Friday, February 24, 2012

Assignment #5



Last year, as an assignment for one of my classes, I spent a substantial amount of time tutoring students at the local elementary school.  The county that this school is located in has one of the highest poverty rates in all of Pennsylvania.   While tutoring there, I had time to talk with the principal and interview her about the affects of poverty on the children at her school where she revealed a lot of interesting information to me. 
In Chapter 5 of Poor Economics, the authors examine what they believe to be the reasons behind the problems in education in developing countries.  They discover that these societies only allow certain students, usually of a higher economic background, to succeed in school for a number of reasons while the poorer students slip through the cracks and get deprived of their valuable educations.  
In a Washington Post article titled, Public educations biggest problems get worse, The author comments on the intellectual potential of the poor, “There is always a big hullabaloo when American students score average on international tests, but the fact is that American kids in very low-poverty schools score as high or higher than anybody else on the planet.”  The authors of Poor economics touch upon a very similar topic in their section about “wastes of talent.”  The story of “Rangaswami”, the young man with little formal education who performed well on an intellectual test and became a leader in one of India’s biggest IT giants shows that talent exists in poverty just as much as it does for the lucky ones who can afford to be properly educated.  But the problem that both these pieces of writing bring to light is that stories like Rangaswami’s are rare, and recognizing the intellectual ability of the poor in the real world does not happen very regularly.  In other words, just because the poor have the same talent or intellectual ability as their richer competitors does not translate into real world success for them.  Most children of poverty who have not had the opportunity for proper education never find opportunities like the one that Rangaswami found.
So if education is the stepping-stone out of poverty, what keeps poor children form succeeding academically? The book and the article offer different views as to what is the right answer to this question.  Even though the article speaks only about poverty and education in the US, I believe it is still worth comparing the two.  One of the main arguments of the book is that teaching hinders the academic achievement of the poor because it is designed for the elite rather than for the regular children who attend schools. It offers supportive and convincing statistics that back its argument.  On the other hand the article offers a different opinion with regards to teaching, “But we need to face facts: Problems in schools would remain even if every teacher were magnificent”.  This is where the article seems to diverge from its initial similarities with the text above.  It says that poor teaching, and unreasonable curriculums are major hindrances to the poor’s success with education.  But poverty itself causes problems that are external to education, and even if the affects of teachers were perfect or held constant, these external factors would still cause problems.  I think both the article and the book offer different but valid arguments in what really hurts the poor with education.  While the book offers a very interesting case about the importance of good teaching, it would have been interesting for them to address other factors such as home life besides the monetary aspects of the ability of parents to afford education. 
During my interview with the Principal of the local elementary school, she told me that one of the biggest problems with poverty and education is the lack of help at home by parents.  What a child learns at school is very important but it is just as important that the information learned at school is reinforced and planted into the child’s brain at home. This absence of help at home stems from a range of problems, such as unreal expectations by parents that teaching should be left to the school only, or the inability of parents to help their children because of a lack of education themselves due to poverty. 
So is it outside the responsibility of the teacher for a child’s success if it is impossible for a child to learn at home? According to the Principal it is not, she said  that you can try your hardest to improve the home life for a child but ultimately it is the schools responsibility for the academic success of the child, “45 percent of the kids are eligible for free and reduced lunch.  No one knows who these kids are.  But if we just said, ‘well their parents can’t help them so they’re just not going to do well.’... would we really want half of the kids in the school not to make it?  So we have to find ways to give them those tools so that they can believe they can make it.” 
So it seems that both good teaching accompanied with addressing external factors outside of the classroom that hinder poor children such as home life are both important in helping children reach their full potential, and the more of these factors the school can account for, the more improbable success stories like Rangaswami’s will come true. 


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