I don't usually disagree with Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate in economics who writes for the New York Times. But this week, he blew it in his column about the unequal playing field facing Americans trying to pursue their dreams. Here, he tried to describe some of the obstacles that make advancement impossible for millions of Americans:
The failure starts early: in America, the holes in the social safety net mean that both low-income mothers and their children are all too likely to suffer from poor nutrition and receive inadequate health care. It continues once children reach school age, where they encounter a system in which the affluent send their kids to good, well-financed public schools or, if they choose, to private schools, while less-advantaged children get a far worse education.
I won't dispute for a moment that poor children in the United States are getting a worse education than kids from affluent families - a quick look at test scores will show that even though test scores for poor children have been rising in the United States over the past decade, they still lag other students' scores, and the gap is growing.
But who's to blame for that? Krugman doesn't explicitly say it, but when Krugman writes that "affluent send their kids to good, well-financed public schools," it's not hard to imagine that the reader will take from that statement an assumption that the poor end up with the "bad" schools.
Here's the trouble with that hypothesis, though: If inadequate schools are the problem that prevent children in poverty from advancing, why are the middle-class children who attend those same schools succeeding?
My children attend an urban school district where about 70 percent of the students qualify for the federal government's free- or reduced-price lunch program. As one might expect, given that demographic, the district's average test scores fall behind the average scores for the rest of the districts here in California. But when I took a closer look at those scores, I found that the district's average test scores for the non-poor kids - the children, like mine, who came from families that earned more than the cut-off for free or discounted school lunch - were above the state average for similar children.
The same held for all individual schools in the district that had enough non-poor students to break out their data publicly. The non-poor students were succeeding - scoring above the state average for other children in their demographic group. Clearly, these schools weren't holding back those students. It is possible for students to succeed, even in districts where a super-majority of children come from families that are poor, or struggling financially.
For what it's worth, I found that in our district, the poor kids were outscoring the state's test-scores average for poor students, too. The reason why the district's average lagged the state's was that the district had a much larger-than-average percentage of poor children. But it's clear from the data that, on average, poor students score far behind their classmates whose parents earn more money.
So why aren't the poor children succeeding at the same level? Given the performance of their more affluent classmates, it should be clear that the opportunity for success is there, even in so-called "poor" schools and districts. Op-ed columns and politicians' stump speeches that blame schools for the lack of performance by students in or near poverty are missing that point.
Worse, these columns and speeches are leading people to think that our public schools are fundamentally broken and in need of massive reform. But the problem is not that schools aren't giving our children a chance to advance. Kids from families whose parents haven't fallen behind financially are succeeding, and getting better with each generation. Yet, for some reason, kids from other families aren't taking advantage of the opportunities available in our public schools, and their test scores are not rising as quickly as their classmates'.
To find out why that's happening, we need to start looking outside the classroom. It's too easy, and simplistic, to blame "bad" schools for poor student performance. But the reality is that schools are serving the children who come to school with the home support to learn. Blaming the schools for the failure of our poor and economically-struggling students diverts our attention from where the problem really lies - an economy and a society that's left too many families broke and broken, unable to provide enough help to enable their children to succeed.
If you want to blame the schools for something, blame them for not being able to overcome that disadvantage for these children. But if you want schools to be able to do that, you'd better be prepared to pay the enormous cost of recreating a healthy home environment for millions of children across the country. This isn't just about giving kids a free lunch on school days. This means providing adequate nutrition for kids, three meals a day, 365 days a year. It means giving kids places where they can go before and after school to get help with the homework, from someone who know how to show them a way to find the answers. It means giving kids a safe, warm place to sleep at night, every night. And even more that all that, it means giving kids a personal advocate - someone who can show them the way to advance in life, and be there to defend them from anyone or anything standing in that way.
How much time have you spent waiting to talk with teachers and counselors on behalf of your children? How much time and money have you spent enrolling them in summer camps and after-school activities? How many hours and how much money have you spent helping your kids with their homework? Would you still be able to do that if you were earning minimum wage, grabbing every extra hour of overtime you could get to buy groceries this week? Or if you had to work an extra just to pay to the rent? What if you hadn't graduated high school yourself, or maybe couldn't even read or write the language? Where would your children be in school then?
Frankly, I'm amazed that so many of the children of poor families do as well as they do in our schools. So let's not fall into a trap of blaming the schools for ongoing effects of poverty in our communities. They're working. It's the rest of our society that needs to step up, if we're to better level the playing field for all Americans.
This post originally appeared at SensibleTalk.com