Big Lies of Education: Poverty Is an Excuse

George W. Bush built his path to the presidency on education reform, the discredited Texas “miracle,” and manufacturing his persona as a kinder and gentler conservative. One of his most effective rhetorical flourishes was evoking the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”

He spoke into cultural mythologies in the US that embrace bootstrapping and claim a rising tide lifts all boats—mythologies uncritically embraced by mainstream media.

During the Bush era of education reform in the 1990s and 2000s, charter schools increasingly received bipartisan support, notably under the Barack Obama administration.

The darling of that charter school movement was KIPP charter schools that popularized “no excuses” education.

More recently, declaring poverty an excuse in education was established in the “science of reading” manufactured reading crisis: “One of the excuses educators have long offered to explain America’s poor reading performance is poverty” (Emily Hanford, Hard Words).

While Hanford’s misleading and false story caught fire, fueling another reading crisis and state-by-state dismantling of reading instruction, Gerald Coles‘s careful and evidence-based discrediting of Hanford’s claims went mostly unacknowledged:

Can poverty and inequality be taken “out of the equation” in creating literacy and academic success? From Rudolf Flesch onward, the deplorable, unsubstantiated, simple-minded answer is supposed to be “yes, if a phonics-and-reading-skills-heavy early-reading program is employed.” However, as the current rendition reveals, just as over the past 60 years, the answer once again is “no, that’s not why Johnny can’t read.”
Cryonic Phonics

Decades of research, notably including the evidence created by the value-added methods of teacher education under Obama, confirm Coles, not Hanford or Bush or KIPP.

For example, consider the overwhelming evidence that poverty and out-of-school factors are causally linked to at least 60% of measurable student achievement: