As Georgia’s 1.75 million public school students return to classes over the next few weeks, they’ll arrive with new backpacks, sharpened pencils and blank notebooks. Many will also arrive with empty stomachs, language deficits and financial crises at home.
Georgia has one of the highest rates of child poverty nationally; slightly more than one out of four Georgia children live in poverty. Children don’t leave the traumas of poverty in the cloakroom. Growing up poor undermines how ready they are to learn, their ability to learn and their likelihood of graduating.
Yes, excellent teachers, strong content and adequate supports can counter some of the ill effects, but the challenges become overwhelming when all the children in a school are struggling. Increasingly, many Georgia schools are segregated not just by race, but by socioeconomics. Today, the income gap in student achievement is outpacing the racial gap and widening.
This growing income inequality means affluent and middle-class children come to school with much more in their backgrounds and their backpacks — high quality preschool, violin lessons and a concerted parent focus on language and reading that Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam has dubbed more “Goodnight Moon” time.
In our Legislature, our schools and our homes, Georgia has to initiate the uncomfortable but vital conversation about the opportunity gap that begins at birth. Research shows schools alone cannot close that gap, and schools steeped in poverty are the least able to do so. Educated and high-income parents are not wrong to saturate their kids with enriching opportunities, but we must acknowledge the academic edge those advantages create and extend some of them to poor children
That means offering not just good schools to low-income kids, but, as Fordham Institute President Michael Petrilli says, “phenomenal” schools. It means recognizing enrichment can’t wait until pre-k or kindergarten, but must begin earlier. And, in what might be the toughest challenge for Georgia, we would do well to explore ways of reversing the marked trend in consolidating poverty in certain schools.
Fifty years ago this month, sociologist James Coleman published a landmark study of America’s schools that found students born into poor families faced even greater risk of failure when they attended school with other poor children. After studying 3,000 schools and testing 600,000 students across school systems in multiple areas, the Coleman Report concluded the social composition of the student body “is more highly rated to achievement, independently of the student’s own social background, than is any school factor.”
Achievement rose not simply because black children sat next to white children. The report found, “… the apparent beneficial effect of a student body with a high proportion of white students comes not from racial composition per se, but from the better educational background and higher educational aspirations that are, on the average found among white students. The effects of the student body environment upon a student’s achievement appear to lie in the educational proficiency possessed by that student body, whatever its racial or ethnic composition.”
Speaking on a panel this spring on the Coleman Report, researcher Eric A. Hanushek, senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution of Stanford University, noted the black-white achievement gaps Coleman uncovered in 1966, especially in the South, have not closed in a half century.
“At this pace of closure over a 50-year period, we can expect the reading achievement gap to close in one-and-a-half centuries and the math achievement gap to close in two-and-a-half centuries,” he said. “This to me is a national embarrassment, that 50 years of attention to achievement differences have left us two-and-a-half centuries away from what we’d expect.”
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