No – Poverty doesn’t excuse low school performance

It came up again during the August 16, 2022 meeting of the Kentucky Legislature’s Interim Joint Committee on Education. During a presentation to the legislators on the current status of the Jefferson County Public Schools District (JCPS), Superintendent Marty Polio said:

But we all know, as many of you are educators right here, one of the number 1 correlations with achievement is poverty.

KET Webcast of Kentucky Legislature’s Interim Joint Committee on Education, August 16, 2022, at 1 hour, 21 minutes and 40 seconds into the broadcast

Polio’s implication is one we hear a lot from educators: It’s the poverty – not anything schools can control – that is behind low academic performance.

Really?

At least when it comes to reading, poverty doesn’t work as an excuse. The real problem is something schools can control: teachers simply are not teaching reading properly.

In fact, many of Kentucky’s ed schools don’t even cover all the aspects needed in strong reading programs, so a lot of teachers don’t have any idea that they are not properly prepared to teach reading.

It doesn’t have to be this way. When teachers learn how to teach reading properly, the results can be amazing.

Evidence of this is found in our recent report about Reading proficiency rates rising in some Appalachian schools. In this report, we show some very high poverty schools, including some in Clay County, Kentucky, produced some notable third grade reading proficiency rates after the teachers were retrained to do reading instruction the way scientific research – not poorly researched and incomplete education school fad ideas – shows really works best.

Let’s use the same analysis program used to create the Appalachian schools report to compare Jefferson County elementary school reading performance to what happened in Clay County after teachers started to teach reading properly.

The graph below was generated using a really neat tool created by my friends at the Education-Consumers Foundation, by the way. 

The graph plots schools’ performances against third grade reading proficiency rates from the 2019 KPREP on the vertical axis and the percentage of students eligible for free and reduced cost school lunches (a poverty measure) on the horizontal axis.

For example, the Goose Rock Elementary School, found in the upper right part of the graph, had a 2019 KPREP proficiency rate in Grade 3 reading of 89.7% and an eligibility rate for school lunches of 85%.

Notice that the performances of all the Clay County schools (shown with green hexagons inside the green dashed border) plot on the upper right side of the graph. This is because all have very high (well above state average) school lunch eligibility rates but also had some notable Grade 3 reading proficiency rates in 2019, notably above the state average (53%) reading proficiency rate.

The best results are for the Goose Rock Elementary School, which scored that really amazing KPREP Grade 3 reading proficiency rate of 89.7%.

No elementary school in JCPS, not even the highest scoring Greathouse Shryock, which got a Grade 3 reading proficiency score of 88.9%, did as well.

But, Shryock’s school lunch eligibility rate was just 25% while Goose Rock had that very high 85% eligibility rate for school lunches. Poverty didn’t stop Goose Rock from doing super well.

Furthermore, as you can see in the right side of the graph, no JCPS school with anything close to the sort of school lunch rates found in Clay County posted anything close to the reading proficiency rates in that Appalachian high poverty system where teachers were taught how to teach reading in accordance with what scientific research shows works best.

Simply put, Clay County schools, especially those highest scoring schools called out by name in the graph, put just about the entire Jefferson County system to shame.

However, poverty didn’t prevent this from happening in Clay County. The key was retraining teachers to teach reading properly. There’s more.

Thanks to Kentucky Senator Stephen West’s Senate Bill 9 from the 2022 Regular Legislative Session, Kentucky has started “Reading Academies” to give our teachers training about what science shows works best. This sort of approach has worked well in Mississippi (which outscored Kentucky for both white and Black students’ results in the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress in Grade 4 Reading, by the way) as well as in Clay County.

I didn’t hear Polio say anything about the Reading Academies in his comments, though I have information that some JCPS teachers have signed up to attend them.

Going forward, I hope Superintendent Polio gets on board with real support for those Reading Academy teachers as they learn how to do the job right.

Also, let’s hear no more tired and inaccurate excuses that it’s all just about poverty. In truth, it’s about teaching. Clay County schools have shown we can get that a lot better. I hope all the other schools in Kentucky will now follow suit and encourage more teachers to enter the Reading Academies.

https://bipps.org/blog/no-poverty-doesnt-excuse-low-school-performance

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