Fewer low- and moderate-income high school graduates are attending college in America, and fewer are graduating. Enrollment in four-year colleges was 40 percent in 2004 for low-income students, down from 54 percent in 1992, and 53 percent in 2004 for moderate-income students, down from 59 percent over the same period, according to  a report recently submitted to Congress by the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance. [...]

Persistence through four-year colleges dropped to 75 percent in students entering in 2003 for low-income students, down from 78 percent in students entering in 1995, while persistence for students from moderate-income families remained at 81 percent. Persistence rates for low- and moderate-income students in two-year colleges, however, fell 10 percentage points to 49 percet over the same period.

A significant part of this is economics.  As the article notes, the net price for a low-income student attending a four-year college is 48 percent of family income, compared to 26 percent for a moderate-income student. Combine this with the tendency of students to pile on more and more debt, and the opportunity of college can quickly become financial quicksand.

Public K-12 education is increasingly focused on students attending college. As the study that Paul cited shows, that can be a catalytic factor in improving incomes.  But as the focus on college as a partial solution to basic issues like income inequality increases, it is equally important that the students are college-ready, and that college is affordable. We do no one a favor by praising the benefits of a college education for which a student is unprepared and unable to finish, and then sticking them with the bill.

In 2007 graduates earned 77% more per hour than those with only a high-school degree. The share of poor teenagers aspiring to college tripled from 1980 to 2002. Nevertheless, rich, stupid children are more likely to graduate than poor, clever ones. Sadly, the increase in the proportion of Americans who graduate from college has slowed.

[...] Though some students are ill-prepared for university, many go to colleges that are not demanding enough. This makes them more likely to drop out, explains William Bowen, a former president of Princeton, who co-wrote a book on completion rates. Black boys who go to rigorous colleges graduate at higher rates than do similar peers at easier ones.

Last year, the Denver Post noted:

Nearly three-quarters of unassigned veteran Denver Public Schools teachers who have not found jobs are forcibly placed into schools with the poorest students… Under union and district rules, these direct placements are made without regard to the desires of the teachers, school principals or parents.

On Friday, DPS superintendent Boasberg announced his intention that the District’s lowest performing schools — almost all with high poverty student demographics — become exempt from receiving any of these teachers.

This is a significant move by DPS, and also long overdue.  Now the music still plays, and lemon dance is not over yet, as under the DCTA contract these teachers will have to be placed somewhere, but the seats are going to be a little harder to find, and far better illuminated.  When higher-performing schools, which generally have a stronger culture and leadership, and more engaged parents, get stuck with lemons, you can bet the chance the system undergoes change increases, because the tolerance for bad teachers will be far lower.  I’ve written about the power of affluent parenting previously — if some of Denver’s best schools suddenly face the forced hiring of several teachers, expect some parents and civic groups to finally take a stand on this deplorable practice.

There is increased agreement that education hiring should be by mutual consent (both the teacher and the principal agree to the hire), an approach that was embraced by the rest of the employed world, oh, just a few decades ago.  Changing the lemon dance to a game of musical chairs is a good first step, but far better would be to turn the music off entirely.

Equally interesting is a sidebar examining how Denver’s three newest school board members view charter schools. The position staked out by Andrea Merida should send a chill through anyone who supports school choice. After saying she doesn’t want to approve any more charters for now, Merida goes on to complain that most charters are too small to serve enough kids to make a difference in a neighborhood.

But what’s most troubling is her distorted, flat-out inaccurate view of the Denver School of Science and Technology. Written into DSST’s charter is a dual lottery system, so that the school will always have AT LEAST 40 percent of its student eligible for free or reduced-cost lunch (the current number is 45.1 percent). DSST’s founders instituted the dual lottery because they knew full well that low-income families often get driven out of successful, popular schools because affluent parents have sharp elbows and know how to work the system.

This means that DSST will always have at least 40 percent of its kids coming from low-income families. Nothing prevents the number from going much higher than that.

So how does Merida interpret this eminently sensible and socially responsible policy?

But, she argues, the portion of low-income students in DPS as a whole is higher than that: 70 percent.

“That really isn’t a public institution,” she says. “An underprivileged child can be excluded from participating in a school that’s funded with public money.”

Factually she could not be more wrong. But who cares about facts when you’re trying to put ideological points on the board?

It’s finals week and since most of my class finished their test on Monday (it didn’t take them as long as I had imagined and I’m happy to report that most of them did pretty well), I spent our scheduled time today talking with the few kids who turned up.  The main theme of the conversation was the culture of physical violence in which they have grown up.

I find it most striking that they appear to revel in it.  People getting hurt badly is “hilarious.”  I don’t know enough about their internal experience to tell but I suspect such a response is a form of psychological armor.  Of course, I’m a math teacher and not a psychologist so I’ll leave it to better trained professionals to make that determination.

I hasten to add that I don’t think these are bad kids at all.  In fact, I quite like them and that they’re sitting in my room in a school after the experiences they describe (and being assured that, “oh, Mister, that’s nothing …”) says something about their strength.  These kids did not drop out, made it to their junior or senior year, and most of them will probably graduate.  They clearly get that they need a diploma but they don’t show a lot of interest (outwardly anyway) in the expectations of school.  Their grades certainly don’t reflect their obvious intelligence and resourcefulness.

Immediately following this conversation another student of mine, one who most probably did not grow up in a violent household, walked up to me in the hall and handed me a holiday gift with a smile.  He’s a 9^th grader in an honors class and doing well.

The contrast between this “thank you, you’re very kind” experience and the “oh my god” experience of minutes before hit me hard.  Without the second experience, the first would have been just another reminder of the challenges many of my kids face.  Instead, it has created a dissonance in my head that I’m not sure what to do with.  And so here I am at the keyboard.

Now, I know perfectly well that not all lower income people grow up or live with violence.  And I am also aware that physical, verbal and emotional abuse takes place in wealthy households too.  However, I have worked with economically disadvantaged kids my entire career and I know the experience is common enough that I think any conversation about reform must explicitly include the supports to develop non-violent and productive ways to solve problems and to help students transfer what they learn to settings outside of school.

And honestly, most of the kids who did not grow up with violence could use some support in learning these skills too.

Let’s look at the DPS schools with an SPF score equal to 65% or higher of possible SPF points (which is roughly the top quintile). This group comprises the top 27 of the 140 total schools.

Start with these 27 high-performing schools:

Filter #1. Elementary schools (and selective K-8) do pretty well.  Fully 21 of the top 27 schools are either elementary (16 schools) or K-8 (7 schools). Full kudos to these 21.  The problems at DPS are not primarily at schools with elementary students.

…Subtract these 21 and you have six schools left.

Filter #2. Of the six remaining schools, 2 are selective admissions (DSA and CEC). Good schools both, but if you get to choose your students, you have a bit of an advantage.  Partial credit kudos.

…Subtract these 2 and you have four schools left.

That’s pretty much it.  After these two filters, there are just four remaining public schools in Denver that are both open admissions and serve primarily middle and high school students. Four.

…Who are these premier four?

Three are charter schools: DSST (ranked #1 overall); WDP (#2); and KIPP (#21).  These are now clearly three of the four best open-enrollment middle and high schools in Denver, particularly given that they are all serving a substantial percentage of low-income students (respective FRL of 45%, 93%, and 93%). The top two overall schools in the district are now charters.

The remaining school, the one and only open-enrollment district school without elementary students in the top quintile (with 27% FRL) is East High (#14 overall). Congratulations to East.

So, to put this in perspective, how far down the list of 140 schools do you have to go to find an another open-enrollment middle or high school with a FRL percentage greater than the DPS average of 67%?  All the way down to #48.

How many of the lowest performing 27 schools (the bottom quintile) have a higher FRL population than the DPS average? 25 of 27.

Filter #3 is that if you are a low-income student in Denver, your future remains very, very bleak.

–

Updated Note: I should point out that while KIPP is listed as K-8, the school only has grades 5-8 and I thus consider them a middle school.  Any similar updates would be appreciated.

To begin, it is a trusim that low-income children do better in schools with more high-income kids.  Most people have always assumed that this difference is largely explained by income (peer group).  Fryer points out that might not be the case:

This suggests that a better community, as measured by poverty rate, does not significantly raise test scores if school quality remains essentially unchanged.  Additionally, and more speculative, there is substantial anecdotal evidence that the Children’s Zone program was unsuccessful in the years before opening the charter schools. Indeed, the impetus behind starting the schools was the lack of test-score growth under the community-only model. (p. 22)

That first sentence is pretty radical.  The usual assumption is that wooing the middle class back to urban districts will cure many school ills – now it seems that many parents who chose to leave poorly-performing schools in search of something better may have had an innate sense that in isolation, if you put (leave?) wealthier students in bad schools, all you get is a bad school with more affluent students.

The Broader, Bolder crowd has long argued that the best way to improve education is to reduce poverty.  Fryer’s paper suggests that this may not be true (and may even be backwards): without better schools, increases in income may not produce different educational outcomes. And as plenty of other studies have shown, education helps reduce poverty (among other virtues: see the education premium).

As usual in these debates, both sides make cogent arguments and both sides are right in places and wrong in places.

The current study, Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success, does not provide startling new evidence or break much new ground.  Rather, it argues, a la Richard Rothstein, that out-of-school factors do more to create and exacerbate achievement gaps than anything going on within schools.

David Berliner, the study’s author argues that

(1) low birth-weight and non-genetic prenatal influences on children; (2) inadequate medical, dental, and vision care, often a result of inadequate or no medical insurance; (3) food insecurity; (4) environmental pollutants; (5) family relations and family stress; and (6) neighborhood characteristics

“limit what schools can accomplish. ”

Berliner also argues that KIPP and similar schools are being held up as The Answer when they are nothing of the sort:

The occasional school that overcomes the effects of academically detrimental inputs-high rates of food insecurity, single heads of households, family and neighborhood violence, homelessness and transiency, illnesses and dental needs that are not medically insured, special education needs, language minority populations, and so forth-has allowed some advocates to declare that schools, virtually alone, can ensure the high achievement of impoverished youth. This point is made by Chenoweth in a book documenting schools that “beat the odds,” and it is the point made repeatedly by Kati Haycock, the influential head of the Education Trust, and other organizations like hers.

But these successes should not be used as a cudgel to attack other educators and schools. And they should certainly never be used to excuse societal neglect of the very causes of the obstacles that extraordinary educators must overcome. It is a poor policy indeed that erects huge barriers to the success of millions of students, cherry-picks and praises a few schools that appear to clear those barriers, and then blames the other schools for their failure to do the same.

So, ladies and gentlemen, your thoughts, please…

The Colorado Children’s Campaign’s released its annual Kids Count report last week, and the news was shocking enough to merit a front-page spread in the Post and even an article in the New York Times.  It seems that the number of children living in poverty in Colorado jumped faster than in any other state over the past few years.   In fact, Colorado’s increase of 73 percent dwarfed the next highest state, New Hampshire, which had 50 percent.

Not only are more kids living in poverty now than in 2000, but more live at extreme levels of poverty (50 percent of the federal poverty level or lower), and the trends hold across ethnic lines. 

So, once  we have prepared our fingers for pointing, where shall we aim them?   Colorado’s dismal performance seems to be a result of a combination of increased child care expenses, a tough economy, and a school system, on average, that is struggling to rise out of mediocrity.  Our state has also seen fairly dramatic increase in the number of immigrant families, who are likely to be poorer, although the ratio of immigrant to non-immigrant families has stayed roughly constant.

Our high child poverty rates should be cause for alarm, as they foretell economic and social woes in years to come.  As these children grow into adults, they will be statistically more likely to commit crimes, less likely to attend college, more likely to require more expensive health care, and less likely to hold high-paying jobs.

And what to do about it all?  While some of our state’s economic woes are our own fault (see my frequent punching-bag TABOR, along with other financial missteps), I suspect much of the problem is tied to bigger trends, such as increases in the cost of living for working people. 

I say we start with those things we know work to help bring kids out of poverty – education and child care.  Both should be accessible to all children, no matter what job their parents happen to hold.