Recently the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) released results of testing conducted among numerous countries. This has caused a lot of uproar from various political figures because the United States did poorly in comparison to other countries. Various people and organizations have poured over the results in an attempt to explain why countries like Finland and the city of Shanghai had better results than the United States.
Diane Ravitch, in her blog posting on Bridging Differences argues that one of the reasons the U.S. scores were lower than other countries is that we have a 20 percent child poverty rate here in the United States. She points to an assessment done by the National Association of Secondary School Principals that points out that when poverty is taken into account when looking at scores, the United States actually does better than any other poor country out there.
I feel pretty strongly that this idea has merit. It is very difficult to convince a student that math or reading is what they should be focusing on when they are not having their basic needs met. How can we expect students to care about history when they don't have enough to eat, are not getting the love they deserve, are worried about staying safe in their neighborhood, and nervous that mom's lost job means they will have to move, again. To me this is a failure of the community when these students struggle in school, not just a failure of teachers. Yet some where in the conversation this idea gets lost and blame ends up getting placed on teachers.
Poverty is not an excuse for teachers to do a bad job, but it certainly puts them in a more difficult and challenging position.
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