Crucial Connections: Economic Opportunity and Development as the Agent of Educational Reform

     Jean Anyon's What "Counts" as Educational Policy? Notes toward a New Paradigm serves as a neat bookend to the main foci of this course: socioeconomic systems, the students marginalized by these systems, how to best improve the educational and vocational outcomes of these students, families, and communities. Beginning with a critical look at historical attempts to improve urban educational outcomes, Anyon ties the almost century-long list of inadequate educational policies to ineffective macropolicies that ultimately failed to address the root cause of low achievement in urban schools, poverty. 

     What is interesting is the persistent relationship public k-12 education shares with the private business sector in regards to the demand on curricula creation. The Smith-Hughes Act of 1917, the Gary Plan, and A Nation at Risk all express concern for public education's ability to prepare students for employment (based on socioeconomic status, of course).(67-68) Indeed, the Gary Plan significantly business driven, influenced just as strongly by the scientific management movement as it was by Dewey. Scientific management was an early 20th century movement designed to increase efficiency in manufacturing through the increased separation of worker roles and duties, and incentivized wages.(Theide, 2013)

     These policies continue to trouble me. It is clear that education is a requirement to employment, yet the idea of educational policies tailored to the economic demands for human capital strike me as an obscene context for improvement. The relationship between business and education appears to benefit  businesses more than the people in the communties served by schools. As we also learned in last week's readings(Buras, Spring), Anyon discusses the attempts at the privatization of public schools under the guise of school choice, through the implimentation of charter schools and vouchers.(68) However, school improvement projects resulting from federal and state mandates still struggle to provide the intended outcome. And that's because you can throw money at a problem and hope to solve it, you have to actually address the circumstances that created and foster the problem. 

     Yet a number of factors must be addressed in order to create a viable solution with long-term success. The concentration of poverty in urban areas was compounded by white flight to the suburbs in the Post-War era, and reinforced by redlining of real estate. Inadequate public transportation fails potential employees from finding employment at the businesses that also migrated to the suburbs. Finally, zoning laws and NIMBYism prevents the construction of low-income, affordable housing that urban families might move to. And so at the publication of this article, the percentage of people living in poverty are close to the highest historical amount ever, "before massive urban poverty became a national issue."(72-73). Which is not to say that massive urban poverty didn't exist before then, it absolutely did. It just wasn't considered a pressing concern. 

   

Socioeconomic Gradients Predict Individual Differences in Neurocognitive Abilities

                         

     Anyon provides ample evidence of longitudinal data from numerous research studies that essentially suggest the same thing: equitable resources would improve the lives of students and families living in poverty. This is critical, because poverty has deleterious effects on the neurocognitive development of the brain, especially during childhood. Poverty robs people of their potential. To take it a step further, the gatekeeping of effective education through spatial politics and socioeconomic status robs humanity of potential. NPR addressed the issue of education and place in it's recent Hidden Brain podcast Zipcode Destiny-The Persistent Power of Place and Education. According to Lee and Burkham (2002), disadvantaged children not only enter kindergrten with significantly lower cognitive skills compared to advantaged peers, but also enter lower quality school systems. (76) Should families receive support to move as they sought to access higher quality public education, their children were disproportionately placed into special education classrooms, a problem discussed in Leonardo and Broderick.(2011) 

     So we can can see that social inequalities are continually being reinforced by the systems meant to foster economic prosperity. What can be done?Anyon offers an approach that I consider to be reminiscent of Boggs (2011), by addressing the needs of the community. Evidence of several long-term research studies indicate that addressing the needs of the student and their family in a holistic manner through access to wraparound social services, childcare, coaching, and supplemental income greatly improved the educational, financial, and mental health outcomes of the participating families. Mothers reported lower rates of depression and stress, students had fewer behavioral difficulties, and higher levels of achievement on standardized testing. Anyon argues that public policies committed to the development of economic opportunities in urban areas combined with access to comprehensive social services will organically result in tangible improvements in the education outcomes of students in urban educational districts, and offers substantial evidence in support of their argument. The government has historically thrown money at plenty of failed educational policies that addressed the symptoms of poverty, perhaps it's time it funds a series of policies shown to have successful outcomes.

Works Cited

1. https://thejosevilson.com/distrust-agents-pull-out-the-highlighter-for-this-one/

2. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Gary-Plan

3.“Socioeconomic Gradients Predict Individual Differences in Neurocognitive Abilities,” by Kimberly G. Noble et al., in Developmental Science, Vol. 10, No. 4; July 2007. Credit: Amanda Montañez

4.  https://www.npr.org/2018/11/12/666993130/zipcode-destiny-the-persistent-power-of-place-and-education