A Question of Disadvantage
With less access to routine and preventive health care,
disadvantaged students have greater absenteeism. With
less literate parents, they are read to less frequently
when young and are exposed to less complex language
at home. With less adequate housing, they rarely have
quiet places to study and may move more frequently,
changing schools and teachers.
With fewer opportunities for enriching after-school
and summer activities, their background knowledge
and organizational skills are often less developed. With
fewer family resources, their college ambitions are
constrained. As these and many other disadvantages
accumulate, children from lower social classes inevitably have lower average achievement than middle-class
children, even with the highest-quality instruction
(Rothstein, 2008).
Discriminatory
policy does
not become
simply because
voters
approve it.
When a school has a large proportion of students
at risk of failure, the consequences of disadvantage
are exacerbated. Remediation becomes the norm,
and teachers have little time to challenge students
to overcome personal, family, and community hardships that typically interfere with learning. In schools
with high student mobility, teachers spend more time
repeating lessons for newcomers and have fewer opportunities to adapt instruction to students’ individual
strengths and weaknesses.
When classrooms fill with students who come to
school less ready to learn, teachers must focus more
on discipline and less on learning. Children in impoverished neighborhoods are surrounded by more crime
and violence and suffer from stress that interferes with
learning. Children with less exposure to mainstream
society are less familiar with standard English. When
few parents have strong educations themselves, schools
cannot benefit from parental pressure for a high-quality
curriculum. Children have few college-educated role
models to emulate and few peers whose families set
high academic standards.
A Question of Race
Across the United States, low-income black children’s
isolation has increased. It’s a problem not only of
poverty but also of race. The share of black students
attending schools that are more than 90 percent
minority grew from 34 percent in 1989 to 39 percent
in 2007. In 1989, black students typically attended
schools in which 43 percent of their fellow students
were low-income; by 2007, this figure had risen to
59 percent (Orfield, 2009).
In urban areas, low-income white students are more
likely to be integrated into middle-class neighborhoods
and are less likely to attend school predominantly with
other disadvantaged students. Although immigrant,
low-income Hispanic students are also concentrated in
schools, by the third generation, their families are more
likely to settle in more middle-class neighborhoods.
Integrating disadvantaged black students into schools
in which more-privileged students predominate can
narrow the black–white achievement gap. School
integration, both racial and socioeconomic, can complement improvements in students’ early childhood
care, health, housing, economic security, and informal
learning opportunities.
But segregated schools with poorly performing students can rarely be turned around while remaining
racially isolated. The problems students bring to
school are so overwhelming that policy should never
assume that even the most skilled and dedicated faculty
can overcome them. Although schools can make a
