Poverty in the South a 'first-order crisis' for schools

from the Savannah Morning News

When low-income student populations are high, achievement is typically low.

But it doesn't have to be.

Schools that hold low-income students to high academic standards and provide them with academic support and resources are closing the gap between them and their more advantaged peers.

"It all has to do with the support you give a child and your belief in that child," said Savannah-Chatham County Public Schools Superintendent Thomas Lockamy.

He is living proof.

"I'm the product of teen parents, my mom was 15 and my dad was 19," he said. "We were poor. We didn't have indoor plumbing until I was 11 years old. My mom got her GED at the same time I got my high school diploma."

Since Lockamy was hired in 2005 to raise academic achievement in a system where 60 percent of the students are low-income, he's begun to build a network of support programs and strategies. He is constantly repeating "All children can learn at high levels - and all means all."

Poor achieving low-income high-minority students have been his main target.

A vicious cycle

His concern is well-founded, and the need to address the problem is only expected to increase.

In the South, low-income students are increasing as a percentage of the population. They now make up the majority in public schools.

Unless investment in their success increased, the Southern Education Foundation warns that the underclass will expand - causing declines in achievement, productivity and quality of life for all Southerners.

"The South has a crisis of first-order magnitude," said Lynn Huntley, president of the foundation.

"The region is in the throes of a self-perpetuating, vicious cycle where poverty and low incomes are begetting a lack of education, and, in turn, the lack of education is perpetuating and creating poverty and inequality."

Lockamy has done everything from establish an evening school and an acceleration program for students who have been held back to requiring staff at a troubled elementary school to reapply for their jobs.

While he's expanded opportunities for high-performing students, Lockamy always shifts the focus back to raising school and community expectations for the system's dropouts, disengaged and underachievers.

A new literacy plan requires teachers to have all children reading on or above grade level by the end of first grade, and assessments are being used more frequently to help teachers better address students' academic shortfalls.

"Children of poverty can learn at high levels provided they receive the proper scaffolding of support," Lockamy said. "It's a challenge, but their success is the reason many of us entered the teaching profession."

Rising to the challenge

Jim Turbeville superintendent of Tattnall County Schools, like Savannah-Chatham, had never met the state academic benchmarks and was a needs-improvement district.

But Turbeville made a drastic adjustment in his system's academic priorities and made adequate yearly progress for the first time this year.

"We focused on the academic needs and social problems with our black male students and it raised our academic outcomes and our graduation rates," Turbeville said.

But nationally, increasing resources, empathy and enthusiasm for low-income student success is a politically and emotionally charged process.

The majority of low-income, disadvantaged and poor performing students are also black and Latino; while higher performing, wealthier, more advantaged students are typically white.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, which tracks student achievement nationally, shows that black and Latino 17-year-olds read and do math at the same level as white 13-year-olds.

Further research by the higher education policy group Postsecondary Education Opportunity shows that 75 percent of young people from high-income families graduate college by age 24, compared to 9 percent of young people from low-income families.

WHY IT MATTERS

"A New Majority," a report by Southern Education Foundation program coordinator Steve Suitts, found that the South is the only region in the nation with a 50 percent or higher enrollment of low-income students.

"Both policy makers and the public must understand more fully that today their future and their grandchildren's future are inextricably bound to the success or failure of low-income students," Suitts said. "If this new majority of students fails in school, an entire state, an entire region, and sooner or later, an entire nation will fail simply because there will be inadequate human capital to build and sustain good jobs, an enjoyable quality of life and a well-informed democracy."

ON THE WEB

To learn more about poverty in Chatham County and rankings for Savannah-Chatham County Public Schools, go to savannahnow.com/know, and click on Data Center to find related databases.