No, not trying to confuse the issue, just frustrated with attempts to boil it all down to (a) simplistic methods that (b) can be implemented at the level of the school rather than © recognizing that there are larger social problems that provide a matrix within which student success and failure occur.
And in all seriousness, how was my edit wrong?
There is no question that there are hungry children. My wife was a high school principal in a somewhat high poverty district, and on Mondays some of the kids would be ravenous. She instructed the cafeteria workers to give larger portions and free seconds on Mondays, but in doing so she was probably in violation of federal law.
But blaming the parents does accomplish something. The food stamp allotment that parents receive every month is more than sufficient to provide food for a month, especially when the kids are eating half their meals at the school. If the kids are showing up hungry to school, the parents need to be arrested and thrown in jail, because they are clearly trading their free food for liquor, drugs or other items not covered by the Food Stamp program.
"No, not trying to confuse the issue, just frustrated with attempts to boil it all down to (a) simplistic methods that (b) can be implemented at the level of the school rather than © recognizing that there are larger social problems that provide a matrix within which student success and failure occur.
And in all seriousness, how was my edit wrong?"
I couldn’t find the reference but a few months ago there was a discussion of a media article showing two middle school course schedules for kids I believe in NJ. A kid from a well off school had some fancy sounding electives while the kid from the low ses school had a lot of the 3Rs and far fewer electives. Some were taking this as a sign that the low ses kids were being deprived of enrichment their wealthier age mates were getting. I personally thought the wealthier schedule was a bit fluffy and that the low ses school was doing exactly right by focusing on the core skills their students probably need to work a lot on. So at least some schools serving low ses kids are focusing a lot on core instruction, but I am not convinced it’s helping.
@muchtolearn, if the solution is with school reforms as you suggested, how then do you explain the large and persistent “achievement gap” which many schools have been unable to eliminate? Our school system is above average and the kids are in the same classrooms together through elementary school. No group is getting substantially better instruction. And yet the gap is there and they can’t get rid of it.
blink blink
@EarlVanDorn, have you ever successfully lived on a food stamp allotment? SNAP benefits are limited to a maximum (a maximum, it can be less!) of $511/month for a family of three, $649/month for a family of four. You can survive on that, I’m sure, but thrive? Yeah, you can buy a lot of rice and beans and maybe even a few carrots with that amount of money, but even that’s pushing it—and that goes even more so when there’s precious little nutritional or financial counseling for people using SNAP, even though they’re the ones who most need it.
For comparison, my family of six goes through roughly the $925/month SNAP allotment for a family our size in groceries each week—and that’s not including the two or three times we eat out each week, which increases our total food spending but decreases our grocery bills. Yes, we have high-quality tastes when it comes to food, but even if we cut back severely, with most of our kids in the throes of adolescent growth spurts we’d be hard-pressed to manage to go even two weeks on that amount. So no, I don’t see how someone who can’t get by on their SNAP allotment is “clearly” doing anything untoward, I really don’t.
Wow! I can’t begin to imagine how you could spend that much on groceries. I can easily feed my family of 4 on $925 a month. And I could do it for way less if I had to but I do like Whole Foods. Come on, you can eat just fine on $649 per month for 4 people.
The photographs of school conditions in Detroit were truly horrifying. It is hard to blame parents for having less motivation to be involved when the schools are in such bad shape. How can the state let this happen? Along with the water situation in Flint, of course.
The answers to improving schools are not simple nor well understood. What works in one school, with one principal, group of teachers and cohort of kids doesn’t always work when translated to another school. I don’t know if there have been any studies that show that longer school days or longer school year have better outcome across the board, if the level of instruction is not improved. Many charters or parochial schools do not have long-term track records of significantly improving outcomes for kids in the worst slums.
Everyone points to ineffective teachers as the cause of bad schools, but how many teachers are there that are that bad? How many better teachers would be willing to go and work in one of those schools in Detroit? How many were good, caring teachers until they got tired of trying to fix a situation that seemed beyond fixing. The community and family support for students is lacking too. My friend that teachers in a low performing school finds that parents do not show up for back to school night and some don’t respond when told their child is failing a HS class.
Money is not the only answer, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt in most cases.
@dfbdfb Please quit acting like eating beans and rice is punishment. Yes, these foods are virtually free, but eating them is not a bad thing. They are delicious and wonderful foods.
I am an economical shopper. We often have ribeyes and other high-cost items at our house, and it is not possible to do this on a Food Stamp budget. But take those out and I would have absolutely no problem feeding my family on $649 per month. I’m rather gobsmacked that anyone could not.
I’m trying to figure out how you are spending so much money on food. Pasta costs 50 cents per pound on sale. Ground chuck or ground round is $2.30 on the old meat rack. Ragu is a buck a jar if you stock up once a year when it is on sale. Hamburger buns are a dollar for a pack of eight. I mean, how can you possibly have any trouble at all feeding a family on $649 a month?
I should have noted in my statement on food budgets above that we operate under certain dietary restrictions.
That aside, I’d suggest keeping all of your receipts for food for a month—there’s a lot of good evidence that most people don’t realize how much they actually do spend on food.
@mathyone That is an excellent question.
Students in wealthier, more education focussed families get more English and math enrichment at home in the evening, on weekends, and during the summer. Students are only in school 180 days a year. That leaves another 185 days that they are not in school. Low income families are more likely to treat that time like a break.I am going to use that time to move my kids ahead by strengthening their English and math skills, among other things.
If you want to reduce the performance gap between low income kids and my kids, you have to extend school hours during school the year, and reduce the break. That will give the low income students more math and English education. It will also leave me with less free time to supplement my kids. This will not eliminate the gap completely, and there are clearly other important issues like unmet basic needs, but it will reduce the gap.
What I know for sure is that as long as you leave my kids with lots of free time, I am going to use some of that time to put my kids academically ahead of the vast majority of kids. That means that you will not be able to close the performance gap without significantly increasing the number of hours in the school year.
I agree with dfbdfb – lots of questionable assumptions in the paragraph in question (post 59). Nations with strong teacher unions manage to educate their kids well enough to outscore ours; so do nations with shorter school days, and ones where art and music are deemed to be as important as the 3 Rs – and MORE important than the 3 Rs in the early years.
Frankly, to every complex problem is a simple solution – that’s usually wrong. Be ware of simple solutions and those who say you’re trying to confuse issues by bringing up, you know, facts and nuance.
@muchtolearn, I do not believe that the majority of middle class families are using off time to strengthen their kids’ skills and move them forward in some deliberate manner as you portray. I didn’t do that at all, unless you count taking my kids to the library when they asked and reading them stories at bedtime and making sure they did their homework.
@dfbdfb, come on, I know how much I spend on food. Your grocery bill is outrageous. If you shop twice a week, you are telling me you spend over $450 per trip to the grocery store? I have never seen anyone spend that much or buy that much food. Even at a less economical store it wouldn’t fit in one cart, perhaps not even 2 carts.
@mathyone “I didn’t do that at all, unless you count taking my kids to the library when they asked and reading them stories at bedtime and making sure they did their homework.”
Yes, all of those things, plus making sure they read, helping them by explaining the math homework, asking them if they know what a word means, asking for a packet of key math skills for them to practice on over the summer, making sure they do it, launching a rocket with them, building a trebuchet together, doing little science experiments, teaching them why education matters. It is many little things that add up to a big advantage. We aren’t rich so we do most things ourselves, but more wealthy families often pay for supplemental help.
The last I’m going to post on this: Yes, my family spends that much. Like I said, we have certain dietary restrictions that bump the prices up (but fortunately for those on food stamps, no poor people ever have any such issues to deal with), and we live in one of the highest-cost areas in the country for food prices—so, yeah, it’s arguably unfair to compare costs for a family like ours to those on SNAP benefits, except that there are a lot of families in my community who use them.
But no, I know what I spend on food in a month. The weekly bill isn’t precisely as much as the monthly SNAP limit for a family my size, but it’s reasonably close. So it goes.
The most important resources a school system has are the people, not the money or the buildings. Highly qualified and motivated students and highly qualified and motivated teachers and highly qualified and motivated parents to improve students qualifications and keep them all motivated. You can, in most cases, substitute “high SES” for these descriptors, though YMMV in some immigrant communities. The benefits of putting all these highly qualified people together accumulate, and so do the negatives where low SES families are clustered. Orchestras, stadiums, pools, team sports, trips to foreign countries, they are all just the icing on the cake. It’s the people who matter. Parents who are looking for a good school, from preschool to college, are looking for exactly that, even if it isn’t spelled out. At the elementary and secondary level, clustering highly qualified and motivated people together is what private schools and high SES districts accomplish. If you control by both family AND school SES, most advantages for “better schools” disappear.
There is very little that money can do about this. Virtually the only thing a system has complete control over is how highly qualified and motivated the teachers are they put into the classroom. Next, they would have to augment the time the kids spend with those teachers - kids are in school only a quarter of their waking hours. Then they could try to raise motivation among parents - you can’t augment their qualifications or SES via the school system, but you can try to help them motivate their kids, have high expectations, make them work hard, make them turn off the TV, no matter how exhausted they themselves may be keeping the roof over their heads and food on their table. Then you would also have to make sure that every classroom has a critical mass of highly qualified and motivated students to keep standards and motivation up for everyone - and make sure that their attitudes prevail. Some magnet programs accomplish this.
Good luck with all of that - consciously or not, spending time, energy and money to cluster with other highly qualified and motivated families is what high SES families do best, for the sake of their kids. And from a public policy and human rights standpoint, you can’t treat kids and their families as a resource to be shifted around, quite apart from the fact that they won’t have it. All you can do is to try and make the resources you can control - teachers, buildings, programs etc. - attractive enough so they’ll come, or stay, voluntarily.
There is a reason there are no easy solutions.
@dfbdfb wrote
We eat well, but this just boggles my mind. By “groceries”, are you referring to just FOOD? Or are u including all the stuff that gets picked up in a grocery store, like housekeeping supplies, personal care items, etc. Because $925 per week divided by 6 people comes out to over $150 per day. If I bought a good bottle of wine every day (even w the ridiculous import duty we pay), I’d have to be eating foie gras everyday to spending that on just food groceries alone.
$925/week X 52 weeks = 48k
You spend nearly 50 grand a year on just food groceries?
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/05/01/grocery-costs-for-family/2104165/ This article is a few years old, but reports the UDSA report for the estimated cost of feeding a family of 4. Sure if someone has some very, VERY expensive dietary issues (for example, some kosher foods can be pricey) there are outliers in every bell curve. These are average #s, and are more the norm.
Dfb lives in Alaska. Might the price of food there be significantly higher than the mainland?
Many people living in poor areas live in food deserts. They can’t run over to the local grocery store and stock up on Ragu when it is on sale because it is not necessarily on sale at the local bodega and they don’t have a car in which to carry heavy jars nor the storage space to keep a years supply of spaghetti sauce. In many cities, the cost of food is much higher than in the suburbs and it certainly is at the corner store compared to a suburban supermarket. There are no Costcos or Walmart supercenters in the poor areas of NYC for example.