How "No Rich Kid Left Behind" asks us to Imagine

There is a New York Times blog article I've seen floating (and read several times as I waited in this doctor's office or that grocery store line on my new iphone) about rich kids testing and learning well.
No Rich Kid Left Behind.

It's good.
(Boy, btw, rich kids got these iphones a long time before I did, I'm so far behind I hope I'm not assessed on my ability to load an app. )

"What is news is that in the United States over the last few decades these differences in educational success between high- and lower-income students have grown substantially."

A prof. at Stanford noticed that the gap in school performance seems to mirror or correlate to the gap in economic affluence.

Very nice observation.

Interestingly we've Left No Consultant Behind as well in the last 12 years in a failed plan that demanded accountability in public schools while siphoning off millions until, sadly we blew the gap into a divide.
Account for what we got in this bargain.
Can we discuss that?
Ok. back to the article, which you need to link out to read above.  I got to perseverating on a sentence.

"Whatever we’ve been doing in our schools, it hasn’t reduced educational inequality between children from upper- and lower-income families."

I will address that in another blog, (the ENTIRE REASON for NCLB evidently a complete botch)  but here's the quote that I want to address:

"It’s not clear what we should do about all this. Partly that’s because much of our public conversation about education is focused on the wrong culprits: we blame failing schools and the behavior of the poor for trends that are really the result of deepening income inequality and the behavior of the rich."

Interestingly I think that it is exceedingly clear what to DO.
So I'll state a few things.
Gov. Jerry Brown in CA (around future school funding) knows what to do. At least as far as I read he knows.

We have to close the disparity between have and have not, and we do, in fact, need to address what money does buy. It's a shame that every pleasure, every opportunity, every park and  experience has been monitized. That's something MY generation should answer for, but it hasn't.
So here are some things I do not see in schools in poverty, and  in poverty I do think this matters-it's why my children attended schools in poverty and STILL had outstanding scores and got into great schools.
Because he is right.
From birth on I bought books, we had experiences out in the world,  I think to some degree I understood the world of academia and we purchased the tickets and found a way to go and get it.
But we had enough income at the time- and I took on the debt early on- because I understood the game.


Going Places.

No  one can have context without context.
And believe it or not state and national tests are incredibly biased towards those that have seen things like Mount Rushmore, or gone to a Presidential library, walked in a marathon, seen an odometer, wandered  by a glacier, caught a now hugely expensive ball game, you get the drift.
Mighty hard to AFFORD on two minimum wage jobs. Or less. In a new place you immigrated to perhaps....
and if you can hold the contempt down to a minimum...a young child did not purchase their parent.
Maybe Google can get that going so that the in the future only those with $ can replicate. We'll see.
SO one thing we CAN, but don't do is....

Children in poverty need monthly fieldtrips.  No, not once a year,  but until they have the common knowledge gained from visits to historical sites, art museums, aeronautical museums, public parks, historical register sites, botanical gardens, and so on. I do not kid you-these experiences of trips to Washington DC, summer camps, to the places of community, historical, and cultural significance create something that is unmatched in terms of a context for learning. 

The FIRST thing to get yanked in cut backs in school economy- or when a school was labeled "failing"- was something like the museum. No consultant mined the fieldtrip bringing you an awareness of how that helps us learn, and SOME even tappled on to insist video that showed another place was a "waste of time"- so goodbye Reading Rainbow, National Geo.

Traveling out was labeled too "expensive" for those in poverty schools.
Narrowing stopped the ability of the teacher to connect learning to actual people and places (and gosh knows if someone else tells me about the fantastic video on-line bus fieldtrips on face time that we do not have I'll scream) and thus we lost connection to meaning.
And fundraising for a trip at today's rate of gasoline-that's prohibitive. Much less the ten they should have.
It needs to be as important as dumping the $ into the retreats to listen to Kagan strategies with a 5 day catered lunch. No "strategy" gained for $150,000 like "turn to your shoulder buddy" is going to replace a year when a grade level visited police, fire department, the local lock and dam, the air traffic control booth, the train station, the places that really are the community hubs at LEAST ten times, getting out and about. Using that to push forward into literacy responses
Restoration of this, or re-branding and funding needs to be on the plate of the Secretary of Education. Get on board Michelle. I bet if we were out twice a month we'd lose some of the lard bottoms doing passive workbook practices evolve. My bottom grew.


Call it "Kids Explore" or anything you darn well please.
Expand and pat yourself on the back for connecting it to expository text, make it part of projects that design environmental impact whatever. Study the river in your district, map the birds, get out and do a bug study every week- but for gosh sakes get out.  Get kids in poverty on buses or bikes, and to something besides the desk and the workbook of test prep that the grade level chairs think matter.
If you took a grade level and made model economies- then took children to ten kinds of businesses and industry in that year- you'd vastly improve their understandings of math, money, stocks, and everything else you say when you say "college and career ready," and they then get to read about on the state test-imagine that.
If you designated in another grade level the public service trips- with trips to post office, water treatment plants to various forms of government- what you would do is strengthen the connections.
Develop context.
And yes...by the end of a year those children would be transformed. Yeah, just like the rich kids.
I'm not asking for them to get taken to Build A Bear, or the exclusive shop where Mom gets the perfumes she now needs, or waxed, or the ways to better hire a cook- but I am asking for the feeling of having the funding to get the kids OUT.


Parents of the affluent hire nannies who they expect to haul their kids to such things, we ALL learned that in the televised OJ debacle. Nannies-the rich and doctors get them. And they occasionally do some of that taking out with their kids  too. You see the TMZ. After all they have the luxury of time, money, resources and knowledge.
It would definitely improve a child's chances of understanding what is going on IF  they went yearly to see orchestras, universities, libraries, and places that are the sole providence of those now with $. As we have monetized every single thing including getting in a red canoe on a river-we'll need to fund it.

Call me a dreamer but when no child in my room-zero- raises a hand to the question "Have you ever been to another state?" And one then asks "Paso Robles"- which is a town a few hours away in our state, and now that child is seen as exotic- we can ACT like these things are unknowable but the truth is easy.

If you have money by the time your child is 6 they've seen things...

Children need to be seeing things.
Poor kids-going to public places, seeing things.
Good.


Another thing we can do

Bringing theater and music to students

So...

I read rich kids...test well.

Coincidentally they also get piano lessons, violin, cello, flute, you get the idea- along with SEE it done well.
Even if that means concerts of Usher.
Or the Beiber. Watch the Voice and go to lessons.
They look forward to skipping the practice on their piano lesson- if they can- when the tiger mom isn't looking- or gets to travel to Thailand for the job.
But not students in poverty.
At best they had a few music assemblies a year.
But the Districts cut that nonsense in NCLB, those activities weren't "serious" enough. Oops, they cost.
They needed to clean up those schools.
And so, restore and refund active music/theater assemblies.

I'm in a quandary right now. I teach a student that needs a piano. He can't afford it.
However he longs to play the piano and he wants to understand classical music-and has conquered melody lines for several pieces by Beethoveen and Mozart on his own. I think the last time I had a student in music lessons was 8 years ago.
How can I make this plainer?
All students need to play instruments.
How can I make this plainer-things like this are what money buys and those who test well- have it.
Once school just had music, music teachers, teachers with access to hooking you up to lessons outside of school that were not prohibitively expensive. Once.

Survey kids when you give these all important state exams. ASK -do you see orchestras, do you play instruments with a weekly teacher? Look for a correlation with test success.
I'll wager you do see one.

As for assemblies. I think my District kept them longer than most. Children need to experience quality theater and arts every month at the least and perform several times a year-make the day longer in school if you must. But hire people with skill. How do you expect a child never exposed to these art forms to do well without giving them this enrichment that their peers gain through wealth and affluence?
Monetize the arts-and certainly we have-you'll need to fund music for students in places that you like to forget exist. And you'll need to get over thinking that their families don't deserve it.

So hire music teachers, choir teachers, art teachers.
Hire them as you once did.

Now I could do reams of research. But if you just think logically...what do the kids have in affluence that children in poverty do not- things that are doable?

Things like adult attention, love, stability...now I'll get to that.

So

What do we do about that early Maslow?

So, it occurs to me that if you are homeless, or you live in high crime, or if you just have two parents working at minimum wage and they rely on school after care or other services, daycare, that perhaps one of the issues to surmount is the poverty.

So this article writer doesn't KNOW how we can address that.

Interestingly I do know.
And it IS knowable.

IF you will read a colleague of this article's writer- at Stanford, Nel Noddings, what she wrote was a philosophy of education.
It's always good to work out of a system. To try to match your intents to something bigger. Her's is based in care.

That addresses this fundamental aspect of the need. It tells us then how to structure and why to structure our schools. It assists us in debating how important a test score should be. It looks at the value of roles, modeling, in what we have children do. It might assist us in deciding rigid behavioral control or flexible give and take. It talks to us about replicating family patterns and structures within the school setting. Frankly I think it would assist us tremendously. Also her work addresses happiness. It talks about achievement, about how we motivate.

So...try this, read some Nel Noddings.
Then...ask yourself, how can our earliest experiences in school give children better experiences in literature, in care, in developing positive experiences that are based in literacy. Start there.
A little Denny Taylor wouldn't hurt either.

This stuff is known and knowable.