Thanks to Fordham for providing this space and then ignoring it, giving us the chance to run amok with our half-baked opinions and ideas. Some day I’m sure we will realize we don’t actually hate children, promptly fall in line with Fordham, and become “true reformers.”

In the meantime, count me still distressed that no one is having the segregation conversation (a.k.a. “separate but excellent”), concerned that merit pay is just the new class size (by the way, did you know they’re making Member’s Only jackets again?), ever more skeptical of vouchers-as-reform, and a little appalled by how much fun it is to work in the achievement gap policy sphere as compared to how much fun it is to work in the actual achievement gap.

Special thanks to everyone who commented and linked to our blog. Look for us later, on the Former Fordham Fellows Blog (FFFB) or at the Former Fellows Unemployment Conference of Knowledge (not abbreviated, meets weekly at the unemployment office or grad school). If you need me, blogosphere, I can be reached at catherine cullen at g mail dot com.

But in all seriousness, many thanks to Fordham, ES, and the other fellows!

The costs of poverty are not only high, but they’re often hidden from the larger public, something the Washington Post tried to tackle in a lengthy feature earlier this week:

The poorer you are, the more things cost. More in money, time, hassle, exhaustion, menace … The poor know these facts of life. These facts become their lives.

The benefits of everyone, not just the poor, knowing these facts, is twofold. First, it pushes back against false stereotypes about the poor (that they are lazy or have bad habits or make bad choices). Second, it lets us think strategically about ways to improve conditions and make things better.  In this vein, Ed Sector’s Erin Dillon has a new report detailing how to create “functioning, well-designed markets” that “improve higher-quality supply and higher-quality demand.” In the report’s introduction, she writes:

The neighborhoods of Southeast Washington, D.C., are among the poorest in the city. There, the grocery stores, banks, restaurants, and other institutions that suburbanites take for granted have long been in short supply.

This cuts to the chase: things cost “more in money, time, hassle, exhaustion, menace” because those who live in poverty lack options, or have to choose between unappealing options. For instance, Dillon’s colleague Kevin Carey has noted that the only two sit-down restaurants east of the Anacostia River are a Denny’s and an IHOP:

But there’s another business thriving in the various run-down strip malls east of the river: dialysis centers. Wards 7 & 8 appear to have been struck by the diabetes epidemic that is afflicting communities nationwide. And the only two sit-down restaurants east of the river, parking lots full because these are the only options the free market provides, are in the business of selling their customers liquid sugar.

None of this is particular to DC; it’s endemic. PolicyLink found that in New York City, areas with poor supermarket access have higher levels of diabetes and obesity:

In Chicago, those who live in food deserts (areas with little or no access to healthy foods, seen in red in the map on the left) have higher body-mass-indexes:

The Post described the practical effect of living in a food desert:

You don’t have a car to get to a supermarket, much less to Costco or Trader Joe’s, where the middle class goes to save money. You don’t have three hours to take the bus. So you buy groceries at the corner store, where a gallon of milk costs an extra dollar.

A loaf of bread there costs you $2.99 for white. For wheat, it’s $3.79. The clerk behind the counter tells you the gallon of leaking milk in the bottom of the back cooler is $4.99. She holds up four fingers to clarify. The milk is beneath the shelf that holds beef bologna for $3.79. A pound of butter sells for $4.49. In the back of the store are fruits and vegetables. The green peppers are shriveled, the bananas are more brown than yellow, the oranges are picked over.

(At a Safeway on Bradley Boulevard in Bethesda, the wheat bread costs $1.19, and white bread is on sale for $1. A gallon of milk costs $3.49 — $2.99 if you buy two gallons. A pound of butter is $2.49. Beef bologna is on sale, two packages for $5.)

In addition, regardless of neighborhood, there’s a growing financial disparity between healthy and unhealthy foods:

Needless to say, our most impoverished neighborhoods are often the ones with the most health concerns (and we haven’t even mentioned other factors like crime, environmental racism, and lack of health care). Unfortunately, taking sick leave from work is another area where the poor are forced to choose between two unappealing options: going to work sick, or losing pay and risking being fired by staying home. Unlike in other nations, workers in the U.S. aren’t guaranteed paid sick leave:

And those who live in poverty are the least likely to receive such leave benefits - and the least likely to be able to afford taking unpaid leave. They depend on their paycheck to get them through the month. Unfortunately, as the Post details, those who live in poverty are often forced to waste a portion of their check at check-cashing establishments. As you can see, there’s only 1 check-cashing business west of Rock Creek Park in Ward 3, which is largely white and affluent:

In contrast there are almost no banks in Wards 5, 7, and 8. (This list, from 2007, is slightly outdated - there’s a Wachovia in southeast now, and also one at Georgia and T NW.)

As Joel Klein has said:

Schools matter and they matter big time in America. Sure, poverty matters, families matter, but schools can be the game changer…We’re never going to fix poverty in America if we don’t fix education.

Schools can be the game changer. But it’s undeniable that poverty and education are intertwined. This means that fixing education is all the more imperative. But there are strategic steps we can take to alleviate conditions of poverty outside of what we do in schools, and we need to do those things, too.

David Brooks:

And let me say right away that I do think Obama is doing a good job. The issue I care most about is education, and his education policy is the best of any president in American history.

Taking a throwaway shot at teachers while attacking Bill Ayers!

His radicalism and chosen profession bring to mind Oscar Wilde’s quip that, “Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.”

Thank you, Washington Times, I’m sure no teachers found that offensive. I’ve written before about why it’s extremely counterproductive to group all teachers in together.

In a WSJ opinion piece titled “The President and His Priorities,” Jason Riley writes:

Virginia Walden-Ford, a school-choice activist in Washington who played a pivotal role in getting Congress to pass the voucher legislation in 2004, recently told Reason.tv: “The thing that makes me the angriest about this — and I am angry — is that this has become about politics and not about children.”

Wait, you mean politics are the reason the WSJ keeps writing about the DC voucher program? And here I thought the WSJ editiorial board had developed a sudden genuine interest in children who live in poverty.

A while back, Ben wrote about the demise of federally funded abstinence education programs. It’s an interesting story, especially if you go back to the guidelines that got put into the 1996 Welfare Reform Act and the trace the increasingly incredible (as in not credible, and also outrageous) actions of HHS during the Bush years.

Personally, I think we ought to make all of our sex ed programs center on the concept of meaningful consent. How to give it (including how to be safe about disease, how to prevent pregnancy, and how to respect your moral and religious beliefs) and how to get it, an equally important concept that seems to elude some men especially and lead to all kinds of sticky situations. My fifth grade girls were shockingly knowledgeable about disease and pregnancy, but lacked any sort of framework for thinking seriously about consent.

A lot of the teacher quality conversation has to do with equitable distribution, something that will be sure to come up during ESEA reauthorization. It seems like its important to decide if you think our teacher quality proxies, experience and credentials, matter in the equity conversation

a) so little that we shouldn’t bother with them, and by the way where is that value-added data already?

b) enough that it’s worth cracking down on the unequal distribution of these things via federal law

c) a lot, and by the way our school of education is offering a new credential, would you like to sign up?

Charlie Barone seems to be in the B camp, blogging (with a really untimely title) that

I don’t think you need to be a rocket scientist, a school finance lawyer, or even an education policy expert to get that the pervasive inequities in the quality of teaching offered to poor and minority children meet both of these criteria. No matter how you measure it, poor and minority children are shortchanged when it comes to teacher experience, licensure, and subject matter competence. Usually this is on the order of a factor of 2 to 3 – they are 2 to 3 times more likely, on average, to have less experienced teachers, teachers teaching out of field, and teachers with less than full licensure. Contrary to popular belief, these factors matter, though of course they don’t explain everything.

Here’s my “dear Internet” question. Is the research that looks at the relationship between experience and credentials all done using large samples of diverse schools? Because my experience has been this: In the relatively good, relatively affluent school I taught in, experience and credentials seemed to be related to effectiveness. But in the terrible schools I’ve been in, that’s less true, especially where really good younger teachers are there crusading against the achievement gap.

Does such a good school vs. bad school difference exist? If it does, do we risk making things in the bad school worse if we enforce distribution of experience and credentials?

On February 24th, in his address to a joint session of Congress and the nation, President Obama said, “Dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country-and this country needs and values the talents of every American.”

This was a bold and significant statement, and it raises some important questions. Why do students leave school before graduating? What can schools and policymakers do to keep them in school, or to get them back?

In a 2006 report by Civic Enterprises, several reasons emerged for why kids leave school: family or personal issues, boredom, lack of connection to school, and academic challenges. I don’t find these reasons to be surprising. What is surprising, or actually disconcerting, is that for the most part, policymakers and school leaders have done little to tackle the problem at scale. While the need for a better educated workforce continues to rise, graduation rates stagnate at 1 in 3 nationwide. One thing is clear: continuing to do what has always been done will not solve the crisis.

Traditional comprehensive high school doesn’t work for all students; this is evident when looking at the reasons kids leave school. External factors such family or personal issues have a lot to do with it. When they reach high school, students, especially those from low-income backgrounds, must take on additional family responsibilities such as taking care of younger siblings, working to provide additional income for the family.  For other students, family or personal issues are exacerbated by the fact that they either to far behind to graduate anyway or they don’t understand how what they are learning relates to the “real world.”

Read the rest of this post >>>

A teacher wrote in to the NEA to complain that the local Fire Marshall made her take down her bulletin boards, citing some regulation about corridors and only covering 20% of the walls. She provides a picture of sad, empty wall space.

I have a solution. This teacher works in California. Douglas McGray’s profile of Steve Barr in the New Yorker (no link, $) mentions all the posters that are now on Locke High School’s graffiti-free walls. So I suggest that Steve Barr be dispatched to deal with this Fire Marshall. My money’s on Mr. Barr if it happens.

If you’re a history nerd like me, you’ll want to go back and re-read Phyllis McClure’s short, readable history of Title I in light of Secretary Duncan’s remark today that “”Title I was set up to correct funding inequities — and that is important. But it really should be more focused on correcting educational inequities.”