… and then expecting teachers to make up the difference?
I tend to think that this argument has merit. Its outlined in a letter-to-the-editor in today’s Palm Beach Post. If it does then its also worth pondering how we taxpayers pay on the other end of public school by holding lost kids in jail and prison for years afterward. It put me in mind of Huxley’s dystopian Brave New World which imagined society intentionally putting some fetuses in testubes with too little oxygen to let them fully develop intellectually. Society then used these poor specimens as drudges to do the unpleasant work.
An Aug. 31 headline in The Palm Beach Post reads “Severe poverty affects brain size, researchers find.” This comes as no surprise to me (retired after teaching health/life management classes at a local inner-city school for 38 years) or any of my former teaching associates.
The story says, “poverty affects the parts of the brain tied to self-control, attention, planning and other traits important for success in school and life”; and “The children often receive less nurturing from parents (I averaged one or two parents per class during parent-teacher night) and live in environments characterized by increased stress from crowded housing, instability, poor nutrition, limited stimulation and more exposure to violence.”
Without a doubt, this perfectly described the majority of our students at our high school. The University of Wisconsin-Madison study “provides a brain-based explanation for why children living in poverty are not performing academically as well,” stated Joan Luby, a professor of child psychiatry.
Poverty was the common denominator of the causes of the poor performance at our school. Of course, we had a large number of students whose first language was not English and so had those issues with which to deal.In the early 2000s, we were evaluated as an F school. A process was in existence to address poor-performing schools; the result was that the school system, led by then-Superintendent Art Johnson, reassigned over half of the faculty, as if they were the problem. The teachers knew why our school was doing poorly in academics.
What is incredible is that the real issues that affect learning, as mentioned in this UW-Madison study and known by veteran teachers, were never even considered by the superintendent, the education system, the elected School Board members, or our state and federal elected representatives.
All one can conclude is that those aforementioned people don’t have a clue how to address the needs of our youth in a school setting.
If the real causes of poorly performing students, as reported in the study, are addressed, then we will see educational and learning progress. I have said for years that every kid who meets a new teacher has just come off a life assembly line. If you want to improve the student, then improve the assembly line.
But that would take way too much money and new programs that would overcome the causes of poor learning.
HARRY WINKLER, WEST PALM BEACH
