Why Can't Any High-Poverty School Become High-Performing?

Submitted by guest bloggers Kathleen Budge and William Parrett ("Tough Questions for Tough Times," October 2009 EL) 

If one school can overcome the powerful and pervasive effects of poverty on student achievement, shouldn't any school be able to do the same? 

Yet the vast majority of high-poverty schools in the United States continue long traditions of underperformance. Calling for dramatic turnarounds, Secretary of Education Duncan has recently targeted some 5,000 schools for immediate attention.

Still, hundreds of other schools offer a compelling testament to success—high-poverty, high-performing schools such as Dayton's Bluff Elementary in St. Paul, Minnesota; Lapwai Elementary on the Nez Perce reservation in Northern Idaho; Port Chester Middle in West Chester County, New York; Granger High in eastern rural Washington; Taft Elementary in Boise, Idaho; and PS 124, a K-8 school in Queens, New York—each with 60-95 percent of their students receiving free or reduced-price lunch. Check them out.

These schools build and maintain their successes by creating positive relationships among staff and students and focusing their work in three primary domains: building leadership capacity; focusing on student and professional learning; and fostering safe, healthy and supportive learning environments. They have also eliminated the all-too-common practices of setting low expectations for low-income children and blaming students or their families for low performance.

More than 30 years ago, EL published an article by Ron Edmonds ("Effective Schools for the Urban Poor," October 1979), the Harvard professor who inspired the effective schools movement. Edmonds wrote,

"How many effective schools would you have to see to be persuaded of the educability of poor children? If your answer is more than one, then I submit that you have reasons of your own for preferring to believe that basic pupil performance derives from family background instead of school response to family background . . . We can, whenever and wherever we choose, successfully teach all children whose schooling is of interest to us." (pp. 22-23)

As budgets constrict, the leaders in these schools maintain their gains by staying focused on their priorities and asking themselves important questions. They view their budgets as moral documents, reflective of their schools' beliefs about the conditions necessary to gain and sustain success. The economic downturn and the recent passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act confront many education leaders with the confounding paradox of managing both recession-driven budget cuts and new stimulus funding. In tough times like these, we should learn from the leaders and staff in high-poverty, high-performing schools. And we should heed Edmonds's words: "We can, whenever and wherever we choose, successfully teach all children whose schooling is of interest to us."

So what's getting in our way? And whose interests are we serving?