A new study has been published indicating that wealth plays a role in how well students perform on tests in school, and in theory how well then they do in school [Black-White Achievement Gap and Family Wealth by Yeung, WJ, and Conley, D (New York University). Child Development, Vol. 79, Issue 2.]*

As reported on Science Daily, the reference to wealth has more to do with overall family assets than pure income:

“While wealth may help smooth consumption on a more short-term basis, the presence of wealth over time in a family (or extended family) may have a stronger impact of engendering a sense of economic security, future orientation, and the ability to take risks among all family members which, in turn, positively affect child development,” according to W. Jean Yeung, professor of sociology at New York University and the lead author of the study.

The key, I think, is the notion of stability. A family that has real assets (more than what they earn and spend in a given month) has the ability to save for the future, invest in educational aids, provide food and clothing on par with others, live in better neighborhoods, and allow their children the freedom to do extra things, such as play soccer or go to the library. Families with low incomes live hand-to-mouth and there is little talk of the future. A child in such an environment is asset poor and learns to view the world in an asset poor way. Why achieve if there is no future ability to capitalize on such achievement? So what if you get good grades if you can’t go to college to get the job that would put you into the asset rich world?

One needs only to look at developing countries to see this taken to the extreme. For too many people it is a struggle to find food on any given day. There is no thought of the future if every moment you are thinking about the pain in your stomach from lack of food. The result is you become trapped in the present with no notion that there is anything else.

Quite a few people in the US also struggle to get enough food, and unfortunately quite a few of them are minorities. Focused on the immediate, the gap between them and those with wealth grows. Income, though, is only one small part of this divide. Better housing at a lower price, for example, might allow someone even on a small income to save for the future. Higher salary does not always equate to stability (though, obviously, it doesn’t hurt).

Throwing more money at schools to improve achievement among the poor ultimately will not address the asset poor world from which these kids come. Pushing kids to pass a standardized test won’t give them a future.

We have to do more. That means we have to be willing redistribute some of the assets of the country. As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, affordability is the key.

If we can’t afford to live, how can we actually then succeed at living? Maybe instead of giving money back to everyone here in the US we should use that monetary incentive to open up bank accounts for children living in poverty. They deserve a shot at the future more than most of us need to go shopping for new TVs.

This week in the New York Times national edition I read what for me was a rather disturbing article about paying students real money based on performance on No Child Left Behind (NCLB) state mandated tests [Next Question: Can Students Be Paid to Excel? by Jennifer Medina, March 5, 2008]. I thought surely I must have misread the headlines but no, I had not. New York City and several other cities around the country are in fact experimenting with monetary compensation as a motivator for children to do well on standardized tests.

Why do people continue to believe that throwing money at a problem will always fix it?

I hate NCLB. I hate it with a passion. Standardized testing is one of the worst systems I can think of in education. As a past college instructor I can tell you that the advent of standardized testing greatly correlated (in my anecdotal opinion) with a remarkable drop in the ability of students to work their way through problems and solve them. Thinking has been replaced with test taking strategies and memorization. Schools will deny that they teach to the test, but if you corner teachers off campus and ask them off the record, many will freely admit to doing just that. Students have certain things they “must” learn and that leaves little time to cover anything else.

NCLB does in fact leave children behind. If you cannot pass the high school exit exams you do not graduate. What is that if not leaving children behind? The tests don’t care if students can’t get enough food to feed their brains so they can concentrate. The tests don’t care if kids come from broken homes. The tests don’t care if kids are exposed to environments that detract from their ability to learn.

Didn’t pass the test? So sorry.

Maybe you should switch schools. The whole notion of changing schools if yours somehow isn’t “performing” however only helps the rich. If you don’t have a car to drive your kid someplace else, you don’t get to go. If there is no room, you don’t get to go. If you can’t make up the delta between a voucher and tuition, you don’t get to go. And so on. Maybe it is the teacher’s fault. Unlikely. Sure there are probably some bad apples out there but most teachers I know are working their butts off. They can’t, however, take the test for the students. Learning is a 2 way street.

Into this mess some schools now want to throw money. If you score “X” on your test, you get “$Y”. This is patently absurd. Pay kids to learn? What happened to having kids learn because they want to learn? That would be a nice motivation, don’t you think? But regardless of this, how can you justify what amounts to economic discrimination? Good students will get money, poor students will not. Many poor students are already poor students because of poverty issues and excluding them from the payment system will only increase an already ugly divide. The thought is “well, but they will try harder because of the money”. Some kids ARE trying their hardest and they still can’t succeed because they aren’t being given the right tools. How much more do you need to rub their noses in it? And for the ones who do get money, what message does that send? Will they do everything for money? Will that be the final death-knell for altruism?

Even more sinister, what happens when Johnny doesn’t bring home the cash? There are already stories you hear about kids being punished or beaten for poor grades. Money is a much uglier motivator. Money can be spent on lots of things. Just because you pay the child the money for performance doesn’t mean they will get to spend it. What happens when someone else comes to expect that money and then doesn’t get it?

In the article, the children were asked what they would do with their test bonus. Some said they wanted to buy toys or video games. One little girl said she would buy food for her family.

I thought child labor was outlawed years ago?

In today’s LA Times it was reported that the California State Apellate Court ruled that children being taught in private must be taught by someone who actually holds a teaching credential (Ruling seen as a threat to many home-schooling familes, LAT, March 6). The ruling actually comes in response to a law suit filed on behalf of children in an alleged abusive situation and in response to some of the relative murkiness of California educational laws. The particulars, in this case, aren’t what are important. However, the response to the ruling from the home-schooling crowd has been one of instant outrage and this response is significant. The majority of kids educated in the home are Christian and the whole point of parents in these families that educate their kids at home is to somehow keep their kids “pure” and “safe” from ideas and notions they might be “forced” to learn in public schools. These families see the ruling as an attack on Christian values.

I would argue, however, that they are wrong on that account. I would also argue that they are wrong to educate their children at home in the first place.

The article provides a quote from a man (who doesn’t want his name used for fear of being prosecuted) who educates his son at home, and this quote pretty much sums up the perils of home-schooling:

“I want to have control over what goes in my son’s head, not what’s put in there by people who might be on the far left who have their own ideas about indoctrinating kids,” he said.

Is it indoctrination to teach kids about history? About science? About social responsibility? About reading? Writing? Arithmetic?

The peril is that the people who want to “protect” their kids are, to a great degree, only performing their own form of indoctrination and they are doing so at the cost of their child’s ability to function in a pluralistic world.

Other home-schoolers in the article specifically state a little bit more explicitely that they don’t want their children going to public school because they don’t want their children to learn about evolution, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, and sex education. I would also argue that they probably don’t want their kids to learn any sense of social responsibility either since by excluding their children from the world around them they devalue that world and all of the rest of us in it.

Home-schooled children by default get only one view of the world — it is a sanitized view that in no way prepares them for the realities they will encounter later in life. They are taught from an early age to discriminate against others — if homosexuality is being taught as “wrong” then children will be trained to treat those people as somehow being inferior and thus will discrimination continue. This is WRONG. There can be no excuse or justification for purposefully teaching children to discriminate against others. I’m sure that those with very tightly held beliefs in this area would argue that homosexuality is “evil” or a “sin”. Well, I don’t know if it is or not, but I have read the Bible and no where do I find Jesus telling his disciples to avoid the sinners. Jesus himself said that he did not come to cure the well but the “sick”; he sat down to eat with the “sinners”; he healed the “diseased”; he died for everyone — NOT just the “straight” people. He did not tell his disciples to discriminate against others. He did not say to avoid others. He did not say to teach your children to be bigots, which is what adults do when they teach their children that they are somehow better than anyone else. He did say, however, that those that purposefully lead others astray are to be condemned worse than those who merely rejected his message.

Same-sex marriage is, according to many Christians, to be deplored also as being evil. Those who would exclude their children from public schools don’t want them to see that it might be possible for “non-traditional” relationships to be good relationships. Love, apparently, is evil, if it is not between a man and a woman. That’s too bad. We need MORE love in this world, not less, and to say that love is evil simply because it does not fit into a preconceived notion of what love is, is a travesty. Love is the greatest commandment. I don’t recall any restrictions being placed upon it. Parents also don’t want their children to be educated about sex. This may have something to do with marriage or it may not — in many ways Victorian views on sex never died so it is hard to tell if parents simply don’t want their kids having sex outside of marriage or if they don’t want their kids have sex period. Furthermore, they don’t want their kids to hear about contraception, even if it might keep them from getting diseases. They don’t want their daughters to get vaccinated to protect them from cancer because somehow this will make them run right out and have sex. Since it is unlikely that the parents will provide accuarate information about any of these cases, I guess they simply want their kids to learn things the hard way.

Evolution is a whole other ballgame. I will be writing on evolution and education in other articles, but briefly, to pull your child out of public school simply because you don’t want them to learn evolutionary theory shows a backwardness that is just alarming. The use of reason is not evil. To say that you don’t “believe” in evolution, and to teach your children that same belief, is like saying you don’t believe in the world. You can’t make evolution go away simply by saying you don’t “believe” in it. Science Luddites hurt everyone, not just themselves.

And let’s not forget that home-schooling is also an economic issue. Who home-schools? Since in all likelihood it is a parent doing the schooling, only those families with a single-source income high enough to allow one parent to stay home can home-school. The poor, who might also have very strong beliefs, are out of luck. Christian parents, educating their children at home, in effect are committing a great act of social injustice in my opinion. They are perpetuating economic inequality. They are opting out of social responsibility by failing to contribute to the education within the broader community. Rather than fighting for equality for all students to learn, they have packed up their toys and gone home. They’ll keep their kids “pure” but the rest of us, probably quite literally, are damned in their opinion.

Home-schooling might be beneficial for a student with special needs, but for the majority of kids it is a travesty. They don’t have to learn to get along with other kids who are different from them — this leads to discriminatory behavior and a lack of humility and sense of fairness. They don’t have to learn to formulate their own opinions because their opinions have been given to them by their parents. They learn exclusions, rather than inclusion. They learn that isolationism is good. They learn that Jesus only came for them, and not the rest of us too.

That, too, is a pity.