Education Cannot Completely Solve Our Children’s Problems

Americans expect extraordinary things from our school system. On a basic level, we expect our children to learn the skills necessary to compete in the job market and to function in society. We expect our school system will create graduates who are well rounded and who are knowledgeable in areas society finds important. We expect our schools to instill in children a lifelong love of learning and a hunger for achievement and success. On top of that, we expect our schools to solve a lot of the problems of youth culture. We expect schools to instill in our children a basic sense of morality and to alleviate youth problems dealing with violence and drug use. When former students fail to become functioning members of society after they graduate, we often blame their education for their shortcomings.

This is simply too much to expect of our school system. There are deep societal problems that our kids face as they grow up, and these things cannot and should not be solved solely in school.

The issues involved are highly connected to race and class. A child’s home life is arguably the greatest force for positive or negative development that child will encounter. A child with parents and family that don’t value education, can’t succeed in society, and fail to instill a sense of morality and drive will rarely be reformed through the force of the school system alone. Indeed, the gloomy statistics coming out of our education system support this assertion. Barely over half of minority students, those who are in general most affected by poverty and negative social trends, graduate high school within four years. They are less likely to attend college and drastically less likely to graduate college within six years (pdf). Leaving school, minorities earn 40% less than whites (pdf), leaving many locked into poverty for another generation.

Increasingly it is becoming clear that a child’s failings in school isn’t due to a lack of academic education. In the New York Times Magazine, Paul Tough spelled it out well:

The academics have demonstrated just how deeply pervasive and ingrained are the intellectual and academic disadvantages that poor and minority students must overcome to compete with their white and middle-class peers. The divisions between black and white and rich and poor begin almost at birth, and they are reinforced every day of a child’s life.

Consider some interesting and potentially revealing statistics. According to studies, 3 year old children whose parents are middle class have a vocabulary of about 1,100 words. 3 year olds whose parents are on welfare have a vocabulary of only 525 words. The middle class (and usually white) toddler’s IQ is much higher as well. These differences are correlated to the number of words a parent speaks to their child. Middle class parents spoke to their children 487 times per hour, poverty stricken parents only spoke 178 times per hour. On top of that, wealthy children heard 500,000 encouragements and only 80,000 discouragements by age 3, where poor children heard 75,000 encouragements and 200,000 discouragements. These differences correlated with academic achievement later in life. And these differences were already well set before these children set foot in a classroom.

In effect, mostly white, middle class children start accumulating their advantage from birth. By the time both groups of children enter kindergarten, low-income kids are already behind.

Paul Tough also notes some sociological evidence for the differences between poor and middle class students. By and large, poor children were treated as middle class children were a generation ago, with a lot of freedom to make up games and play with friends and a lot less freedom to talk back or question authority. Middle class children, on the other hand, had their days filled with music lessons, sports teams, and cultural excursions and were treated by their parents as little equals, backtalk included, cultivating a sense of structure and responsibility from an early age.

The reasons low-income parents treat their kids differently are complex and often perfectly practical. Many low-income parents have to work longer hours at more jobs to make ends meet, leaving them less time to fuss over their kids. Wealthier parents can afford to hire babysitters or nannies or even afford to stay at home. Over the course of a child’s life, these differences add up, creating well rounded resume padders applying to Ivy League colleges on one end of the spectrum and disaffected and unprepared youth looking for manual labor and low-paying service jobs on the other.

When both of these sets of children, the poor largely minority group and the wealthy and more white group, get to school, America suddenly expects these problems to disappear. We think that the gap between rich and poor in educational performance can be eliminated with more funding or with more accountability, with standardized tests and with better teachers. Paul Tough argues that with greatly increased resources and innovative teaching techniques, we can solve these problems in schools. Honestly, I’m not so sure it’s possible. While many prominent educational thinkers like to say that poverty and family life are no longer good excuses for a child’s later academic failure, it is hard to truly believe that. How can these differences truly make no difference? More to the point, why do we expect to solve these problems in school instead of attacking them at their source?

If you agree with me that a large portion of the problems that face poor children can’t or shouldn’t be solved in school, then you are faced with some uncomfortable questions. If family life is a large determining factor in a child’s future achievement, how do you fix those problems on a societal or legislative level? Do you force parents to take parenting classes before having children? Do you give parenting tests? Do you create programs designed to check up on lower class parents and teach them new parenting skills? Should the government really be in the business of telling parents how to raise their kids?

Perhaps one answer lies in an experimental program recently enacted by New York City. The program’s wider aim is to eliminate poverty, but it uses a novel approach to do so. The city will pay small amounts of money to residents for certain behaviors, incentivizing things the government wants to promote. To fight poverty, adults will receive $150 a month for holding a full time job and $50 a month for having health care. New York is using the program to incentivize good educational behavior outside of school as well. They will pay parents to make sure their kids have better high school attendance and to attending parent-teacher conferences.

These small incentives might not seem like much, but they mean a lot to the low-income residents who will be this program’s beneficiaries. $50 for a half hour parent teacher conference would be enough to encourage parents to take time off work to attend. Similar programs have been surprisingly successful in easing poverty. Mexico and other Latin American countries have run programs for over 10 years, which have been successful in raising school attendance (by as much as 30% in some places), promoting good nutrition, and keeping families out of poverty.

In this way, America could incentivize good parenting behavior and positive family life. Small cash incentives could be paid to parents who take parenting classes or attend some kind of group family therapy. Bonuses could be paid to those parents who volunteer and receive high marks in government administered “parenting assessments” that could examine the interactions between parents and their children. Activities like reading books, attending PTA meetings, and participating in extra-curricular activities could be similarly rewarded.

Though some preach that learning should be its own reward, the success of these programs in other countries points to their effectiveness. These programs serve to introduce low-income households to middle-income habits. One would hope that after these habits have been built up over a generation, the incentives could be reduced as low-income families move out of poverty and up the economic ladder, elevating their educational values at the same time.

If successful, these programs would eliminate a lot of the pressure on schools, freeing them from unreasonable expectations and letting them get back to their core purpose: Teaching.

Do you agree with my assertion that the problems of race, class, and youth can’t be solved solely in schools? What about possible solutions? I’m sure there are others (such as creating low-income bording schools to remove children from their negative family lives), but I’m curious to know your thoughts.

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