Poverty and student achievement

The school voucher plan, SB 1, proposed by Senators Piccola and Williams, is already dominating discussion this legislative session and will likely continue to do so. The bill seeks to improve the achievement of low income students attending low-achieving schools by allowing their families a tuition voucher that can be used to send them to a higher performing public school or a private school. Unfortunately, SB 1 fails to take into account the impact of poverty on student achievement.

Overall, about 20% of students in the United States live in poverty, and the effects of poverty on student achievement are startling. Based on the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment results, U.S. students in schools with a poverty level of 10% or less performed the best in the world in math, reading and science. However, as the poverty rate increased, student achievement decreased, and students in schools with poverty rates greater than 50% ranked in the bottom of all students internationally.1

Senator Piccola’s office published a list of the 144 public elementary and secondary schools that performed in the bottom 5% on the 2009-10 PSSAs, in which the majority of students performed below grade level in math and reading. These are the schools from which low-income students would be eligible for vouchers in the first year of SB 1.2

A review of the schools on this list shows that there are some striking similarities. The vast majority of the 144 schools (approximately 125) are found in urban school districts, such as the Philadelphia City School District, Pittsburgh School District, Harrisburg City School District and York City School District. These urban school districts have poverty rates that are much higher than the average across the state.

In 2009, over 12% of Pennsylvanians were living in poverty,3 however, the poverty rates in urban areas were significantly higher with 25% of Philadelphia residents living in poverty, 32% of Pittsburgh residents living in poverty, 27% of Harrisburg residents living in poverty and 31% of York residents living in poverty.4

In each of these urban areas over 30% of children are living in poverty, and more specifically, approximately 72% of students attending the Philadelphia City School District, 67% of students attending the Pittsburgh School District, 82% of students attending the Harrisburg City School District and 79% of the students attending the York City School District come from low-income families in which the household income does not exceed 130% of the federal poverty line.5

Research also shows that poverty in urban areas adversely affects minority students. Across the country, almost half of all white students attend schools with poverty rates of 20% or less, while only 7% of African American and Hispanic students attend schools with similar poverty rates. In contrast, nearly half of all African American and Hispanic students attend schools with poverty rates over 80%, while only 4% of white students attend schools with similar poverty rates.6

With the startling levels of poverty in many of Pennsylvania’s urban areas, it’s no surprise that so many of Pennsylvania’s urban schools made the list of low-achievers. Each year, students are in school just over 1,100 waking hours, compared to the 4,700 waking hours they spend outside of school.7 For those students living in poverty, factors that are prevalent during the 4,700 waking hours they are not in school, such as food insecurity, family stress, inadequate medical, dental and vision care, and neighborhood characteristics, carry over into and greatly affect how a student performs during school hours. In many cases, these out-of-school factors create such severe obstacles to student achievement that they cannot be overcome by schools alone.

Students who are hungry have difficulty concentrating and learning in schools. Students with stressful family situations and those who witness or are victims of abuse often develop and display social and emotional problems, have increased rates of aggressive behavior, depression, anxiety and decreased social skills, all of which manifests itself in low academic achievement. Students in poor families with inadequate medical, dental or vision care are more likely to be in suboptimal health, which results in frequent absences from school, distractions and behavior problems due to illnesses and conditions left untreated. Students that come from dysfunctional neighborhoods in which there may be high unemployment, overcrowding, violence, delinquent youth behavior, high incarceration rates and drug use are unlikely to value education as a means to a successful adulthood and are more likely to drop out of school.

By providing students with a warm, safe environment full of caring and responsible adults, schools can offer poor students a refuge each day from the rigors of their daily life. However, in the comparatively short time that schools have to educate and nurture students each year, it is extremely difficult for them to undo the effects of poverty that occur outside school hours and to ensure that students reach their achievement potential. Furthermore, while schools continue to strive to increase student achievement, it is unlikely that many of the low-achieving schools will make significant improvements until the significant effects of poverty on such achievement are widely acknowledged and adequately addressed.

Vouchers are unresponsive to the poverty issue

As the schools with the highest poverty rates represent the lowest-achieving schools in the state, it’s clear that poverty plays a significant role in student achievement and affects every aspect of a child’s life. All schools aim to ensure students meet the academic achievement goals set by both state and federal laws, but it is particularly difficult for those schools with high poverty rates, particularly those in urban areas, to reach such achievement goals due to the plethora of outside factors that negatively affect students living in poverty. While proponents of voucher programs contend that vouchers serve as an escape mechanism for students in troubled public schools, such a scheme will do little to address or ameliorate the impact of poverty on the lives of these students, and therefore, will likely be unsuccessful in improving student achievement in these low-achieving schools.

Poverty can affect students in many ways. Poor students may live in inadequate or unstable housing, face food and financial insecurity, have untreated medical conditions, live in abusive or dysfunctional households, have little parental involvement in their daily lives and, among other things, be exposed to violence or crime in their community. All of these negative impacts of poverty, especially for students in urban areas, function to distract students from focusing on their education, leading to low test scores and high dropout rates.

In an attempt to combat the negative effects of poverty, many schools with high poverty rates have surpassed their traditional educational obligations to provide students with health and other services to ensure that their basic needs are being met. However, despite the fact that schools strive to do all they can to nurture students, overcoming the negative impact of poverty poses an overwhelming challenge that cannot be solved by schools alone.

Overcoming the negative impact of poverty is also a challenge that cannot be solved by simply providing students living in poverty with vouchers to attend higher achieving schools. While allowing a student to attend a new school may provide the student with a new environment and new peers, it does nothing to combat the poverty that is the biggest obstacle to student achievement. School vouchers will do nothing to ensure that students living in poverty have adequate food and shelter, have their health and medical needs met, improve their family life, or revive their violent or dysfunctional neighborhoods, and the negative impacts of poverty will simply follow the student and continue to undermine his or her achievement potential.

To truly ensure that all students have the opportunity to reach their achievement potential at any school they attend, policy-makers must universally acknowledge and examine poverty as an impediment to learning and develop social policy, alongside educational policy, that is responsive to the needs of students. For example, to begin to reduce the impact of poverty, we must begin to change the social and economic environment in which poverty thrives. Dysfunctional neighborhoods must be rebuilt through improved housing, job creation and retail development. Social programs must be improved to ensure that those living in poverty obtain the skills and support necessary for self-sufficiency and home ownership. Family-oriented and human services programs must be strengthened to ensure that families remain intact and that low-income individuals have appropriate and affordable child care, mental health care and substance abuse services. Only after we begin to address poverty at this level, will the negative impacts of poverty on student achievement begin to vanish. While proponents of the school voucher plan contend that vouchers may be the elixir to this student achievement problem, the plan is entirely unresponsive to the broader social issue of poverty, and therefore, is not the silver bullet proponents suggest.