[Header Photo by James Lee on Unsplash]
I am the son of aspirational working-class parents who grew up themselves in the aspirational 1950s.
My maternal grandparents for most of my life lived in little more than a shack with a wood-burning stove for heat and an outhouse. By comparison, my paternal grandparents were working-class themselves as my father’s father ran a gas station in our hometown.
By the time I was 38, I had achieved a doctorate, and then a few years later, I moved from teaching high school in my hometown to being a professor at a selective university where most students are from a social class I have almost no context for understanding.
In almost all ways, I am an extreme outlier among other people having been born into poverty or working-class homes.
My achievements are not the only ways in which I am an outlier since my journey through many years of formal education also allowed me to set aside the “myths that deform us” [1]—specifically the belief in rugged individualism and bootstrapping that are the basis of the American Dream.
While I am vividly aware that my education (and my parents’ sacrifices for that education) saved my life intellectually and materially, that education also allowed me to recognize that my personal story and my status as an extreme outlier do not prove that everyone from a similar background should or can rise above those beginnings.
That’s the paradox of the poverty trap and the role of formal education in the US.
So when I made the following post on Twitter (X), I was not surprised by the many ideological responses that resist the wealth of evidence behind the comment:
I was very careful to choose “perform academically” (and not “learn”) because I am addressing the norm of formal schooling in the US over the past 40 years: Schools, teachers, and students are primarily and substantially labeled, sorted, and judged based on test scores of students (what I mean by “perform academically”).
Let’s start there with research from 2024 (that replicated decades of similar studies):
Because many commercially prepared standardized tests of mathematics require large amounts of reading, student background knowledge casts a large shadow over the results because of its influence on reading comprehension skills derived in part from human and social capital. Background knowledge influences students’ ability to comprehend test questions and use their existing knowledge to successfully answer questions or generate answers.
…Almost 63% of the variance in test performance was explained by social capital family income variables that influence the development of background knowledge. Background knowledge is a known predictor of standardized test results. Family income variables are immutable by schools. Only public policies, outside the control of school personnel, can influence family income.
In general students who live in poverty perform significantly lower on standardized testing that students from more affluent backgrounds.
Further, unlike my own personal story, despite access to public education, more people remain in the social class of their birth than not; in short, social mobility in the US has been decreasing for decades.
Despite the cultural beliefs to the contrary, education in the US is not the great equalizer.
In fact, advanced education is often merely a marker for the affluence of people who would have remained affluent with or without the education.
The double paradox here is that if we in the US would set aside those “myths that deform us,” formal education could, in fact, become the great equalizer—but not on its own.
First, the “no excuses” approach education now embraces (students and teachers must not use poverty as an excuse) is both dehumanizing and cruel since it demands that children somehow set aside the negative consequences of lives they did not choose and cannot change (and lives that their families cannot in general change either).
“No excuses” approaches are deficit ideologies that center the failures in the children and not the systemic forces that are reflected in those students’ academic performances (test data). The result is seeing education as a way to “fix” children instead of addressing social inequity.
Evidence shows that living in poverty reduces cognitive function the same as being sleep deprived, and thus, demanding that children in poverty simply perform the same academically in our schools while refusing to address the poverty and inequity of their lives (and too often of their schooling) is both dehumanizing and unrealistic.
Here is an analogy of what I mean.
When people discovered the dangers to children of lead-based paint, the current approach in education (fix the child and not the systemic poverty) would have meant that we simply taught children not to eat lead paint
However, that isn’t what we did. We of course did teach children not to eat lead paint, but we also removed lead from paint.
Today’s educational ideology is only focusing on our students (don’t eat the paint), but we refuse to address the larger systemic burdens (in effect, saying there is nothing we can do about lead in paint).
Absolutely no one is arguing that since poverty and inequity are the overwhelming causal factors in student achievement that we should throw up our hands and do nothing.
However, most people are saying we cannot do anything about poverty so let’s just fix the children (for example, the discredited work of John Hattie and Ruby Payne represents how that ideology is embraced by mainstream education).
Continuing to insist that simply finding the right curriculum and instruction, focusing only on in-school education reform, or identifying the “miracle” schools (so-called “high-flying” schools with high poverty and high achievement) [2] to scale up is not only misguided but also a disservice to children and our society.
Wanting something to be true doesn’t make it so.
Yes, in the US we want to believe our democracy is a meritocracy, we want to believe in the rugged individual, we want to trust in bootstrapping.
And we want to believe that a rising tide lifts all boats; however, we also want to pretend that some people have no boats—and some insist that is their own fault (even children).
Demanding that every child born into poverty must be exceptional is among the cruelest demands a culture can make. That cruelty is magnified by a wealthy society that throws up its collective hands and declares there simply is nothing we can do about poverty, even for children.
I am convinced by the evidence that a different ideology must guide us, one embraced by Martin Luther King Jr.: “We are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished.”
And as I showed with how we addressed the dangers of lead paint, we must work to eradicate poverty and simultaneously choose equitable and humane ways to offer children from inequitable backgrounds the greatest opportunities to learn possible—while not blaming them for the lives they did not choose or create.
[1] “[A]s we put into practice an education that critically provokes the learner’s consciousness, we are necessarily working against myths that deform us. As we confront such myths, we also face the dominant power because those myths are nothing but the expression of this power, of its ideology.” (Freire, 2005, p. 75)
Freire, P. (2005). Teachers as cultural workers: Letters to those who dare to teach (D. Macedo, D. Koike, & A. Oliveira, Trans.). Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
[2] Thomas, P.L. (2016). Miracle schools or political scam? In W.J. Mathis & T.M. Trujillo, Learning from the Federal Market-Based Reforms: Lessons for ESSA. Charlotte, NC: IAP.
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 