If I were the next Superintendent of the Dallas Public Schools

Can you imagine the enormity of such a challenge?  To move into our school district, so riddled by poverty, economic and educational disparity, high drop out rates and very low outcomes on producing college-ready graduates--talk about a challenge.

I agree with those who identify poverty as the biggest challenge facing our district, its students and our next district leader. 

What would I do if I were the next superintendent of DISD?  Here's my short list of action items to plant in the school culture over the first 5 years.

1.  Identify "master teachers" already at work in the schools.  Every school has them.  Everyone knows who they are.  But how do we leverage their success to benefit other faculty members, as well as students who will never benefit from the experience of their classrooms?  There is a way to infiltrate and inject the attitude, methods and commitment of master teachers through and into the rest of the teaching team.  Call leading teachers into the leadership mix of each campus.  Then, keep track of outcomes.

2.  Establish an on-the-ground, at-the-campus, working relationship with the Texas Department of Health and Human Services, as well as other public agencies.  In short, move the offices of public benefits to the schools, or at least establish certification or enrollment days for parents from low income families to be able to register for various benefits that can help stabilize poor families for the benefits of students.  Make things easier to access and more customer friendly.  If poverty is our biggest challenge, then let's decide together to attack it systematically!  Why  should eligible parents have to go to an office located somewhere else, to deal with strangers regarding CHIP registration, or Food Stamp enrollment, or assistance with childcare, or housing, or EITC filings?  Those at the top benefit from financial counselors.  Why shouldn't those at the bottom enjoy similar services from benefits counselors.  The key to this campus transformation would be to let parents know that enrollment in benefits is not only for them and their children, but also for the entire school and its success. 

3.  Position principals to function as campus leaders with clear expectations linked to individual student improvement and progress, rather than to the next standardized test.  Each student learns at a different pace and in a different way.  Measure student improvement and index school leaders' performance to the creation of a culture of excellence that encourages students to grow and excel in their own styles over a longer course of evaluation.

4.  Don't shortchange the extra-curricular.  One of the reasons low-income students don't achieve more readily has to do with what I call "experience disparity" when compared to more affluent students.  Learning must take place outside the classroom, as well as inside.  Vocabulary is developed in a process of discovering life both in books and in the laboratory that is our world.  Poor kids need more experienced-based educational opportunities. Let's provide them what they need.  Then, let's tie what is discovered "out there" to what we are doing "in here." Restore music, art, theater and PE in every school no matter what it takes to fund excellence in these important developmental areas of study, expression, performance and curiosity.

5.  Incentivize learning performance and parent involvement with some sort of value added benefit.  Parent involvement with PTA or volunteering at school should be rewarded with something of immediate value, like discount coupons to local stores or gift cards that can be used to buy books, groceries or school clothes.  We make a grave error if we take our eye off the wicked curve ball called poverty.  Reward performance by returning something of real value.

6.  Form a closer working relationship with the City of Dallas, Dallas County, surrounding ISDs, businesses, corporations and universities.  Find ways to engage these other, huge institutions for the immediate benefit of our students today. 

7.  Develop a clear communications strategy for challenging students again and again regarding the importance DISD's mission and vision.  Repeatedly invite every student into the battle.  Rehearse and re-imagine the success that awaits us all if we learn to work together.

8.  Initiate a comprehensive evaluation of middle level administrators to the end that more resources find their way to the classrooms, the teachers and the students.  Schools should not settle for being a job factory for adults.  Streamlining away ineffective efforts, programs and departments should be top of the list for any new leader.  This means our new leader must be tough, proven and ready for battle!

9. Partner with community based non-profits like Avance and The Concilio here in Dallas to organize, train and equip parents to become the primary advocates for their children and for the education of their children.  Community organizing to ensure quality public education should never be considered a threat, but rather an expression of partnership and cooperation.  Getting parents and other community leaders involved will be a key component of any successful administration. 

I suppose my ideas are too simple.  And, I admit I enjoy the luxury of not being in the position of leadership.  But, I care about these children, and I understand the powerful negative impact of poverty on families and school systems.

DISD and poverty

Several years ago, a candidate for the Dallas School board dropped by my office to chat about his campaign efforts.  In the course of our conversation he asked me, "Larry, what do you consider the greatest challenge facing the DISD?"

I remember exactly what I told him:  "That is easy to answer and very, very difficult to overcome.  In a word, the biggest challenge facing our public schools is poverty." 

I'm not sure he liked my answer or agreed with my assessment, but I believe I was right then, and things have only grown more difficult.  So, I read with gratitude the editorial page comment from The Dallas Morning News on Sunday, February 12, 2012.  What follows is one part in the paper's series dubbed "Tactics for Turnaround project" dealing wtih the important enormous work that faces everyone who cares about urban, public education here in Dallas.  I hope you'll take the time to read the entire essay. 

Editorial: Poverty’s role in DISD reform

There’s no way to sugarcoat the serious challenges ahead for DISD’s next superintendent. One of the biggest is that Dallas public schools are overwhelmed by a worsening cycle of poverty. Less than a decade ago, 73 percent of students qualified for free or reduced-price lunches at school. Last year, that number had grown to 88 percent, and the trend shows no sign of reversing.

Poverty is by no means a pathway to failure. In fact, despite the growing number of poor children in DISD, dropout rates are declining, four-year graduation rates are up and some standardized test scores are improving. Poverty doesn’t have to be the insurmountable obstacle to success that some might assume.

Still, students living in poverty are far less likely to get the shot at success that all kids deserve. Studies show that, from birth through high school, children growing up in poor households tend to lack crucial developmental skills, proper health and nutrition, and the crucial component of parental involvement in their academic pursuits.

Even before they enter school, kids in poverty are more likely to have stunted vocabularies and be on track to develop debilitating health problems such as obesity. By kindergarten, if a child hasn’t developed a vocabulary of roughly 2,200 words, he or she is already behind, both in literacy and speaking ability. The problem is even worse for those children who don’t speak English; nearly 70 percent of the Dallas district’s student population is Hispanic.

To read the entire opinion click here.

Number 1 problem for public education and growing: poverty

[The following article by Katha Pollitt, "It Takes a Village, Not a Tiger," appeared in the February 28, 2011 edition of The Nation.]

Are you a tiger mother, a soccer mom, a helicopter parent, an attachment mom, a permissive free spirit who just wants your child to be herself?

Congratulations.

Your kids have a good chance of turning out reasonably well. Not because you are a parenting genius who has hit on the perfect method but because you have the time and energy and cultural capital to give your child what he needs to be successful in today’s world no matter what child-raising method you choose.

You are probably not, for example, poor, homeless, functionally illiterate, socially isolated, an addict, in prison, living in substandard housing, working three low-paid jobs—or unemployed for life.

You have books in your house, and probably a computer too.

You know enough to help your child with homework—and if not, you have the money or networks to find a tutor.

You feel comfortable volunteering at your child’s school, being in the PTA, calling the principal, going to parent-teacher conferences.

You can afford to take your child to the doctor and the dentist for regular care.

If your child should happen to get arrested, as quite a few do—if he’s caught with pot, say, or spray-paints graffiti, or jumps a turnstile—there’s a good chance that the charges can be made to go away, or at least not become part of his permanent record.

Your ex may have run off with your best friend, your apartment may be too small, you may hate your job—but you are still a white-collar, college-educated, middle-class person. And that makes all the difference for your children.

The biggest barrier to educational achievement today is not any of the things the media talk endlessly about: poorly prepared teachers, badly run schools, too many tests, low standards.

It’s child poverty—which, like poverty in general, has just dropped out of the discourse.

The Democrats don’t talk about it, except to wag the finger at deadbeat dads and teen moms, and the media don’t talk about it except in the context of crime or individual triumph. In fact, from the coverage you’d think our current crisis chiefly affected the middle classes—office managers, newly minted lawyers, college grads who have to move back in with their parents—when actually the unemployment rate for people with college degrees is 4.2 percent, which is where it was for all Americans before the recession.

By contrast, for those with only a high school diploma unemployment is 9.4 percent; for high school dropouts it’s 14.2 percent. And those figures measure only those actively looking for work, not the millions who’ve given up or have never held a job (some 16.5 percent of black men over 20). All those women pushed off welfare, called success stories because they got a job as a receptionist or a security guard or a clerk, with supposedly the hope of something better to come? Forget them.

Inconveniently, though, the poor and near poor, whom we don’t care about, come attached to children, for whom we supposedly have some concern. So how are the kids doing?

To read the entire essay click here.

Poverty and Stress

Years ago, an old woman who had lived for many years in a very depressed and neglected neighborhood shared something profound. Something I'll likely never forget.

As we discussed her life and the day-to-day stress of living in poverty, she said, "Larry, we carry our grief in buckets here. Everyone has lost something precious."

The stress of a life caught up in poverty, and all that goes along with that state of living, is something most of us cannot possibly understand.

An essay in The Economist ("I am just a poor boy though my story's seldom told," April 4, 2009) gets at the connection between stress and not just poverty, but the role of stress in the transference of poverty from generation to generation.

Here's how the important report begins:

How poverty passes from generation to generation is now becoming clearer. The answer lies in the effect of stress on two particular parts of the brain.

THAT the children of the poor underachieve in later life, and thus remain poor themselves, is one of the enduring problems of society. Sociologists have studied and described it. Socialists have tried to abolish it by dictatorship and central planning. Liberals have preferred democracy and opportunity. But nobody has truly understood what causes it. Until, perhaps, now.

Read more here.

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Poverty's physiology

Did you see the recent story in USAToday ("Study: Poverty dramatically affects children's brains," December 7, 2008) regarding poor children and the affects of poverty on brain functioning?

Clearly, the evidence is mounting that without specific and determined interventions, poverty and its associated realities remove any real opportunity for low-income children to compete on a "level playing field" when it comes to education. Poverty, especially the long term generational variety, positions poor children far behind middle class children by just about every measure. Challenging poverty directly and investing in efforts to overturn the negative affects of living in poverty for children must become a national priority.

Further, recogniton that many children of the poor learn differently and need the benefit of specific educational techniques and strategies will be necessary in overcoming learning disparities.

Here's part of the report:

A new study finds that certain brain functions of some low-income 9- and 10-year-olds pale in comparison with those of wealthy children and that the difference is almost equivalent to the damage from a stroke.

"It is a similar pattern to what's seen in patients with strokes that have led to lesions in their prefrontal cortex," which controls higher-order thinking and problem solving, says lead researcher Mark Kishiyama, a cognitive psychologist at the University of California-Berkeley. "It suggests that in these kids, prefrontal function is reduced or disrupted in some way."

The study adds to a growing body of evidence that shows how poverty afflicts children's brains. Researchers have long pointed to the ravages of malnutrition, stress, illiteracy and toxic environments in low-income children's lives. Research has shown that the neural systems of poor children develop differently from those of middle-class children, affecting language development and "executive function," or the ability to plan, remember details and pay attention in school.

Such deficiencies are reversible through intensive intervention such as focused lessons and games that encourage children to think out loud or use executive function.

"It's really important for neuroscientists to start to think about the effects of people's experiences on their brain function, and specifically about the effect of people's socioeconomic status," says Martha Farah, director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania.

Among the most studied: differences in language acquisition between low- and middle-income children. The most famous study, from 1995, transcribed conversation between parents and children and found that by age 3, middle-class children had working vocabularies roughly twice the size of poor children's.

Read more from the USA Today story.

We kid ourselves if we believe opportunity is equally distributed in this nation.

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