The EDUCATION Digest   Vol.69, No.6
GRASPING WHAT KIDS NEED TO RAISE PERFORMANCE
By Kathleen Vail
From American School Board Journal

              Teachers for Helen Wells go nearly anywhere to hold parenting classes – homeless shelters, neonatal care units, high schools, even jails – because the Early Childhood Family Education program is for all Minneapolis Public School parents, not just ones savvy enough to sign up for it.
“We go where it’s needed, where the parents are” says Wells, the program director. “We know where the kids are, where the gap is the greatest – in poor neighbourhoods.”
              That would be the achievement gap between children from poor families and their middle-class and affluent peers, a gap largely the result of poverty, the kind that grinds down families generation after generation. Children in poverty’s grip do not leave the miseries of their home lives behind when they go to school.
Minneapolis and other urban school districts, which educate a substantial portion of poor and disadvantaged children, are working day and night to eliminate the barriers to learning that poverty raises. They offer early childhood and preschool classes, keep schools open after hours, and hold parenting workshops and adult education classes. Some even have laundries so parents can wash clothes. Others open health clinics so children can get immunizations and regular check-ups.
All of these efforts have the same goal: to take care of children’s social, emotional, and physical needs so they can learn.
Being born poor in the United States does not fate a child to a life of failure, but the blunt effect of poverty on children can be harsh and long lasting. Lawrence Aber, former director of New York City’s National Center for Children in Poverty, says the deeper the poverty, the more powerful its impact on a child’s life.
Children from high-poverty environments enter school less ready to learn, and they lag behind their more-affluent classmates in their ability to use language to solve problems. They face higher rates of health problems such as asthma. They are more likely to drop out of school, get pregnant early, or have a hard time paying attention because they don’t eat breakfast and may not have had dinner the night before.
“Kids are not in good shape” says education researcher Joy Dryfoos. “The pressure on schools for kids to achieve is much greater, and kids are in worse shape. The gap between their potential and what they are doing is wide.”
Poor children live in all types of neighbourhoods, even the suburbs, but much of our nation’s poverty is in inner cities. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 30% of children who attend urban schools live in poverty, and 40% of urban students attend a high-poverty school – one with 40% of its students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. A quarter of rural students and only 10% of suburban students attend high-poverty schools.

Urgent, Urban
This means urban schools shoulder much of the responsibility of educating children with urgent problems, more urgent than those of their suburban counterparts. To many children, urban schools are their last, best hope.
The first strike against poor children occurs when they arrive in kindergarten. Their parents may not have read or even talked to them as much as parents in middle class or affluent families have with their children. They are behind before their academic career has a chance to start.
The federal Head Start program, available for disadvantaged pre-schoolers, serves many fewer students than are eligible. Urban districts such as Minneapolis, Charlotte-Mecklenburg (North Carolina), Chicago, and San Francisco run their own early childhood programs, believing education for 3-and-4-year-olds is necessary to even the academic playing field for poor children.
The Minneapolis program is heavily focused on parent education, with both the parent and child in classes. Sessions start with pregnancy and continue until the children are ready for kindergarten. Held nearly every time of the day and on weekends, classes begin with an activity for parents and children to complete together. Then the parents leave the children in the care of teachers and join other parents with children the same age. With a parent educator, the group discusses temperament, discipline, guidance, and school readiness.

First Things First
The program gives Well’s staff the opportunity to help parents get their children ready for school and identify potential developmental delays early. Staffs also refer parents to social services or other agencies for any necessary help or assistance. In many cases, Wells says, parents need to take care of pressing problems before taking the classes: “It’s not so easy to say, ‘I think I’ll go to parenting class,’ when I don’t have a house and can’t feed my child.”
Early childhood teachers go to hospitals and talk to new mothers, showing them, for example, how new-borns already recognize their mothers’ voices.  The program is based on the belief that if parents are supported and helped, their children will be better off. And this early investment will pay dividends when the child goes to kindergarten.
While the Minneapolis program is for all young children and parents in the district, Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s Bright Beginnings program targets 4-year-olds from the district’s neediest families. “We had a group of students who were behind their peers when they started with us,” says Susan Agruso, Charlotte’s assistant superintendent of instructional accountability. “The idea was to give them the skills they need for kindergarten.”
Like most early childhood programs, Bright Beginnings encourages family and parents involvement. Unlike many, however, it emphasizes academic readiness, acknowledging that children from disadvantaged families may not know their letters and numbers when they reach kindergarten.
The district has tracked the performance of its Bright Beginnings graduates through fourth grade. More Bright Beginnings students scored at or above grade level on state achievement tests than did a control group. Another benefit, says Agruso, is that the program’s students tend to stay in the district longer than some of their classmates. She believes that’s because of the connections families make to the district as a result of the program.
Keeping students in the same school or district, in fact, is another goal of many urban schools because of the deleterious effects of mobility on student achievement is as well documented as it is disturbing. A student who moves more than three times in six years can fall behind a full school year academically, according to David Kerbow, a University of Chicago researcher who has studied the issue extensively.
Middle-class and affluent families move, too, of course, but their moves tend to be less frequent, and the children are usually well prepared for a new home and school. For low-income families, changing residences tends to be more frequent and more stressful. A Minneapolis study of mobility showed that one in four students from poor families moved one or more times during the study period, compared with only one in ten students from more affluent families.
Mobility takes an obvious toll on student achievement, but it has other effects, as well. Students who move frequently feel apart from the school community and are less engaged. Their attendance suffers, and they have more behaviour problems. Mobility hurts teacher morale as well. In fact, researchers like Kerbow doubt that any school reform effort can be successful when schools don’t have enough time with the students for anything to take root.

Still Trying
Many of the causes of mobility seem to be well out of the reach of school: high rent, substandard housing, evictions, spousal abuse, and lack of jobs that pay a liveable wage. But that doesn’t mean that schools aren’t trying to do something about it, or at least to lessen its harmful effect on students and schools.
James Caradonio, superintendent of Worcester (Massachusetts) Public Schools, says some schools in his district have up to 70% mobility. That is, seven out of ten students in the school en-roll or leave during the school year.
To address the problem, Caradonio and his staff knew they had to track mobility in the district as a whole. Working with a local university, they developed software to find out where the students were coming from and where they were going. The district sought and received a state grant to hire a social worker to work with foster families to give the children more stability. “Before, they were bouncing around like tennis balls.” says Caradonio.

The Heat’s On
The district is trying to work with landlords as well, since it is often their rental practices that spur families to move from apartment to apartment. For example, one building advertised rent with heat included, another without. Families were moving to the heat-included building in the winter, and then, when the weather broke, moving back to the building with the cheaper, no-heat rent.
Of course, Caradonio acknowledges, landlords can’t be held responsible for some situations. He cites a student whose family moved 11 times in one year. “That’s how many times the rent was due,” Caradonio says.
Other urban districts, such as Wichita, Kansas, have embraced Worcester’s strategy. The district has a standardized elementary school curriculum, with all schools using the same one or two textbooks. The district’s reading program, Success for All, is highly structured. With it, children who leave one school in the district and go to another can pick up where they left off. And children new to the district can easily be assessed and placed in the right level.
“At no time do we think we are stopping [mobility],” says Caradonio, “just mitigating its effects.”
While dealing with mobility is stressful for students, they may also be facing physical or emotional pain. For many, the school is their only place to turn.
It’s estimated that about 40% of students in public schools need some kind of mental health care. Add to that the number of poor children who don’t see a doctor or a dentist regularly, and you’ll find that inner-city schools are filled with children who have physical and emotional needs that aren’t being met. Most districts have school counsellors and school nurses, but the needs of so many children go beyond what these professionals can handle in a school day.
To address some of these needs, about 1400 school-based medical clinics have opened in the United States. These clinics offer full-scale medical treatment for students, including immunizations. Some offer dental exams. The Children’s Aid Society in New York City works with 12 inner-city schools to provide services that include medical and dental clinics staffed with doctors, physician’s assistants, and nurses employed by the Children’s Aid Society.
Schools that don’t have on-site clinics often come up with other ways to get medical care for students. The Independence City School District, in Independence, Missouri, for example, transports children in the early childhood education program, along with their parents, to doctor and dentist appointments. The district picks up the tab.
Some districts refer families and students for mental health services, but others find it easier to offer those services on site through community resources. At least one district, the Memphis City Schools, owns and operates its own state-licensed mental health center for students and their families.
Memphis has run its mental health center for more than three decades; the facility now has about 150 staff members. Mental health professionals provide individual, group, and family therapy for students and consult with teachers and administrators about students’ behavioural issues.
The chief advantage of having a district-operated mental health facility is that it takes away the barrier of access to counselling and other services, says Jeane Chapman, director of the division of health and social support for the Memphis district. Parents are more likely to allow their children to receive mental health counselling and less likely to see such services as a stigma if the school offers them, she says. Also, the services are free to the students. “Parents trust the schools”, she says.
Teachers, too, are grateful for the mental health resources, particularly when faced with a disruptive or disturbed child in the classroom. “If you have a child with serious behaviour problems, who is seriously depressed or psychotic, there’s no way a teacher will know what to do,” says Chapman.
Efforts like this require a great deal of energy and commitment from the administration and school board, but clearly the Memphis community believes the program is worth it. Providing needed services to students, parents, and community members makes schools like those in Memphis the centrepiece in their neighbourhoods. Many of these schools believe they can do it all, with a lot of help.

Full Service
    What if urban schools could increase parent involvement, decrease student mobility, improve the health of children, and create strong neighbourhood ties? Such schools do exist, commonly known as full-service or community schools and they come in as many different varieties as there are communities.
    These schools strive to be more than academic centers. Most have an after-school program, adult education and parenting classes, preschool classes, and resources for health care and social services. The goal is to improve academic achievement for students, especially those from poor and disadvantaged families. Many community schools are in inner-city neighbourhoods where little or no access to the services is otherwise available.
    Another important characteristic of such schools is that they don’t try to go it alone. They form partnerships with local and state social service agencies, non-profits, and other community organizations to help them provide these services.

        Dealt With
    “These kinds of schools do improve academic achievement,” says Martin Blank, director of the Coalition of Community Schools in Washington, D.C. “When you put together this kind of support, kids do better, attendances goes up, behaviour is better, and mobility is solved. The impediments to learning are dealt with.”
    Mobility is just one problem that proponents say community schools ease. “People talk about mobility and say, ‘I can’t control it.’ It’s true, but you can decrease it,” says Carlos Azcoitia, former deputy chief education officer of Chicago Public Schools and currently the principal of the district’s John Spry Community School. “Becoming a community school and engaging the whole family have attracted families to remain in school.”
    Another Chicago principal, Paul O’Toole, has seen decreased mobility in the eight years since Marquette Elementary was converted to a community school. Turnover rates have dropped from a high of 50% to 27%. Today, parents are loath to move away and give up the after-school child care, the GED classes, and the adult sports programs, among other services. “Parents like our school and are staying here,” O’Toole says.
    “School systems are not responsible for meeting every need of their students,” wrote the Carnegie Task Force on the Education of Young Adolescents. “But when the need directly affects learning, the school must meet the challenge.”
    No one should or could expect urban schools, or any school for that matter, to overcome all of the obstacles faced by low-income children and their families. However, as the Carnegie quote suggests, inner-city schools would be hard-pressed to present even basic academics if they ignored the social problems of their poorest and most vulnerable children.
    Says James Hinson, superintendent of the Independence City School District: “Our families and students have a lot of needs. If we can work with them and other community agencies, we will benefit our families, students, and the entire community. There’s no other way to do business.”