Poor yet promising students

by Kay McSpadden,English  teacher in York, SC, published in Charlotte Observer, December 20, 2013.

In my high school where two-thirds of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, some families have such extreme needs that each Christmas the faculty puts together gift baskets for them. Families stressed to the breaking point would otherwise face a bleak holiday without someone offering a hand.

The children’s wish lists are modest and spare. Very few kids ever ask for anything remotely resembling the items on the lists of their more affluent peers. Most want food, new underwear, a pair of jeans, bedroom shoes, a stuffed animal. This year one teenager simply asked for “something to make me feel pretty.” A 7-year-old girl requested an ice cream maker, doubtless taking to heart the “teach a man to fish” proverb and planning for the months ahead.

At the same time that the faculty has been shopping for the items on the wish lists, some of our neediest students made gifts for their friends and families. Caylen Whitesides, our media specialist, converted the library workroom into Santa’s workshop where students spent their lunchtimes turning donated art supplies into handcrafted gifts.

Caylen had the idea after a student approached her a few weeks ago saying he had no money to buy anything for his mother for Christmas this year. Did the library have a book that could show him how to make an inexpensive gift for her?

Although recent staff cuts left Caylen as the only media specialist for our 1500 students, she willingly added hours to her day so that our students could experience the joy of giving despite their poverty.

Blaming the poor for their own plight is easy, especially when they make bad choices that keep them trapped in the cycle of generational poverty. A new study out this week from researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison helps explain that cycle and the effects poverty has on thinking skills.

In a wide-ranging National Institutes of Health study that tracked the brain development of children from birth onward, scientists noted the differences in children living in poverty. After excluding children with complicating factors such as mothers who drank or smoked during pregnancy or who had a history of mental illness, scientists scanned the brains of normal children of all races and demographics. The children showed no differences in their brains at birth. None. But as they grew, the children living in poverty showed definite physiological differences in the areas of their brains that govern both the way they make and store information (parietal lobe) and how well they are able to pay attention and control their behavior (frontal lobe). By age 4 the differences were dramatic, with poor children having less gray matter than middle class and wealthy children. Developmentally and behaviorally they lagged behind their better-off peers.

Children suffering the stresses of food insufficiency, irregular and inconsistent sleep, homelessness or uncertain housing, parental stress, limited access to books and educational toys, and a lack of rich language interaction with adults grow up ill-equipped to make the kinds of choices that would help them improve their lives.

We know what facilitates brain development – meaningful enriching interactions with adults in a safe environment. For children of poverty, public schools are often the only places where they have those kinds of experiences.

In their new book “The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools,” education professors Christopher and Sarah Lubienski at the University of Illinois looked at National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores and sorted them by demographics. To their surprise, children in public schools show better results than similar children in private or charter schools.

In an interview with the Boston Globe, Christopher Lubienski said that the policy implications are clear.

“One of the main assumptions is that if you further deregulate, adopt a private-style method for schools, that it might be more effective and lead to higher academic outcomes….When you start to look at the data, the evidence doesn’t necessarily bear that out.”

In other words, rather than diverting scarce public monies from public education into less effective charter schools or into private schools through vouchers, children are better served with increased services in the public schools they attend. Investing in quality preschool, nutrition and health programs, mentoring, and enrichment activities pays off not only in the improved lives of children but in the community as a whole.

I see it firsthand at my school, where promising students come from very modest means. Thanks to the care of the adults in their lives like Caylen Whitesides, they have not only brighter holidays but brighter futures, too.