10% Of New York City's Students Are Homeless.

Despite the City having an economic Renaissance and a $6 billion dollar budget surplus,  the student homeless population continues to increase.  Of the 1.1 million students, approximately 140,000 are homeless or 10% of the student population.  In fact, there has been a 28% increase in student homelessness since Bill de Blasio became Mayor of New York City.  In the last 20 year period, between 1994 and 2014, there has been a 115% increase in sthe student homeless population and that has only increased in the last few years as it rose 22% in the 2015-2016 school year and another 6% in the 2015-2017 school year.

Obviously, the reason for the increased homeless population is due to an affordable housing shortage and the City still a attractive location for recent immigrants, many of then with limited English language skills,  In fact, Mayor Bill de Blasio has told Puerto Ricans that while their students are welcome to the New York City schools, their family better be able to have friends or relatives take in since the City has no housing to provide them with and the shelters are overcrowded as is..

Educationally, its a well known fact that homeless students experience higher dropout rates, lower graduation rates, and chronic absenteeism.  The ICPH study shows how homelessness affects student academic achievement.  Until the student homeless problem is solved, expecting real academic improvement is simply "smoke and mirrors".

In Queens schools the amount of homeless students vary by school district.  They are as follows:

District 24.............................4,186
District 25.............................2,020
District 26...............................945 
District 27............................3,164
District 28............................2,638
District 29............................2,782
District 30............................3,058

Total..................................18,173

Homeless Students And Academic Achievement.

You don't need to be a rocket scientist to know that homeless students suffer academically because of their social-economic situation and are far more likely to be placed in special education programs and struggling schools since their parents are more concerned in finding food and shelter than advocating for a better placement for their child at school.  The result is renewal schools end up with a large amount of homeless students which number almost 87,000 in New York City.  Moreover, add to the homeless student population the many students who are recent immigrants whose families share an overcrowded apartment with other families and offer little or no privacy or a place to study and you have a recipe for educational disaster.

When you talk to education reformers, they ignore the inconvenient truth of poverty and homelessness and instead blame schools for their low academic achievement.  These organizations will blame the teachers and demand that teachers be fired for their failure to improve the test scores of deep poverty students by the use of junk science.  Unfortunately,   even the best teachers have little real effect on a child's academic achievement.  A major study showed that any one teacher makes between a 1% to 14% difference in a child's academic achievement.  In other words, the education reform organizations and their media allies believe that putting a bandage on an infection will cure the infection.

Secure housing (not shelters), food security, and parental involvement is the solution for better academic achievement and failing to address these difficult issues and blaming the schools and their teachers is not going to improve a child's education.

The Academic Achievement Gap Is Caused By Family And Community, Not The Schools.

Approximately 50 years ago, the Coleman Report was published and it showed that the primary factor in a student's academic achievement was  the family environment, the community the child lived in, and peer interaction.  On the other hand, the quality of the schools and teachers had minimal effects on the student's academic achievement gap.  While many education scholars have tried to debunk the Coleman Report but the study has stood the test of time.  Even the esteemed Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan realized that the family unit was the primary factor in the success or failure of a child.  He even wrote his own report that showed racial inequality was due to the family structure.  The Senator started citing the Coleman Report as well as his own study in speeches around the nation and received blowback from Liberals and Progressives for laying the blame on the crumbling family unit (lack of fathers and lack of income) in high poverty Black communities and not on the inequality and segregation of schools.

Now 50 years later both the Coleman Report and Daniel Patrick Moynihan's study has withstood the test of time and while education scholars have used more sophisticated methods in determining the factors that cause the student achievement gap, the bottom line is it all starts with the family and community environment that the child is exposed to before they even start school.  Chalkbeat has an excellent analysis of this and can be found Here.

While schools matter, the most important factor is the family unit and the income that unit generates and when children grow up with limited childcare, lack of fathers (role models, and financial stability) and is surrounded by similar family units in low income communities, these students are starting off educationally behind when they enter school and will increase the academic achievement gap going forward unless drastic action is taken to improve the family environment.  Blaming the schools and their teachers for the academic achievement gap is simply ignoring the real truth.  Its the family unit and the community the child lives in that are the primary factors that determine a child's academic success or failure not the quality of their teachers.

Is student diversity of the schools a worthy goal?  Absolutely.  However, will it really help narrow the student academic achievement?  Not likely, since the students will still be leaving school back to a low-income community (especially the public housing complexes) that feels unsafe, and insecure where deep poverty and lack of fathers are common, and their role models are the community's adults who hang out on the corner rather than their teacher.  Not a hopeful outcome for educational success.

Income Inequity Is Due To Education, Family, & Community.

Over the years various studies showed that social-economic factors had a strong correlation with the success of children as they reached adulthood.  Most show that 80% is associated with family and community while the remaining 20% are associated with the schools and only between 1% and 14% on their teacher.  A Pew study showed that the highest paid cohort were Asian men.  That's right,  this cohort averaged $24 dollars per hour while White men averaged only $21 dollars per hour.  Lagging far behind were African American males at $15 per hour and Hispanic males at $14 dollars per hour. For the last two minority groups these wages remain essentially unchanged since 1980 while Asians and Whites have seen significant gains since.

Interestingly, the gender gap between men and women have narrowed significantly since 1980. As White women have narrowed the income gap from 60 cents to 82 cents ($17 dollars per hour) compared to white men.  The highest paid women were Asian and they averaged $18 dollars per hour.  By contrast, like their male counterparts, Black and Hispanic females lagged far behind at $14 and $12 per hour respectively and showed only a slight increase over 1960 levels.

According to the Pew study, the stable family unity (mother and father), community standards, and school environment is the primary reason for the income inequality and explains the rapid rise of the Asian income levels.  In fact, the Pew study appears to show the following:

Pew's findings may feed into the stereotype of Asians as the "model minority," which holds up Asians as studious and hard-working and can come with its own set of negative issues. The stereotype fails to view Asians as individuals, and ignores economic differences within Asian communities, for instance.

Moreover, what the study appears to conclude is that   while a stable family and the ability to work hard in school serves all children well, the quality of schools at the K-12 level also plays an important role in future earnings, regardless of race or gender. In addition,the Pew study included the following statistics:

Post-recession years, workers with college degrees have pulled farther away from those with only high school degrees, in both earnings and job opportunities. About 53 percent of Asian-Americans older than 25 have college degrees, compared with just 36 percent of whites, 23 percent of blacks, and 15 percent of Hispanics, Pew noted.

While a zip code is not destiny, it makes it extremely difficult to break out of the deep poverty, unsafe community, and poor school environment that plagues many urban schools and limits the income potential for many minority students who come from single parent households who are more concerned with their economic needs and safety than becoming a successful adult.

More Proof That There Is A Correlation Between Poverty And Academic Achievement.

In 2004 Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein, heeding the education reform community, decided to eliminate the neighborhood high school and give students "free choice" to apply to any high school in New York City that was not a specialized school.  This "free choice" was supposed to narrow the academic achievement gap and help diversify schools.  In fact, Chancellor Joel Klein in his exit interview with the New York Times said " poverty is not destiny" when it came to student academic achievement. Well, fast forward to 2016 and the high schools are far from diverse with far too many of them segregated by race and income.  As for narrowing the racial/income?  It has been a total failure as the "college and career readiness" numbers show.  In other words, the education deformer claim that poverty is not the primary factor in academic achievement but teacher quality is has been proven false.  In fact, Joel Klein himself grudgingly acknowledged this in a speech this year.

Now adding to the evidence that poverty is correlated with poor academic achievement, a study just completed convincingly shows that a students home zip code is strongly correlated with academic achievement, regardless of what high school these students attend.  A study prepared by Measure for America found that neighborhoods are even more important than race or culture.  A Washington Post summary of the report is found Here.  Some of the findings are as follows: when linking the best and worst neighborhoods to graduation rates.

Neighborhood.............................................Graduation Rate

Morris Heights.....................................................60.9%
Ocean Hill/Brownsville.........................................61.4%
Crotona Park.......................................................61.4%
Highbridge..........................................................63.4%
Hunts Point.........................................................63.4%
East Harlem.........................................................65.1%
Far Rockaway......................................................67.7%
Bedford Stuyvesant.............................................67.7%



Neighborhood.............................................Graduation Rate

Greenwich Village/Soho....................................95.1%
Bayside/Little Neck...........................................92.2%
Forest Hills........................................................91.0%
Tottenville.........................................................89.0% 
Upper East Side.................................................88.3%
Murray Hill/Gramercy........................................86.8%
South Beach......................................................86.0%
Fresh Meadows.................................................83.9%

What the report shows that regardless of what high school the student travels to, the biggest factor in the student academic achievement is the community that student lives in not the quality of their teachers or the location to school resides in.


Note:  While I believe the graduation rate is inflated and the college and career readiness rate is probably a better indicator of student academic achievement, the study is simply comparing the graduation rate for different neighborhoods which shows the true academic achievement gap.

To Ed Deformers, Its Deep Poverty Stupid!

Over the years education reform organizations, commonly known as ed deformers have minimized the role poverty plays in student academic achievement and blame the problem on "ineffective teachers". Now an article by Bill Hammond has shown that poverty is the major factor in low performing schools in New York State. While some studies have previously shown a correlation between single mothers in poverty and poor student academic achievement, there were no studies that connected the 178 "failing schools", oops struggling schools in New York State with poverty  However a new report has found just such a connection, a"lock step" correlation between the concentration of deep poverty in all the schools and their academic shortcomings.  In fact, the report showed that for every 10% increase in students in  poverty, the academic test scores in English and Math dropped 6.3 points  Since all the 178  "struggling schools"  have high concentrations of low income students, the results were proof that poverty greatly affects student academic achievement.

The report prepared by John Bacheller found that the 178 "struggling schools" had an average proficiency rate of 6%, compared to 30% for the entire State in English and Math.  The report also points out that poverty made up 79% of the test results while the rest were associated with schools, including teacher quality, budgets, resources, class size, and administration accounted for the remaining 21% of a student's test results.  This is in line with other studies and the American Statistical Association that found that any one teacher contributed between 1% and 14% of a child's academic achievement not the 50% that Governor Cuomo and his ed deformer allies pushed through. 

The ed deformers can complain all they want and blame it on "ineffective teachers" but this study shows the "lock step" correlation between "failing schools" and high concentrations of low income students as the primary reason for poor student academic achievement.

Poverty Is The Reason We Can't Narrow The Academic Achievement Gap.

The education reformer holy grail is to reduce the income/racial academic achievement gap and to attempt to achieve this goal they have tried different strategies to try to make it happen with little success.  Bill Gates is the poster child of the education reformer organizations and he has tried various strategies, none of them have worked.  First, it was the small school movement which he admitted failure.  Then it was cameras in the classroom that was to be used to identify good teaching that was shot down like a lead balloon.  Next, was advocating charter schools and blended learning which has been a disaster where it has been tried, including New York City.  Finally, his new emphasis is on "teacher quality"  which is a major part of the program of high-stakes testing to evaluate teachers.  However,  many states have retreated from using test scores to evaluate teachers (New York State) or are eliminating it all together like Seattle Washington.

The primary reason that the education reformer organizations can't seem to significantly narrow the income/racial achievement gap is their failure to address the poverty issue.  Nationwide 42% of children who live only with their mother are living in poverty and instead of trying to eliminate poverty by keeping families together, promote safer communities, and have financial and food security. Its easier to lay the blame on the lack of "quality teachers" for poor student academic achievement.

Now we have a 10 year study done in San Diego California that tried mightily to narrow the income/racial achievement gap by hiring more teachers of color, increased teaching professional development, and better teacher certification practices.  The blueprint can be found here.  The result has been disappointing, the ten year study showed only marginal progress and in some cases no progress in narrowing the academic achievement gap.  .

The reason that none of these programs have worked is the failure to address the poverty issue and as long as the education reformer organizations ignore the 800 pound gorilla in the room and that is poverty, blaming teachers or the schools will not result in any significant improvements in narrowing the income/racial achievement gap.

School Diversity And Reality.

The big push by Chancellor Carmen Farina is to try to diversify schools but how do you do this without forced integration which was declared illegal by the Supreme Court back in 2007?  Trying to diversify a school is a very tricky issue.  You don't want to scare off middle income families, manly White, by encouraging them to send their child to a school with low test grades and that cater to low-income minority students from the housing projects.  Moreover, by establishing a quota system as some elementary schools are trying to do has resulted in failure when tried in the past.  The end result was that many middle class families will just send their children to the local parochial or private school, defeating the purpose.  Finally,  no right-thinking parent from well to do households will allow their elementary school child to be bused to a lower performing school outside the neighborhood when their child's friends are going to the higher-performing neighborhood school?  Not many parents will allow their elementary school child to be a guinea pig just to satisfy someone's idea of social engineering.

That brings me to school choice.  Many districts allow parents to select their school and many middle class parents select schools with high test scores and low poverty rates that has caused clustering in specific schools. Few, if any, parent would gamble their child's education and well-being by having them travel outside the safety of their community  for lower quality schools., How will the diversity forces encourage the middle class parents to take a chance in integrating a lower performing school?  Unfortunately,  there is no real solution to this thorny diversity issue.  Even when one or two schools succeed in becoming diverse, they usually tip the other way by ending up to attracting many of the middle class families to the school and crowding out the low-income minority student.  Brooklyn is a prime example where a school that is majority middle-class and white is located a couple of blocks from a near 100% minority school who are usually low income and struggle with low test scores. How do you force middle class families to send their children to these low performing schools?  You can't!

At the high school level, school choice is real and any student can apply to any school in the City.  However, look at our high schools, few are diverse.  Some in Northeastern Queens, Southern Staten Island, and parts of Brooklyn are. Otherwise, most of the city high schools are near 100% minority or, when it comes to highly screened and specialized schools, majority Asian/White.  School choice is a joke when it comes to Southeastern Queens where my school is located in a solidly middle to working class community, with no low income projects in the area.  Yet, many of the students in the four schools that inhabit the Campus find that the majority of their students live in Far Rockaway, South Jamaica, and Rochdale Village, all two bus rides from the campus.  Had the Bloomberg Administration retained zoned schools, the Campus would have retained the student population of the community rather than scrounge for low-achieving and over-the-counter students who are usually "high needs".  Three of the four schools in the Campus were short between 75 to 130 students for their freshman class this year and took far too many level one students just to meet the numbers.

The reality of the situation while income and racial diversity is a worthy goal but achieving diversity in the New York City schools is simply a pipe dream.   Bbringing back the neighborhood schools while attacking the poverty issue is a better approach to improve our schools in the long run, even if we cannot solve the school diversity issue...

Family Values

During last week's cold snap an eighth grade child, I will call her Clara, did not show up to school or attend her after school program. Later that night, the coldest night of the new school year, with temperatures dropping into the low 20's and windchills in the single digits, the teacher was giving out free turkeys for Thanksgiving at the school and who shows up?  Clara, with her mother and little sister in tow.  The teacher asked Clara's mother why Clara was not in school that day, the mother responded in a calm voice "because it was too cold and I kept Clara home".

Here is the problem,  Clara is a struggling student and is in danger of not moving up to high school as she is academically behind her peers.  The teacher told me that Clara has learning difficulties and instructions must be kept simple and short.  Clara has difficulty in completing tasks and cannot do complicated learning assignments.  As you might expect, she gets frustrated and exhibits behavioral issues due to her inability to complete or fully understand her assignments.

Clara lives with her grandmother and her mother has given most of the responsibility of raising Clara to the grandmother..  To the teacher's knowledge there is no father or male authority figure in her family.  Worse, when the weather is bad, Clara fails to show up to school.  What is going to happen when winter is here to stay?

That brings me back to Clara's mother.  How can a parent allow their child to miss school simply because its cold?  More importantly, why doesn't the City hold this parent responsible for educational neglect?   Yet, this parent, when offered a free turkey, took Clara and her little sister on the coldest night of the school year to school so that she can get the turkey.  What kind of message is that sending to Clara and her younger sister?

Education reformers like to blame poor student academic achievement on bad teachers and schools.  However, when these children are raised by dysfunctional families that lack parental supports and role models, they end up coming to school educationally, emotionally, and physically damaged.  Moreover, many of these children experience deep poverty feel unsafe and food insecure, yet that are deliberately ignored by the education reformers. That's why the ex-Chancellor Joel Klein's statement that   "poverty is no excuse" rings hallow when faced with the damaging reality of how poverty and the dysfunctional family affects student academic achievement.

No matter how one looks at it, getting families back together and providing them support is the most important factor in improving student academic achievement.

The NY Post Shows Its Hypocracy When It Comes To Improving Schools.

         


















Over the Bloomberg years and in the beginning of the De Blasio Administration, the New York Post, echoed the education reformer slogan that a great teacher in every classroom is the major factor in closing the racial/income academic achievement gap.  To the New York Post it wasn't tight school budgets, a bloated DOE bureaucracy, large class sizes, unqualified administrators, social-economic factors, or family.  It was about firing teachers for any or no reason at all and making sure every classroom had an effective teacher.  Just like the education reformers, the New York Post would write editorials saying that the quality of the teacher is the most important factor in a child's educational development while ignoring the fact t5hat the schools were hiring the cheapest and not the best teachers for the schools.

However, in an attempt to dump on Bill de Blasio's inequality agenda, the New York Post editorial cited poverty as the root cause of the gap, the blind spot that all education reformers ignore.  That;s right, the New York Post editorial finally admits its the elimination of poverty that needs to occur if the inequality gap is to be closed.  The editorial claims that raising the minimum wage, universal pre-k, and affordable rents are praiseworthy, however, the real problem is poverty.  Interesting how the New York Post all of a sudden claims poverty  is the major factor in the inequality gap when it suits their purpose to belittle Mayor De Blasio's plans but never questions education reformers on this same issue?  What a hypocrite the New York Post is.

One needs to just look at the John Hopkins study to realize its poverty and family that is the most important factors in reducing the inequality gap, not a great teacher in every classroom.Its time the education reformers and their media allies admit it.

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