A few years ago (pre-pandemic), I was invited to an event celebrating a local charitable foundation’s program to support literacy initiatives in elementary schools. Our city’s third grade students were not demonstrating proficiency on reading tests, and the organization wanted to help ensure students were ready for the shift in literacy instruction that occurs in fourth grade. Initially, the speaker at this event explained, the foundation staff had expected to fund new books, campaigns to get students and caregivers reading together, and professional development for educators. When they actually started working with families and educators, they realized there was a different unmet need they hadn’t anticipated: eyeglasses. Many of the students who were struggling to acquire foundational reading skills needed glasses, and didn’t have them. The foundation funded a limited program to distribute the needed eyewear in select classrooms, and lo and behold, student scores increased.
At the event, this was treated as a victory to celebrate, and in some ways it was. Still, I couldn’t help but feel sickened and angered. Here was yet another example of poverty being the real barrier to learning, which teachers were somehow expected to solve. No matter how evidence-based the curriculum or responsive the classroom management strategies may be, individual educators can’t solve the issue of poverty in the United States. Those third graders couldn’t learn to read properly until they could see, and they didn’t have access to glasses for any number of reasons. For one, insurance is not an easy system to navigate. Comprehensive employer-provided vision insurance is not that common, and even under extensive programs like the Affordable Care Act, pediatric eye exams aren’t considered preventive care, meaning families may have to pay out of pocket. That is assuming families can even make a doctor’s appointment, which requires having consistent access to internet and telephone, availability during standard business hours, and the ability to speak and understand English. If the appointment can be made and paid for, the child and their caregiver require transportation, so the family must either have a car (which requires paying not just for the vehicle but also for registration and excise tax, gas, maintenance, and auto insurance) or be lucky enough to live in a city with public transportation (which 45% of Americans are not). This is without even getting into the racial disparities in healthcare, which are well-documented and widespread. There are any number of barriers to low-income families trying to access health care, and while many school systems are trying innovative strategies to address them, they are far beyond the control of the classroom teacher.
Another example of poverty’s effect on educational achievement is food access. My school district offered free breakfast, lunch, and weekend grocery bags to any student who wanted them, because so many of our students were food insecure. After all, hunger has a direct negative impact on attendance, cognition, and behavior. Simply put, hungry students don’t learn. That’s why 60% of teachers reported spending their own money to buy food for students in a survey by No Kid Hungry. Unfortunately, whether or not schools provide no-cost food for children is inconsistent across the country. Some require families to fill out an application, which creates barriers for families where caregivers are not fluent in English, have limited literacy, or do not have the paperwork to prove their income. Universal free meal programs in low-income communities improve school attendance, can improve test scores, and may increase academic performance — and they are, once again, entirely out of the teacher’s control.
There are over one million homeless students enrolled in public schools. Those children perform worse on math and reading assessments than their consistently housed peers, are less likely to graduate high school, and often exhibit chronic absenteeism, which negatively impacts school performance. I have had homeless students in my classroom, and they while they were smart, funny, and caring, they were also fatigued, stressed, and distracted. School was the least of their concerns, below caring for younger siblings and worrying about whether their family would be able to stay together. One middle schooler informed me he had started working under the table at a restaurant in order to try and make some money, and he was exhausted from night shifts. During online learning, another student stopped attending remote classes because he and his five siblings were all sharing one hotel room, and he simply couldn’t focus. No matter how many best practices I implemented in my classroom, even if I modeled growth mindset and provided authentic assessment opportunities and embraced every other trendy buzzword that gets thrown around in professional development, I could not give those children reliable access to shelter, or the sense of security that comes with it.
Good teaching practices matter. I don’t mean to make it sound as if they don’t. However, there is a reason why the National Association of Secondary School Principal’s recommendations to address the achievement gap include calling on policymakers to address health coverage and housing. It’s devastating as a teacher to be constantly given new initiatives and curriculum to implement (which cost thousands of dollars from your limited district budget), hoping it will finally be the answer to making your students perform at grade level, all the while knowing that what they really need — consistent access to food, shelter, healthcare — is something you will never be able to provide. In the city where I taught, 74% of third grade students did not meet expectations on the standardized reading test. The city also has the second-highest child poverty rate in the state. Those two facts are inextricably linked to each other, and I can only do so much to address the former while the latter remains. Can my highly-rated curriculum and postive behavior interventions make up for nationwide income inequality?
There are some measures that have been proven to work, but they are systemic interventions, not individual. In 2007, Ferguson, Bovaird, and Mueller published “The impact of poverty on educational outcomes for children,” a comprehensive article outlining the effects of income on educational outcomes and what measures have been successful in addressing the problem in Canada. Early intervention programs including parental support, universal preschool, and comprehensive healthcare can change the fact that low-income children typically enter kindergarten with smaller vocabularies and shorter attention spans than their wealthier peers. For adolescents, tutoring, mentorship, community-engaged learning opportunities, and financial support for public transportation (and the promise of committed financial support for post-secondary education) improved their academic outcomes. These programs do work, but so many school committees and legislators would rather implement another punitive accountability measure for failing schools than put financial resources towards addressing the unmet needs of their students.
There’s a well-known quote, “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” After a certain point, that’s what the conversations in my school began to feel like. We had fourteen year olds who read at a first grade level, and we as teachers were expected to bring them to grade-level proficiency without any additional time, resources, or support. A reading specialist would have been able to do more than me to support those students, but frankly so would universal basic income. I came to resent the constant implicit insinuation that if I simply attended enough professional development sessions and worked enough additional unpaid hours and loved my students harder, I could somehow solve the fact that they lived in an under-resourced community and weren’t getting their basic needs met. Making sure our questions promote higher-order thinking is great, but so is coming home knowing that the electricity will still be on.
Americans love individual solutions to systemic problems. It’s how we frame most of our national conversations, from public health crises to climate change. It’s also of limited usefulness. Institutional problems need to be addressed at an institutional level for change to really occur. Classroom teachers have enormous power to make a difference in students’ lives, but that power is not infinite, and it’s infuriating that we pretend as though it is.
So, why do teachers leave high-poverty schools at greater rates than wealthier schools? Today’s answer: because good teaching can’t solve the problem of poverty, and to expect otherwise is setting educators and students up for failure.
