What comes out depends on what goes in – and how it gets there

The object of education for anyone is to provide something that’s missing – how do I read, how do I paint, how do I interpret Plato? Regardless of the exact curriculum or method of teaching there are social, emotional, and cognitive skills that poor children are missing and need to be taught if they are going to successfully escape poverty.

According to their website, KIPP schools aspire through their teachers to create a rigorous academic environment that also provides role models and support systems, characteristically missing in poor families, as Ms. Payne has pointed out[1], to help their students out of poverty.

Children in poverty, particularly generational poverty, literally come from an alternative culture. They need someone to model the different cultural norms so they know how one thinks, talks, and acts in the culture they aspire to. Perhaps more importantly, by providing a nurturing relationship that teacher or series of teachers can be the key relationship that transports children out of poverty.

Support systems provide the how-tos of the new culture. How do you do this algebra assignment when you don’t understand it; how do you balance a checkbook; how do you dress for a college or job interview? Having the time and taking the time to identify and focus in on the needs of the students and providing this kind of support, again in a nurturing manner, will help students bridge the gap to the middle class.

I have no first hand knowledge of how well KIPP schools achieve these goals but they are goals all schools should aspire to. Being aware of these differences and being able to provide resources to overcome these differences should be a crucial part of the education of teachers and the task of teaching. Schools and teachers should be judged on how well they provide this kind of service.

With respect to curriculum, regardless of what cognitive skills are taught non-cognitive skills should be embedded into the course work and/or taught as separate class work. Non-cognitive skills include perseverance, self-control, social intelligence, curiosity, gratitude, enthusiasm, and optimism.[2] These character traits are as important to scholastic and life success as any cognitive learning skill. Furthermore, while they are most easily instilled at an early age they can be learned even later on in a scholastic career.[3]

With respect to the academic curriculum my only suggestions are the following.

I would recommend ensuring that all students are bilingual by the time they enter first grade. This would be accomplished by immersion in English in preschool for children for whom this is a second language and immersion in a second language in preschool for children fluent in English. This is when brains are optimally designed to learn language. A former classmate of mine has run a Montessori school outside of Chicago and English-speaking 3 year olds are immersed in one of 3 languages and come out at age six fluent in the immersion language.

I would consider introducing students to a musical instrument at around age six. There are a host of cognitive and non-cognitive skills that can be learned in the practice of a musical instrument.

In my next entry, I take a stab at how we might educate teachers, how we might measure achievement, and how we would pay for all this.

In addition, while one in five children live in poverty (compared to 1 in 8 adults) and 44% live in low-income families, that still leaves a majority of children who are middle class or above. In my next entry I will also take a stab at what if any benefit this structure might have on the majority of students.

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[1] I reference my own blog. http://geoffhberg.blogspot.com/2018/03/a-framework-for-understanding-poverty.html

[2] Again KIPP schools are exemplary is that this is part of their mission and curriculum http://www.kipp.org/approach/character/

[3] In the early 90’s Nobel Prize winning economist James Heckman noted that students who took the GED to earn a high school equivalent diploma studied an average of 32 hours. In subsequent studies he found that compared to high school graduates they tended to do poorly in jobs, the armed services and marriage. What they lacked were non-cognitive skills. I came across this idea in the following This American Life segment.  It is very worthwhile to listen to. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/474/back-to-school

Improving Public Education - More is better

This discussion of education is based on the following assumptions.

1.     Democracy should afford its citizens equality of opportunity.

2.     Education, both historically and actually, is a vehicle – probably the principle vehicle for democracy to afford equality of opportunity.

3.     Financial status affords middle class and wealthy students material and cultural advantages that tend to tilt the playing field in their favor.

4.     Changes in the way we educate our children can provide better outcomes for everyone[1] and at the same time help to level playing field for the socially and economically disadvantaged. That said, I am going to principally focus on leveling the playing field. At the end I will make some comments on how this specifically may help the more materially advantaged classes.

As noted in A Framework for Understanding Poverty people are poor in more ways than a lack of money. These include deficiencies in emotional resources, knowledge resources, spiritual resources, support systems, and role models. In addition, people living in poverty learn hidden rules that help them survive in poverty but are different than the hidden rules of the middle class and keep them from moving up the socioeconomic ladder.

I would contend that school can provide these non-financial resources and provide an environment to learn the hidden rules of the class they aspire to but only if children start younger and go to school for more hours/day and more days/year. That would mean children would start school at age three, have a 9-5 school day, and go at least 200 days per year with no school break longer than 3 to 4 weeks.

The model for this can be found in KIPP schools. These are publicly funded K-12 charter schools. Their typical school day is 7:30 to 4:00. Because they are publicly funded they operate on the public school calendar although they offer summer school. Nearly 90% of their students are poor [2] but perform academically at or above grade level when compared with conventional public schools[3]. I would suggest starting this model for preschool, starting the school day later for health and academic reasons[4], and extending the school year to avoid summer learning loss[5].

The principle object of these extended hours days and years is provide an immersion experience in literally an alternative culture from the culture of poverty so that poor children can successfully move out of poverty and into the middle class and possibly beyond.

Of course, if the academic quality of those extended hours, days, and years of schooling is subpar then expanding this time will be a waste of it. That quality will depend on the quality of the methods, the teachers, and the curriculum. I know nothing of teaching methods and close to nothing about teacher standards or curriculum. However, with respect to the latter two I would like to suggest some parameters and I will do that in my next entry. 

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[1] The United States is below average in math and about average in reading and science compared to 34 OECD countries https://www.oecd.org/unitedstates/PISA-2012-results-US.

[2] http://www.kipp.org/results/national/#question-1:-who-are-our-students

[3] http://www.kipp.org/results/national/#question-3:-are-our-students-progressing-and-achieving-academically

[4] https://www.cdc.gov/features/school-start-times/index.html

[5] Summer learning loss is the phenomenon that students regress and lose up to a month of learning after the 10-week summer vacation. This is especially true of socioeconomically disadvantaged students. https://www.brookings.edu/research/summer-learning-loss-what-is-it-and-what-can-we-do-about-it/