Educating for Democracy: Tenure Isn't the Problem, Poverty Is

[Starry Messenger]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joel-shatzky/educating-for-democracy-t_8_b_1655119.html

6. Poverty is the greatest cause of poor education. Unless poverty is seriously addressed, no amount of "reform" is going to improve our educational system, certainly not tenure "reform." Teachers, teachers' unions, parenting, and lack of choice can be used as scapegoats. But attacking them will not address the problem nor have a positive impact in giving young learners the opportunity to learn. In one of many articles tying poverty to poor education, it has been reported:

"Simple comparisons between children in poor families and children in non-poor families using national data sets indicate that poor children are more likely to do worse on indices of school achievement than non-poor children are. Poor children are twice as likely as non-poor children to have repeated a grade, to have been expelled or suspended from school, or to have dropped out of high school. They are also 1.4 times as likely to be identified as having a learning disability in elementary or high school than their non-poor counterparts. A study called "The Impact of Family Income on Child Achievement" (by Gordon Dahl and Lance Lochner) measured the consequences of growing up poor for a child's math and reading achievement: a $1,000 increase in parental income raises math test scores by 2.1 percent and reading test scores by 3.6 percent."

Governor Christie and other so-called educational reformers can try to minimize the autonomy of teachers and turn them from professionals into semi-skilled labor, but instead of solving the problems that come with improving educational quality through strategies to reduce poverty, they are merely tinkering with and damaging a complex system of learning that can be irreparably harmed. Without the minimal protection of tenure, the teaching profession will become even more unattractive to the very cohort of bright, young students that are so desperately needed in the future to educate our children, not indoctrinate them.

[Lionessa]

1. How timely, I just got into an argument with a fella at a social gathering about this.

He wanted to end EOE, and I said, "sure, as soon as all public schools are created identically, not similarly, not "desegregated", not based on property values, but total pupil by pupil equality." He nodded and shut up.