Turning Around a School District By Fighting Poverty (npr.org)

New submitter gomezedward40 writes: Through her unconventional focus on addressing poverty, Superintendent Tiffany Anderson has been credited with rapidly improving the school district of Jennings, Mo. NPR reports: "The school district of 3,000 students has taken unprecedented steps, like opening a food pantry to give away food, a shelter for homeless students and a health clinic, among other efforts. 'My purpose is to remove the challenges that poverty creates,' she says. 'You can not expect children to learn at a high level if they come in hungry and tired.' That unconventional approach has had big results. When Anderson took over in 2012, the school district was close to losing accreditation. Jennings had a score of 57 percent on state educational standards. A district loses accreditation if that score goes below 50 percent. Two years later, that score was up to 78 percent, and in the past year rose again to 81 percent, Anderson says. She points to a 92 percent 4-year graduation rate, and a 100 percent college and career placement rate."

Comments

Fighting Poverty..not new.

[lionchild]

This isn't new news here, this is all data that's been proven out over more than a decade of study. What's news is that someone has finally had the wherewithall to actually use the data. Hopefully, this will be a wake up call, and just the first of more to come.

No student can focus on learning when they're distracted with the struggle of just living, hoping they'll have food to eat tonight, and a warm place to sleep, clean close to wear. All the things that so many of us take for granted.

Re:Fighting Poverty..not new.

[Jason Levine]

Sadly, in my son's district, a school failing due to poverty is told they're failing because of "bad teachers" and the school is put into receivership. They then have 1 or 2 years to turn it around (how much is determined by State Ed who are the ones blaming teachers). If they don't turn it around enough, the school will be given to an outside agency who can turn it into a charter school and restrict student admittance to whomever they want. In other words, they'll kick out "under-performing" kids or kids with issues that require extra assistance - pushing them to other public schools - and then they'll show how they've "improved" scores and will push for more schools like theirs. (Using more taxpayer money, of course.) Meanwhile, the poor kids will still be worrying about whether they'll be able to eat or have a place to sleep tonight.

I'd go for a funny line like quoting Futurama's "Thus solving the problem once and for all.... ONCE AND FOR ALL" but, sadly, these politicians refuse to look at the studies that show poverty is the leading factor and instead want to channel public school funds to companies that donate to their campaigns.

Re:Fighting Poverty..not new.

[Anonymous Coward]

If they don't turn it around enough, the school will be given to an outside agency who can turn it into a charter school and restrict student admittance to whomever they want.

This should really be called "class warfare", but somehow the term only applies when it is the poorer parts of society taking action against the wealthier.

Offtopic: Are the /. devs trying to kill the site by driving away readers through persistent, unfixed login issues?

Re:Fighting Poverty..not new.

[HiThere]

You seem to fail in reading comprehension. Read what the grandparent wrote again. You don't need to agree with it, but your response indicates you didn't understand it.

Re:Fighting Poverty..not new.

[jandersen]

This is just yet another illustration of the privatization fallacy: that privatizing public services somehow makes them more efficient and cheaper NO MATTER WHAT. I've never been able to understand the reasoning behind - when the state provides a service, they do not have to produce a profit for shareholders, whereas private companies exist mainly to do this; all things being equal, how can a private company deliver the same service and skim off a profit? The answer is of course that the private company doesn't actually deliver the service, for one thing. The other side of the answer is that public services are cronically underfunded, and the staff is underpaid - which leads to poorer quality services that rely on overly complicated bureaucracy, since nobody is willing to take responsibility and take real leadership; public servants are simply not allowed to do the things that would lead to efficiency and real improvements.

That said, I think traditional welfare is probably not the way to help the poor; in order to manage your life well, you need more than a home and money to spend; there's a lot of life skills that you never had a chance to learn when you were a child and which are are very difficult to pick up when you are constantly running to keep things together as an adult. I know this - I grew up in poverty, and although I managed to climb out of it, I had to fight many years with the debt trap, and the fact that I had never been in a situation where making a budget was a realistic proposition; how can you make a budget, when you know you are going to be hit by more bills than you can possibly pay - and on top of that, even if you do make a list of everything, there is always going to be several that you have missed? It is very easy to simply give up and think "what do I care"; a lot of poor people do just that - they know they will never have any real hope. What you need in that situation is a way to get rid of their debt once and for all, and then coaching in basic life skills: budgetting, planning, even cooking good meals - all the things they didn't get the opportunity to learn, because they grew up knowing they were just trash and society didn't want to know about it.

Re:Fighting Poverty..not new.

[Jason Levine]

That's been the problem where I am. We had tons of charter schools without much of any oversight. They got to set their own goals and if they missed them, oh well. One charter school was finally closed when they missed their own goals for 10 years straight. Even then, they fought in the courts saying they should be allowed an 11th year to turn things around.

The standard response by politicians in my area to a school not doing well is "let's open a charter school." Usually these politicians have clear campaign donation links to the companies opening the charter schools. Those schools are allowed to kick out kids who aren't as profitable. (My child and a bunch of others were kicked out because they required occupational therapy services. Unfortunately, we were afraid to upset the wrong people by pursuing it so it never was pursued.) The charter schools drain money from the public schools and leave the public schools with the lowest performing students and the students who cost the most money. This means the public schools continue to do poorly and the call goes out to open another charter school. Businesses profit and kids who need the most help suffer.

Most districts don't think of this...

[jpellino]

they just keep throwing money and gadgets at the school building with little or no thought for the other 18 hours of the students' day.

Re:Another NPR snowjob

[Anonymous Coward]

And how useful is private education? Private industry is good when there is plenty of competition and consumers can switch easily. I dont think parents can easily keep on switching their kids to different schools to "shop around"

You are either a corporate shill for private schools or just plain ignorant.

Re:Goddam SJWs.

[Anonymous Coward]

She's on the dole for $200k/year ...

That's horrible! She should be paid around the median household income of $28,429! That'll fix things!*

... and just feeds kids into affirmative action and welfare:

Because obviously we should starve kids into affirmative action and welfare. I mean, it's your bygone conclusion these are all affirmative action and welfare babies, so let's just fuck them over when we can, right?

"just 36 percent of the graduates in 2015 scored high enough on the ACT, SAT or similar tests to meet Missouri's definition of 'college and career ready.'"

"One-quarter of Jennings’ residents are living below the federal poverty line, according to 2014 Census Bureau data. The median household income is $28,429. Just 13 percent of those age 25 and older have a bachelor’s degree, half of the state average."

Or, in short, the place is so far in the hole that their rates are actually an improvement.over the norm and imply possibly improving the state average. Yea, it'd be great if those "college and career ready" were a lot better, so we really need to look further down the line to see if things continue to improve. You know, crazy shit like that.

*Whether $200k/year is actually is actually a fair pay rate, I don't really know. But short of some part of jealousy (or pissy whining about taxes), I don't see why she shouldn't be being paid well if she's improving the circumstances of her district. Fuck knows that private company presidents can do much worse and can be paid much more. If that's the efficiency of the market, it's hard to argue that the public sector is doing wrong to pay their Superintendent well.

PS - Seriously, what's with assholes like you who say she's "on the dole" to be paid a decent salary for her work. And why do you jump to the conclusion this will invariably lead to "affirmative action" and "welfare"? Are you really that pathetically racist that anyone who would try to actually improve their own situation and the situation of others through measurable stats is somehow worse than a person who otherwise would be paid the same but improve nothing? Because the insanity precisely is that we already have affirmative action, welfare, starving children, and your racism. Clearly you don't want success. Success would just drive point how much of a horrible person you are.

PPS - Before you think I'm giving a "free ride" to anyone, I'd note that I'd expect in the future to see further success in this school district and a failure would indicate that the strategy is incomplete or outright flawed. Not that, you know, you're presenting some sort of counterargument or actual suggestions on ways that would improve the circumstance. But, then, the objective for you is obviously not to improve the circumstance. It's to, no matter the circumstance, to use examples to justify your racism. Even when the examples disprove your biases.

Re:So...federal breakfast+lunch+dinner+... = fail?

[tlhIngan]

Oh, don't give me that. American minimum wage is enough to put you into the 1% super rich global elite. Even a single part time job, paid minimum wage, would be 10 times the salary of the vast majority of families in the world. If they do not have enough money for food, it is become of an ill managed luxurious lifestyle. And if this improved test scores, well they still are scoring orders of magnitude under many many communities living under much greater poverty.

Statistics fail - sorry, but 1% is not the entire US.

The world has around 7-7.3 billion people. 1% of that puts you at 70-73 million people. The US population is nearly 320M people. Or basically, if all the 1%-ers are in the US, that would mean almost one-in-four to one-in-five is a 1%-er.

As much as it is trendy to hate on the rich, being in a first world nation does not make you a 1%-er. There are much more valid reasons to hate on the 1% such as creating the laws that make income inequality a growing thing since the 70s, or the CEO salary ratio, which means the average CEO would make as much money as their lowest paid employee by mid-day Tuesday (this is in the US) this week (January 5). Those are very valid problems.

Most kids in poverty aren't there because the parents spent all the money on yachts and expensive cars, but are because of those policies. Minimum wage is a wage - money paid per hour. Just because it's $10.50 or so doesn't mean you even get full time work - a lot of those jobs are for 4 hour blocks or less per day. Which is why a lot of those parents work 2, 3 or more jobs, plus commuting (and a lot of places in North America mean you need a car, which is expensive).

So housing, car(s), food, and you can barely make it through the month. That sort of stress creates a negative learning environment. And that assumes they can make it - if they can't, then something has to give - rent, electricity/heat/etc, food, etc.

And it's a big social problem too - because people then turn to crime to fulfill basic needs, so society ends up paying. WE end up paying anyhow becase someone has to pay for their medical bills and other social problems they inflict on everyone else as well.

So yes, hate on the 1% for creating an environment where the rich get richer and everyone else gets screwed (and stuff like medical reform and Obamacare are putting bandaids on the real problem).

Sure you may think the guy living on the street is lazy, but it actually costs everyone time and money dealing with them.

Re:Goddam SJWs.

[sociocapitalist]

She's on the dole for $200k/year and just feeds kids into affirmative action and welfare: "just 36 percent of the graduates in 2015 scored high enough on the ACT, SAT or similar tests to meet Missouri's definition of 'college and career ready.'"

1) She's employed, not on the dole.
2) There can be no doubt that her policies are effective, even if you don't like them. FTFS: "When Anderson took over in 2012, the school district was close to losing accreditation. Jennings had a score of 57 percent on state educational standards. A district loses accreditation if that score goes below 50 percent. Two years later, that score was up to 78 percent, and in the past year rose again to 81 percent, Anderson says. She points to a 92 percent 4-year graduation rate, and a 100 percent college and career placement rate."
3) Your negative perception of the 36 percent being ready to go on to college doesn't take int account previous rates or, for that matter, that getting a high school diploma is in and of itself an achievement in such areas, for such poor people.

Re:Goddam SJWs.

[AmiMoJo]

This is the American Dream. Anyone can make it, but if it looks like they might you must hate them because that means it's slightly harder for you to get ahead*, and especially if it looks like they may have benefited from the tax/welfare system more than you did.

* Of course, this isn't true.

Re:Goddam SJWs.

[murdocj]

At $200k a year, if even a couple of kids a year become productive citizens instead of the State having to pay to house them in jails, she is a bargain.