David Kopperud was acting principal at a West Sacramento, Calif., elementary school when one of his first-graders stopped showing up. The child was so chronically absent that Kopperud went to see the child’s mother. What he learned has stayed with him since. She told him that she hadn’t been sending her son to school because he had no shoes. “It showed how such a simple lack could become a major barrier to education,” says Kopperud, now a state education administrator. “And, unfortunately, I think we’re going to see a lot more of this.”
A huge increase in the number of children in poverty, compounded by housing foreclosures and a rise in homelessness, is converging with continued deep cuts in school budgets to present a daunting challenge for American educators. And while there are some things teachers and schools can do, others are advocating for much more ambitious reforms that would bring back a concept popular with funding agencies in the 1990s: full-service schools.
The Growing Challenge
It’s a challenge that shows up the moment the kids do—the first day of kindergarten, by which time poor children are already so far behind that fewer than half are at the level they need to be to learn, as compared to 75 percent of children from moderate- and high-income families, according to a study by the Brookings Institution.
And the ranks of kids like these are swelling at double-digit rates. According to the Brookings report, some 32 million American children are classified as low income, while the number who live in downright poverty—in families of three that earn under $18,350 a year or families of four that make $22,350 or less—has jumped 25 percent since 2000 to about 16 million.
Families with children are also now among the fastest-growing groups of homeless, with an estimated 1.4 million homeless children and another 3.8 million in “precarious” housing situations, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless. For a variety of logistical reasons, some 25 percent of these homeless children do not regularly go to school.
Some of the obstacles are obvious: They’re not ready for school, they miss too many days, and they lose ground in the summers. But other trials—not having shoes, for instance—are often less obvious. Districts for which poverty is a newer problem often miss the warning signs completely.
“These problems have become so widespread that all schools need to look for subtle indicators” of financial issues, such as students wearing the same clothes day after day, changing behavior, and hoarding food, says Donald Hernandez, a Hunter College sociology professor who studies children in poverty.
First Things First: Attendance
Given the burgeoning problem, what can schools do to help? While some solutions are expensive, such as adding full-time health clinics, others are uncomplicated and even cheap (see sidebar “Simple Steps to Support Poor Students”). Close SidebarSimple Steps to Support Poor Students
The problem of growing poverty is huge, but here are a few simple steps educators can take to help.
• Make sure students attend school. Don’t just measure average daily attendance; track attendance by student and reach out to students who are chronically absent or team up with community service organizations such as City Year.
• Practice nonpunitive responses to absenteeism.
• Encourage churches, community organizations, and pediatric health care providers to distribute books to parents of preschoolers. Ask libraries to offer children’s story hours during times that are convenient for working parents.
• Text literacy tips to parents. Advocates say cell phones are lifelines for families in poverty, which they tend not to relinquish no matter how squeezed they are financially.
• Be prepared to provide contact information for social service agencies. Include this information on the backs of forms that parents have to keep. Also provide information about the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, which ensures a child’s right to remain in the same school if he or she moves or becomes homeless.
The first is getting children to show up. The seemingly obvious connection between attendance and performance has only in the last few years become well understood. Poor kids miss four times more school than middle-class and affluent children, according to Attendance Works, a research initiative to study and promote ways of improving attendance.
“As kids fall further into poverty, attendance tends to slip,” says Michael Gottfried, a professor of education at Loyola Marymount University. “Maybe there’s not a parent home when the kid needs to go to school. Mom may need to be at a job at five in the morning.”
For these students, the usual stress of school is compounded by hunger, asthma, anxiety, fear, not enough money for supplies or books, and no quiet place to read. Many have to take care of a sibling or an older relative. Twenty percent of urban high school students surveyed by Temple University said they had missed school to care for a family member or close friend.
Schools are good at tracking average daily attendance, since it’s one of the measurements of adequate yearly progress, but they’ve been slower to monitor individual absences. “It’s not enough to just reward schools based on attendance rates,” says Gottfried. “Is it the same kids every day? Is it different kids every day?”
Immediate and Positive Intervention
At the Orchard Gardens K–8 Pilot School in Boston’s Roxbury section, members of the City Year national service organization chase down absentees, usually by phone but occasionally in person. In California, school administrators summon the parents of students who miss 10 percent or more of school beginning on the 20th day of any academic year; if the absences continue, the parents are brought before a district school attendance review board, which includes law enforcement, social service, and mental health workers.
“What we’re doing is intervening immediately,” says Kopperud, who oversees the process statewide. “Don’t wait till the kid has missed 20 percent of the school year, because you’re going to be talking to an angry, disengaged youngster.”
Yet, attendance policies that punish parents can make matters worse. “We need to sit in the empty seat to know why it is empty,” Kopperud says. However, 22 states define “failure to educate” as a form of child neglect. In New York, for instance—where researchers from Teachers College at Columbia University report that nearly 40 percent of high school students miss 20 or more days of school each year—the parents are reported to the child protective system. That can lead to the threat of removing the child to foster care, and kids in foster care do even worse in school.
Some schools offer carrots, not sticks—extra recess, for example—to classes with the best attendance. Other schools simply work to help parents better understand how showing up for school affects their kids’ performance. “There are really inexpensive ways to do this,” says Hedy Chang, director of Attendance Works. “I’ve seen people start to turn this around. But it can’t be about blaming parents.”
Some of what increases absence rates among poor kids is bad health. Children in poverty are as much as 16 times more likely than middle-class and affluent children to have asthma, which is blamed for 12.8 million missed school days annually. They’re twice as likely to have unmet dental needs, according to the U.S. Surgeon General’s office. The Baltimore Student Attendance Campaign reports that another two million school days nationwide are lost each year to dental-related illnesses. And when they are in class, at least 25 percent of urban students may not be able to see the blackboard. That’s how many are estimated to have unaddressed vision problems.
A huge increase in the number of children in poverty, compounded by housing foreclosures and a rise in homelessness, is converging with continued deep cuts in school budgets to present a daunting challenge for American educators. And while there are some things teachers and schools can do, others are advocating for much more ambitious reforms that would bring back a concept popular with funding agencies in the 1990s: full-service schools.
The Growing Challenge
It’s a challenge that shows up the moment the kids do—the first day of kindergarten, by which time poor children are already so far behind that fewer than half are at the level they need to be to learn, as compared to 75 percent of children from moderate- and high-income families, according to a study by the Brookings Institution.
And the ranks of kids like these are swelling at double-digit rates. According to the Brookings report, some 32 million American children are classified as low income, while the number who live in downright poverty—in families of three that earn under $18,350 a year or families of four that make $22,350 or less—has jumped 25 percent since 2000 to about 16 million.
Families with children are also now among the fastest-growing groups of homeless, with an estimated 1.4 million homeless children and another 3.8 million in “precarious” housing situations, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless. For a variety of logistical reasons, some 25 percent of these homeless children do not regularly go to school.
Some of the obstacles are obvious: They’re not ready for school, they miss too many days, and they lose ground in the summers. But other trials—not having shoes, for instance—are often less obvious. Districts for which poverty is a newer problem often miss the warning signs completely.
“These problems have become so widespread that all schools need to look for subtle indicators” of financial issues, such as students wearing the same clothes day after day, changing behavior, and hoarding food, says Donald Hernandez, a Hunter College sociology professor who studies children in poverty.
First Things First: Attendance
Given the burgeoning problem, what can schools do to help? While some solutions are expensive, such as adding full-time health clinics, others are uncomplicated and even cheap (see sidebar “Simple Steps to Support Poor Students”). Close SidebarSimple Steps to Support Poor Students
The problem of growing poverty is huge, but here are a few simple steps educators can take to help.
• Make sure students attend school. Don’t just measure average daily attendance; track attendance by student and reach out to students who are chronically absent or team up with community service organizations such as City Year.
• Practice nonpunitive responses to absenteeism.
• Encourage churches, community organizations, and pediatric health care providers to distribute books to parents of preschoolers. Ask libraries to offer children’s story hours during times that are convenient for working parents.
• Text literacy tips to parents. Advocates say cell phones are lifelines for families in poverty, which they tend not to relinquish no matter how squeezed they are financially.
• Be prepared to provide contact information for social service agencies. Include this information on the backs of forms that parents have to keep. Also provide information about the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, which ensures a child’s right to remain in the same school if he or she moves or becomes homeless.
The first is getting children to show up. The seemingly obvious connection between attendance and performance has only in the last few years become well understood. Poor kids miss four times more school than middle-class and affluent children, according to Attendance Works, a research initiative to study and promote ways of improving attendance.
“As kids fall further into poverty, attendance tends to slip,” says Michael Gottfried, a professor of education at Loyola Marymount University. “Maybe there’s not a parent home when the kid needs to go to school. Mom may need to be at a job at five in the morning.”
For these students, the usual stress of school is compounded by hunger, asthma, anxiety, fear, not enough money for supplies or books, and no quiet place to read. Many have to take care of a sibling or an older relative. Twenty percent of urban high school students surveyed by Temple University said they had missed school to care for a family member or close friend.
Schools are good at tracking average daily attendance, since it’s one of the measurements of adequate yearly progress, but they’ve been slower to monitor individual absences. “It’s not enough to just reward schools based on attendance rates,” says Gottfried. “Is it the same kids every day? Is it different kids every day?”
Immediate and Positive Intervention
At the Orchard Gardens K–8 Pilot School in Boston’s Roxbury section, members of the City Year national service organization chase down absentees, usually by phone but occasionally in person. In California, school administrators summon the parents of students who miss 10 percent or more of school beginning on the 20th day of any academic year; if the absences continue, the parents are brought before a district school attendance review board, which includes law enforcement, social service, and mental health workers.
“What we’re doing is intervening immediately,” says Kopperud, who oversees the process statewide. “Don’t wait till the kid has missed 20 percent of the school year, because you’re going to be talking to an angry, disengaged youngster.”
Yet, attendance policies that punish parents can make matters worse. “We need to sit in the empty seat to know why it is empty,” Kopperud says. However, 22 states define “failure to educate” as a form of child neglect. In New York, for instance—where researchers from Teachers College at Columbia University report that nearly 40 percent of high school students miss 20 or more days of school each year—the parents are reported to the child protective system. That can lead to the threat of removing the child to foster care, and kids in foster care do even worse in school.
Some schools offer carrots, not sticks—extra recess, for example—to classes with the best attendance. Other schools simply work to help parents better understand how showing up for school affects their kids’ performance. “There are really inexpensive ways to do this,” says Hedy Chang, director of Attendance Works. “I’ve seen people start to turn this around. But it can’t be about blaming parents.”
Some of what increases absence rates among poor kids is bad health. Children in poverty are as much as 16 times more likely than middle-class and affluent children to have asthma, which is blamed for 12.8 million missed school days annually. They’re twice as likely to have unmet dental needs, according to the U.S. Surgeon General’s office. The Baltimore Student Attendance Campaign reports that another two million school days nationwide are lost each year to dental-related illnesses. And when they are in class, at least 25 percent of urban students may not be able to see the blackboard. That’s how many are estimated to have unaddressed vision problems.
A New Push for Full-Service Schools
These issues and others are driving a renewed campaign for so-called full-service schools, which were especially popular with funding agencies in the 1990s. They offer everything from health centers and social service help to food pantries. In Newark, N.J., for example, a project called the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education unites seven schools with universities, philanthropies, and social agencies to provide health care and afterschool programs. Students in schools with health centers had three times fewer absences than students in schools without them, according to a study of two urban high schools in western New York State. Nationwide, 1,700 schools have health centers, according to the National Assembly on School-Based Health Care, and when the federal government offered 12 grants last year to help pay for full-service community schools, it got 480 applications.
“The one location children can get identified and get services is schools,” says Barbara Duffield, policy director of the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth. Low-income parents working several jobs don’t have the time or transportation to go from one social service agency to another. “You can’t just say, ‘Here, here’s a name and a number.’ You have to remove those barriers, so having the services on-site is important.”
The need for this is even greater in rural areas, where nearly half of all children are in poverty (four times the proportion of 10 years ago), services are thinly stretched, and public transportation is virtually nonexistent.
“In a lot of communities, the schools are the only safety net that’s left,” says Pedro Noguera, a professor of education at New York University. “Schools should be central as the point of service delivery.”
More Need, Less Money
But even that one safety net is tenuous, given draconian cuts to education budgets. Thirty-six states have cut, or proposed cutting, education, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and more than 20 expect to make further dramatic cuts in education spending in 2013.
For this reason, many advocates say the need for full-service schools is more pressing than ever. “How do you coordinate these services? How do you make it so the kid who might have some English competency isn’t being pulled out of school to be the translator for his parents to go get food stamps?” says Richard Long, executive director for government relations at the National Title I Association, whose member schools have among the highest poverty rates. The budget cuts, he says, “make it harder to do that, even when you know it’s the right thing to do.”
The Campaign for Educational Equity, a research and policy center based at Teachers College, is advocating for a full-service menu of support for students in poverty, from prenatal and obstetric care for expectant mothers, continuing education for parents, and home literacy visits for families with preschoolers to routine and preventive pediatric care and afterschool and summer programs. The campaign has estimated that this blanket of services would cost taxpayers about an additional $290,000 per child from the time of conception to high school graduation. It maintains that the return on that investment would be twice that amount in local, state, and federal taxes, income gains, reductions in crime, and improvements in health.
“Realistically, you’re not going to get the whole comprehensive model at once,’’ Michael Rebell, the campaign’s director, says of the comprehensive full-service approach. “But obviously doing something is better than doing nothing.”
In the meantime, some districts are patching together solutions by adopting such familiar strategies as extending the day or school year, offering full-time kindergarten when possible, and training low-income parents to read to their preschoolers. At Hunters Lane High School in Nashville, the principal began a food pantry from which about 40 students take home backpacks of soups and snacks so they won’t go hungry over the weekends. Some schools in Detroit added 15 days to the school year, which helped fourth-graders improve in reading, math, and science. The Valley View Community Unit School District 365U in Romeoville, Ill., is investing $14 million to start a full-day kindergarten in the fall.
A Call for Empathy
Some advocates say simply encouraging empathy is an important step toward recognizing the depth of the problem. In December 2011, the advocacy and training organization Parents as Teachers put educators through a morning-long simulation of what it was like to be poor for a month—juggling bills and bus fare, getting children to school and elderly parents to doctors, visiting social agencies, looking for work—in order to help them understand what poor families are up against.
“The things that we don’t think about, and that they have to, are really astounding,” says Kerry Caverly, the organization’s director of training. “It shakes you up. I saw people literally walk out of the room. They could not handle the stress.”
Jon Marcus writes about education for the Washington Post, Time Magazine, USA Today, Boston Globe Magazine, and TES Magazine. This is his first article for the Harvard Education Letter.
These issues and others are driving a renewed campaign for so-called full-service schools, which were especially popular with funding agencies in the 1990s. They offer everything from health centers and social service help to food pantries. In Newark, N.J., for example, a project called the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education unites seven schools with universities, philanthropies, and social agencies to provide health care and afterschool programs. Students in schools with health centers had three times fewer absences than students in schools without them, according to a study of two urban high schools in western New York State. Nationwide, 1,700 schools have health centers, according to the National Assembly on School-Based Health Care, and when the federal government offered 12 grants last year to help pay for full-service community schools, it got 480 applications.
“The one location children can get identified and get services is schools,” says Barbara Duffield, policy director of the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth. Low-income parents working several jobs don’t have the time or transportation to go from one social service agency to another. “You can’t just say, ‘Here, here’s a name and a number.’ You have to remove those barriers, so having the services on-site is important.”
The need for this is even greater in rural areas, where nearly half of all children are in poverty (four times the proportion of 10 years ago), services are thinly stretched, and public transportation is virtually nonexistent.
“In a lot of communities, the schools are the only safety net that’s left,” says Pedro Noguera, a professor of education at New York University. “Schools should be central as the point of service delivery.”
More Need, Less Money
But even that one safety net is tenuous, given draconian cuts to education budgets. Thirty-six states have cut, or proposed cutting, education, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and more than 20 expect to make further dramatic cuts in education spending in 2013.
For this reason, many advocates say the need for full-service schools is more pressing than ever. “How do you coordinate these services? How do you make it so the kid who might have some English competency isn’t being pulled out of school to be the translator for his parents to go get food stamps?” says Richard Long, executive director for government relations at the National Title I Association, whose member schools have among the highest poverty rates. The budget cuts, he says, “make it harder to do that, even when you know it’s the right thing to do.”
The Campaign for Educational Equity, a research and policy center based at Teachers College, is advocating for a full-service menu of support for students in poverty, from prenatal and obstetric care for expectant mothers, continuing education for parents, and home literacy visits for families with preschoolers to routine and preventive pediatric care and afterschool and summer programs. The campaign has estimated that this blanket of services would cost taxpayers about an additional $290,000 per child from the time of conception to high school graduation. It maintains that the return on that investment would be twice that amount in local, state, and federal taxes, income gains, reductions in crime, and improvements in health.
“Realistically, you’re not going to get the whole comprehensive model at once,’’ Michael Rebell, the campaign’s director, says of the comprehensive full-service approach. “But obviously doing something is better than doing nothing.”
In the meantime, some districts are patching together solutions by adopting such familiar strategies as extending the day or school year, offering full-time kindergarten when possible, and training low-income parents to read to their preschoolers. At Hunters Lane High School in Nashville, the principal began a food pantry from which about 40 students take home backpacks of soups and snacks so they won’t go hungry over the weekends. Some schools in Detroit added 15 days to the school year, which helped fourth-graders improve in reading, math, and science. The Valley View Community Unit School District 365U in Romeoville, Ill., is investing $14 million to start a full-day kindergarten in the fall.
A Call for Empathy
Some advocates say simply encouraging empathy is an important step toward recognizing the depth of the problem. In December 2011, the advocacy and training organization Parents as Teachers put educators through a morning-long simulation of what it was like to be poor for a month—juggling bills and bus fare, getting children to school and elderly parents to doctors, visiting social agencies, looking for work—in order to help them understand what poor families are up against.
“The things that we don’t think about, and that they have to, are really astounding,” says Kerry Caverly, the organization’s director of training. “It shakes you up. I saw people literally walk out of the room. They could not handle the stress.”
Jon Marcus writes about education for the Washington Post, Time Magazine, USA Today, Boston Globe Magazine, and TES Magazine. This is his first article for the Harvard Education Letter.
