Last week, a Washington Post article reported on a new study showing that poverty has a significant impact on school performance. That made us curious”¦ will Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s successor, Kaya Henderson, stick with Rhee’s line about poverty not being a barrier to educational achievement?
The study makes a strong case that tools beyond “improving instructor quality” are needed to produce better outcomes for low-income students. The study found that low-income students perform better when they move to schools with less poverty or when their families move into lower-poverty neighborhoods.
Some districts, like Montgomery County, have chipped away at the issue of concentrated childhood poverty by requiring new residential developments to include some affordable units, which creates income-diverse neighborhoods and schools. Others have implemented busing programs, where low-income students attend school in a more affluent neighborhood.
Those approaches would be challenging in the District. Later this month, Henderson will inherit a school district in which two of three students qualify for free or reduced lunch, in a city where one in three children live in poverty (one in two in Wards 7 and 8).
These figures remind us that child poverty is a huge education issue in the District. Concentrated childhood poverty is tied to a variety of learning barriers, including malnutrition, poor health, and child abuse. Problems such as these take more than a brilliant teacher at the front of each classroom. Poverty shouldn’t be accepted as an excuse for low student performance, but it shouldn’t be ignored, either.
The District’s poor children are suffering, both at home and in the classroom, and it’s going to take more than great teachers to help them thrive and succeed. When Henderson takes the reigns at DCPS, we hope she brings a broader perspective on school reform’one that takes into account the grave effects of poverty on children and the classroom, and offers students and their families the support they need to make achievement possible. A recent effort to offer dinner in some DC public schools, which both improves nutrition and encourages students to stay for after-school programs, seems like a step in the right direction.
