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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."
A fellow in Florida took his lottery winnings and started day cares for people in his district. Free of charge. School attendance went way up. Parents could get jobs and help their families...
This isn't about parents who said "We could afford to do your laundry or take you to the doctor but we're too busy partying on our yacht to do that." This is about parents who are working two jobs (each in the case of 2 parent households) and even then barely able to afford the bare necessities of food, clothing, and housing. These are parents who have to make the serious budgetary decision of whether they feed their kids dinner tonight or pay the rent on their apartment because there's not enough money for both. These are the parents for whom having to pay an unexpected doctor's bill means possibly losing their apartment and living on the streets. These are parents who are doing the best they can do, but are barely keeping afloat (or, in some cases, not even keeping afloat).
When your life involves constant anxiety about whether you'll eat tomorrow, whether you'll have a place to sleep tonight, or whether you'll have clothing warm enough for the cold weather, you tend not to be able to pay attention to your teacher and won't do well on the tests.
And this isn't welfare. They opened a food pantry, had a shelter for homeless kids, and a clinic for kids whose parents couldn't afford to take them to a doctor. How are any of these actions bad? Considering how the scores improved, this sounds like money well spent. It's a much better use of funds than spending a million dollars to improve the high school football field so that the local sports team has state of the art equipment to play with.
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So...federal breakfast+lunch+dinner+afterschool+foodstamps+welfare = fail? Can we just invest in what she's doing then and cut back on all the other social programs that are not addressing poverty?
Most likely, no.
With programs like these, often it is a single person who cares that makes a huge difference. In the foster-child program, for example, the people who are hired by the government to handle cases are the difference between a horrible program and an excellent program.
You can try throwing money at the problem, but unless people care, it's not going to make a huge difference.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The few of us that work are getting crushed under the massive amount of money taken from us to give to lazy people that refuse to work.
No you're not.
"Lazy people that refuse to work" are a vanishingly small proportion of the un- and under-employed. The problem is a lack of jobs.
The real problem is a lack of demand, since the poor have no money, and the middle classes are either flat broke after decades of wage stagnation, or completely tapped out on debt and sacrificing most of the money they do have into it.
Successes like this go against many comfortable rationalisations for doing nothing and paying less tax.
"Anyone can get themselves out of poverty, I did!"
"Intelligence is genetic, X are just dumb/gifted from birth"
"It's all wasted money, nothing works"
"The problem is too many kids, the only solution is sterilization"
That's why people get upset. It breaks their comfortable bigotry.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
US Federal minimum wage is $7.25/hour. At 2080 working hours in a year (40-hour working week, no days off), that gives you $15,080/year. Global Rich List indicates that this puts you in the richest 11.44% - not even a 10%er. If you aren't able to work a full-time job, it will be less than that. And even that is meaningless, because it doesn't cover cost of living. I used to live somewhere where my cost of living (including mortgage on a house overlooking the sea and a short walk from the town centre, food, all other recurring expenses) was less than that. Now I live somewhere where that is less than my rent and that's just moving between two similar sized towns in the UK. The difference in cost of living in the USA can be even larger.
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But a child (anyone under 18 now) coming in with even unwashed clothes, or hunger? That's an issue that gets referred to social services pretty damn quick. I'm not saying they can act immediately, but we have a range of neglect laws and getting taken into care can happen pretty damn quick if the parents obviously aren't around, can't cope or don't give a shit.
The home for children that I grew up in was closed out of funding a few years ago having been blocked by the state for the home not having employed a full time on-site doctor and all the costs that go with it.
I spent eight years living in that home and with a full-time nurse and two hospitals about ten minutes away by car there was never a need for a full time doctor so I can only assume this was a thinly veiled trick to cut the state budget.
With a poverty level of 24.4% in 2013 (about the same as Jennings, MO), New Haven CT certainly has no fewer kids in need than it did in my time so I don't see the need for such homes decreasing - and if anything the opposite.
http://www.city-data.com/pover...
With antisocial policies being espoused by those who feel that their hard earned money shouldn't be used for 'socialist' programs like getting the dirt poor out of the cycle that they are stuck in I am not surprised that the number of homeless children in the US is increasing.
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So yes, you're right that this is not a problem for schools. The failure is in the people of the US who want to cut social services, and in those social services themselves who are incapable, for whatever reasons, of fixing what is an endemic problem in the US.
So hats off to the woman who has found a way to make it work in her part of this mess.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
They love these. Then ten years later, all the facts come out, and the "miracle" turns out to be fake.
Yeah, much as I would love to believe this story to be true (so everyone else could then learn from it), really dramatic increases in test scores from year to year are usually the result of some sort of cheating or cooking the numbers. In real life, there are no quick fixes for education. It takes hard work over the long haul. If the test scores jump drastically in a single year or two, that usually just means something fishy is going on.
I would also seriously question her claims of "a 92 percent 4-year graduation rate, and a 100 percent college and career placement rate." Even the best public schools in the country don't have those kinds of numbers. There is no way she has that in some inner-city school in a poor neighborhood unless she is seriously fudging the numbers or playing with the language.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
You make a great point. There is no reason to believe a kid who is fed well and well rested will do better than if they are starving and tired.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun