills that directly come into play in the workforce.

Life cycle skill formation is dynamic in nature. Skill begets skill; motivation begets motivation. Motivation cross-fosters skill, and skill cross-fosters motivation. If a child is not motivated to learn and engage early on in life, the more likely it is that when the child becomes an adult, he or she will fail in social and economic life. The longer society waits to intervene in the life cycle of a disadvantaged child, the more costly it is to remediate disadvantage.

The Essential Supports

What are the Five Essential Supports?

School leadership: This support refers to whether principals are strategic, focused
on instruction, and inclusive of others in their leadership work. Elementary schools
with strong school leadership were seven times more likely to improve in math and
nearly four times more likely to improve in reading than schools weak on this
measure.

Parent-community ties: This support refers to whether schools are a welcoming
place for parents and whether there are strong connections between the school and
local institutions. Elementary schools with strong parental involvement were ten times
more likely to improve in math and four times more likely to improve in reading than
schools weak on this measure.

Professional capacity: This support refers to the quality of the faculty and staff
recruited to the school, their base beliefs and values about change, the quality of
ongoing professional development, and the capacity of staff to work together.
Elementary schools where teachers were highly committed to the school and inclined
to embrace innovation were five times more likely to improve in reading and four
times more likely to improve in math than schools weak on this measure.

Student-centered learning climate: This support refers to whether schools have a
safe, welcoming, stimulating and nurturing environment focused on learning for all
students. Elementary schools with strong safety and order were two times more likely
to improve in reading than schools weak on this measure.

Instructional guidance: This support refers to the organization of the curriculum,
the nature of the academic demand or challenges it poses, and the tools teachers have
to advance learning (such as instructional materials). Elementary schools with strong
curriculum alignment were four times more likely to improve in math and reading
than schools weak on this measure.

To summarize, school organization drives improvement, and individual initiatives are
unlikely to work in isolation. This has strong implications for states and districts
focused on any number of reforms that have gained increasing political currency—for
example, improving teacher quality, turning around low performing schools, or
mandating a single curriculum.

Truly Disadvantaged Schools

Clearly, the social context of schools matters. Indeed, the authors found that
community factors accounted for most of the difference in stagnation rates among
schools. For instance, schools in communities with weak religious participation were
twice as likely to stagnate as schools in communities with strong religious
participation. Schools in communities where people did not believe they had the
ability to make a positive change were twice as likely to stagnate as schools in
communities where people believed they could. This pattern held true for social
indicator after social indicator.

Still, despite tremendous obstacles, a handful of “truly disadvantaged” schools did
improve. Over the seven-year period, 15 percent of “truly disadvantaged schools”
showed significant academic improvement. While low, these improvement rates didn’t
differ significantly from those of schools in predominantly minority communities,
which had much lower rates of crime and child abuse and higher median family
incomes.

The small group of truly disadvantaged schools that “beat the odds” and improved
suggests that community context matters, but only so far as it affects the likelihood of
developing certain organizational structures that the authors found were vital for
improvement. Whether in advantaged or disadvantaged communities, very well
organized schools improved and very poorly organized schools stagnated, the authors
found.

In short, in communities where there are few viable institutions, where crime, drug
abuse and gang activity are prevalent, and where palpable human needs walk through
the school doors virtually every day, robust efforts are necessary to ensure schools are
organized for improvement. The hopeful news is that even truly disadvantaged
schools can be organized for improvement.

Technology Alone Won't Save Poor Kids in Struggling Schools

Our results indicate that computer ownership alone is unlikely to have much of an impact on short-term schooling outcomes for low-income children. Existing and proposed interventions to reduce the remaining digital divide in the United States and other countries, such as large-scale voucher programs, tax breaks for educational purchases of computers, Individual Development Accounts (IDAs), and one-to-one laptop programs, need to be realistic about their potential to reduce the current achievement gap.

How to Resurrect an Urban School District

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/05/how-resurrect-urban-school-district/5552/

Living on right side of county line means more life, better health

-Gladwin County has the highest percentage of smoking adults (31 percent); the lowest rate of smokers is in Ottawa County (11 percent)

-Saginaw County has the highest rate of obesity (40 percent), but even in the skinniest counties (Ottawa and Washtenaw), a quarter of adults are considered obese.

-Lake County has the highest teen birth rate, at 64 births per 1,000 females ages 15-19; that’s more than four times the teen birth rate in Livingston and Washtenaw counties (13 per 1,000).

Despite being the home to five of the state’s top-10-ranked hospitals, Wayne County ranks last in health outcomes such as poor physical and mental health, low birth rate and premature death.

By contrast, Washtenaw, with the state’s top-ranked medical facility (University of Michigan Hospitals and Health Centers), is ranked fifth. (Leelanau County is tops in health outcomes.)

“This is about changing economic opportunity,” Udow-Phillips said. “Health is about poverty. And the best way to get people out of poverty is education.

“If we invest in early childhood education, health issues (will improve)” eventually, she said, because education is positively correlated with better jobs and better health.

“This is a long-term issue,” Udow-Phillips said. “It’s not going to be solved by hiring more doctors.”


http://bridgemi.com/2013/04/living-on-right-side-of-county-line-means-more-life-better-health/

Resistance theory. As applied to schools, this term refers to the ways in which students actively or passively resist learning. Reasons for this resistance may be varied, from cultural or linguistic differences to perceptions that the knowledge taught is meaningless and imposed. Resistance can take a variety of forms, from acting out, to refusing to complete schoolwork or other assignments, to dropping out of school altogether. Although resistance is rarely intentional on the part of a student, it can be extremely effective either in disrupting or preventing learning or in developing alternative ways of coping within schools.

The End of the Neighborhood School

Kids being uprooted from neighborhood schools are often the ones that can least handle the sudden change. "A lot of the children who are affected by this trend are already at risk because of poverty, drug abuse, violence, family upheaval, lack of healthcare," says Julianne Robertson King, a mother of four who lives in D.C.'s Ward 5, which is set to see four schools close this year. "These are people who have not been able to capitalize on the promise of America. When you remove one thing that they can count on... ."

According to researchers from the University of Chicago's Urban Education Institute, if these students are sent to a similarly under-performing school, test scores will remain low. Moreover, students are more likely to jump around between schools after their first school is shuttered, and may stop attending school altogether.

Five large school districts saw charter school enrollment increases averaging 17 percent over the 2011-12 school year: Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Chicago.

According to a report commissioned last year by D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray, despite geographic disparities, two-thirds of all students attend schools within or adjacent to their neighborhood cluster. (For traditional public schools, 74 percent of students stayed within their neighborhood cluster; in charter schools, it was 57 percent.)

"One of the biggest things is the community aspect of it," explains Garrison PTA President Ann McLeod. "You really meet more of your neighbors that way. It helps you enjoy your neighborhood more, you are more rooted in your neighborhood, you've got resources for your kids to have more friends who live around them."

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/02/end-neighborhood-school/4687/

Michelle Rhee

Michelle Rhee has been working for the last 18 years to give children the skills and knowledge they will need to compete in a changing world. From adding instructional time after school and visiting students' homes as a third grade teacher in Baltimore, to hosting hundreds of community meetings and creating a Youth Cabinet to bring students' voices into reforming the DC Public Schools, she has always been guided by one core principle: put students first.

Each chapter of Michelle's story has convinced her: students of every background and ZIP code can achieve at high levels, and for our schools to become what children deserve, every educator is called to believe this. Even in the toughest of circumstances, all teachers are called to turn the incredible potential that fills their classrooms daily, into the achievements worthy of our children and country.

RADICAL: Fighting to Put Students First

In her new book, Radical: Fighting to Put Students First, Michelle Rhee draws on her own life story and delivers her plan for better American schools. Michelle's goal is to ensure that laws, leaders, and policies are making students - not adults - our top priority, and she outlines concrete steps that will put us on a dramatically different course. Informing her critique are her extraordinary experiences in education: her years of teaching in inner-city Baltimore; her turbulent tenure as chancellor of the Washington, D.C., public schools; and her current role as an education activist. Rhee draws on dozens of compelling examples--from schools she's worked in and studied; from students who've left behind unspeakable home lives and thrived in the classroom; from teachers whose groundbreaking methods have produced unprecedented leaps in student achievement. The book chronicles Rhee's awakening to the potential of every child blessed with a great teacher, her rage at realizing that adults with special interests are blocking badly needed change, and her recognition that it will take a grassroots movement to break through the barriers to outstanding public schools.

Teaching with Teach for America

As a Teach for America (TFA) corps member in a Harlem Park Community School in Baltimore City, through her own trial and error in the classroom, she gained a tremendous respect for the hard work that teachers do every day. She also learned the lesson that would drive her mission for years to come: teachers are the most powerful driving force behind student achievement in our schools.

STRUCTURAL RACISM AND COMMUNITY BUILDING

-How is it that a nation legally committed to equal opportunity for all—
regardless of race, creed, national origin, or gender—continually reproduces
patterns of racial inequality?

-Why, in the world’s wealthiest country, is there such enduring poverty among
people of color?

-How is it that in our open, participatory democracy, racial minorities are still
underrepresented in positions of power and decision making?

Without fully accounting for the historical and ongoing ways in which racial dynamics produce inequities between whites and people of color, the social justice and antipoverty field risks pursuing strategies that are misguided, incomplete, or inappropriate to the challenge.

The statistical portrait of the American population broken out by race reveals persistent disparities between people of color and white Americans in almost every quality of life arena, the most basic being income, education, and health.

The statistical portrait of the American population broken out by race reveals persistent disparities between people of color and white Americans in almost every quality of life arena, the most basic being income, education, and health.

The correlation between race and well-being in America remains
powerful.

Beginning with the expropriation of Native American lands, a racialized system of power and privilege developed and white dominance became the national common sense, opening the door to the enslavement of Africans, the taking of Mexican lands, and the limits set on Asian immigrants (8).

Over time, beliefs and practices about
power and privilege were woven into
national legal and political doctrine.
While committing to principles of
freedom, opportunity, and democracy,
America found ways to justify slavery,
for example, by defining Africans as nonhuman. This made it possible to deny
Africans rights and freedoms granted
to “all men” who were “created equal.”
Only when white Southerners wanted
to increase their political power in the
legislature did they advocate to upgrade
Africans’ legal status to three-fifths of a
human being. Thus, from the earliest
moments in our history, racial group
identities granted access to resources and
power to those who were “white” while
excluding those who were “other” legally,
politically, and socially.

Racism in twenty-first century America is harder to see than its previous incarnations because the most overt and legally sanctioned forms of racial discrimination have been eliminated. Nonetheless, subtler racialized patterns in policies and practices permeate the political, economic, and sociocultural structures of America in ways that generate differences in well-being between people of color and whites. These dynamics work to maintain the existing racial hierarchy even as they adapt with the times or accommodate new racial and ethnic groups. This contemporary manifestation of racism in America can be called “structural racism (9).”

White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks (18).

. . . . whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and
average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as
work which will allow ‘them’ to be more like ‘us.’

It seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage . . . is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all.”
-Peggy MacIntosh, “White Privilege: Unpacking the In

“. . . a child born in the bottom 10
percent of families ranked by income
has a 31 percent chance of ending
up there as an adult and a 51 percent
chance of ending up in the bottom
20 percent, while one born in the top
10 percent has a 30 percent chance
of staying there.”

Psychological studies of African American adolescents have demonstrated that consistent negative imaging contributes to negative self-acceptance and mental health problems (22).

Moreover, the attitudes that manifest
themselves at the individual level can
also aggregate all the way up into a
national consensus about race that,
in turn, influences policies, practices,
and representations. Experimental
studies of the effects of news stories
on the public suggest that television
images have the potential to catalyze
and reinforce opinions about public
policies that contribute to racially disparate outcomes: “A mere five-second exposure to a
mug shot of African American and Hispanic youth offenders [in a 15-minute newscast]
raises levels of fear among viewers, increases support for ‘get tough’ crime policies, and
promotes racial stereotyping.”


---EDUCATION---
Public education is probably the national system that holds the greatest potential for reducing racial inequities over time.

Looking closely at specific school districts reveals even greater inequities in investments. In the predominately white school district of Manhasset, just outside New York City, students receive twice as many resources as their predominately black and Latino counterparts in or close to New York City’s urban core (28).

RACIAL EQUITY ITSELF NEEDS TO BE A PRIORITY OBJECTIVE OF ANYONE COMMITTED TO PROMOTING SOCIAL, ECONOMIC, AND POLITICAL JUSTICE.

The implication for action is that social change leaders must adopt an explicitly raceconscious approach to their work: they must factor race into their analysis of the causes of the problems they are addressing, and they must factor race into their strategies to promote change and equity.


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