Poverty is indeed education’s enemy

The Lacrosse Tribune

By RICHARD MIAL / La Crosse Tribune

Elsewhere in today’s Tribune, education reporter Dan Simmons looks back at the 15-year-old controversy involving socioeconomic balance in La Crosse schools.

Having lived through that period, with children in the schools, I remember vividly the concerns expressed by parents who opposed the policy — and voters who eventually recalled most of the school board members who supported the changes.

But I don’t want to talk about busing. There has been plenty of attention here and nationwide to various busing plans for racial desegregation or, in the case of La Crosse and a handful of other similar-size school districts, for socioeconomic balance.

Instead, I want to focus on socioeconomic balance. Why did teachers and school officials believe so strongly that low-income students do better when they are in a school that is predominately middle class.

One factor is parents. Most low-income parents are struggling so hard to get by that they don’t have time to get involved in school issues.

One teacher told Simmons: “We know that 65 percent of people in La Crosse will advocate for their kids, but there is this very desperate group of poor, poor people. It’s not race. It’s their circumstances. And they have no advocate other than social programs, and for some of these kids the only positive social program they have comes from school.”

One of the biggest advocates for socioeconomic balance in schools is the New York-based Century Foundation.

Here’s how Century Foundation researcher Richard Kahlenberg described the situation: “Poverty concentrations present an enormous problem for educators. According to the U.S. Department of Education, all children, poor and middle class, perform substantially worse in schools with concentrations of poverty. Indeed, middle-class children attending high-poverty schools (those with more than 75 percent low-income) perform worse, on average, than low-income children attending middle-class schools.”

Remember that two La Crosse schools had poverty rates close to 80 percent. Reducing the concentrations of poverty — and giving the kids in those schools better role models and more advocates — was what the policy was about.

Where it failed was the perception of coercion — of “forced” busing. If you go back and look at the testimony from public hearings about the plan, most parents opposed to the plan wanted their kids to go to school in their neighborhood. Parents wanted their children to be in a school that would be comfortable and familiar to the parents.

Socioeconomic balance proponents now are more likely to be thinking in terms of using choice and magnet schools to achieve a better balance.

And that may be the long-term solution.

La Crosse’s plan in the early 1990s ran smack into the fears and opposition of parents.

(The kids actually adjusted better.) If we want to do something about high concentrations of poverty in schools, we better figure out a way to do it voluntarily — through the strategic use of choice and special magnet programs.

Otherwise, we’ll just repeat the experience of the past.