Rethinking Poverty’s Power over Education

As we move deeper into this election season there undoubtedly will be much debate over America’s dedication to public education. Most of the debate will center upon one-dimensional attacks on President’s Bush’s much maligned educational program, “No Child Left Behind”. While these attacks on Bush’s marginally effective yet misguided educational policy are by no means unwarranted, most of his critics have failed to take into serious consideration poverty’s ever-darkening shadow over the minds and educational experiences of urban America’s youth.

In a recent column by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman entitled, “Poverty is Poison” referred to an American Association for the Advancement of Science study which was one of a few new and intriguing groundbreaking studies that delve deeper into psychological affects of poverty. The study stated that “children growing up in very poor families with low social status experience unhealthy levels of stress hormones, which impair their neural development. That effect is on top of any damage caused by inadequate nutrition and exposure to environmental toxins”. Martha Farah one of the neuroscientist involved with the AAAS study stated that, “The biggest effects are on language and memory”. Traditional wisdom regarding education has formed an indelible image in our nation’s collective conscious and has compelled us to believe that our nation’s education failures are primarily an institutional dilemma. But progressive research is beginning to demonstrate that it’s our nation’s inability to engage in a sincere and robust debate around the suffocating poverty that has defined the lives of so many in urban America, is what has handicapped our ability to remedy our educational woes. As more and more studies are published it’s becoming apparent that resources and attention need to be reallocated towards creating new and creative ways to rebuild how education “outside the classroom” is perceived in America’s urban centers.

For instance, a study was done by a team of child psychologist in Kansas on language acquisition and was recently profiled in a New York Times Magazine special on education. The team of scientist studied forty-two families with newborn children in Kansas City and for three years they visited each family and recorded each verbal and non-verbal interaction that occurred between the child and the parent or parents. The team of researchers then transcribed the family’s interactions and analyzed each child’s language development over time and each how the parents communicated with their children. The language differences they uncovered were astounding. In terms of vocabulary they uncovered that growth differed sharply by class and that the gap between the social classes became apparent early. The study stated, “by age 3, children whose parents were professionals had vocabularies of about 1,100 words, and children whose parents were on welfare had vocabularies of about 525 words.

The children’s I.Q.’s correlated closely to their vocabularies. The average I.Q. among the professional children was 117, and the welfare children had an average I.Q. of 79.” When the researchers looked deeper they found that this data was inexorably tied to number of words and the quality of the words spoken to the child. In professional homes parents spoke an average of 487 “utterances” to their children every hour contrast that figure with welfare homes, where the children heard 178 utterances per hour. In terms of the quality of the words spoken to the children the NY Times article highlighted the study’s discovery that “by age 3, the average child of a professional heard about 500,000 encouragements and 80,000 discouragements. For the welfare children, the situation was reversed: they heard, on average, about 75,000 encouragements and 200,000 discouragements.”

The data above is overwhelms the mind and without doubt is discouraging to any liberal or conservative who, with all the best intentions at heart, seeks to find honest, true and fiscally responsible solutions to our nation’s education problems. The AAAS study and Kansas University study should be a painful reminder for our nation, that if we want to sincerely address and transform Baltimore City Schools so they can graduate more than 39% of its students in four years, it will take more than just a financial commitment from our nation’s highest levels. For this transformation to be succeed it will take a significant paradigm shift in black and brown urban communities that must begin with strengthening families understanding of how crucial the health of the domestic sphere is to their child’s cognitive development. But if America continues to ignore the acute social and economic ills (i.e. crime, joblessness, fatherless homes, and illicit drug use) that contribute to the factors that rip urban units apart then any community roots work will be for naught. As a nation we can no longer be naïve and pray to political messiahs for institutional “change”; all of us must turn to our families and begin to actualize a new educational revolution that’s founded upon positive and loving communication with our children that will unfold not just in a classroom but right in our living rooms.

~Kevin Lawrence Pitts, M.A.