Another blow against the idea that poverty itself cannot explain the diminished academic performance of poor students

I'm not an expert in educational policy, so I don't have much to say about it. I wrote previously about how it's long been known that poverty is the greatest predictor of student performance, and how parents or teachers need to be scapegoated in order to justify the poverty and inequality that are the real source of the problems in the American education system.

Basically, if poverty and inequality are the real causes of poor student performance, than there is an obligation to alleviate poverty and inequality. But that's a very expensive proposition. What if there was a cheaper, more convenient explanation of poor student achievement? Who can we blame instead?

Poor parents are a popular scapegoat: If poor parents were more involved in their children's lives, impoverished students would be doing just fine in school. If only poor parents had the initiative and desire to exercise the same level of responsibility as rich parents.

Dana Goldstein explains how a major study has just fatally wounded the scapegoating of poor parents:

In the largest-ever study of how parental involvement affects academic achievement, Keith Robinson, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and Angel L. Harris, a sociology professor at Duke, mostly found that it doesn’t. The researchers combed through nearly three decades’ worth of longitudinal surveys of American parents and tracked 63 different measures of parental participation in kids’ academic lives, from helping them with homework, to talking with them about college plans, to volunteering at their schools. In an attempt to show whether the kids of more-involved parents improved over time, the researchers indexed these measures to children’s academic performance, including test scores in reading and math.

What they found surprised them. Most measurable forms of parental involvement seem to yield few academic dividends for kids, or even to backfire—regardless of a parent’s race, class, or level of education.

Crack babies and convenient explanations of poverty

The Philadelphia Inquirer has a story on a 25-year-long longitudinal study of 224 children (110 actually participated for the full 25 years) that set out to show the dangers of uterine crack cocaine exposure to children.  Instead, they wound up showing the dangers of poverty:

At age 4, for instance, the average IQ of the cocaine-exposed children was 79.0 and the average IQ for the nonexposed children was 81.9. Both numbers are well below the average of 90 to 109 for U.S. children in the same age group. When it came to school readiness at age 6, about 25 percent of children in each group scored in the abnormal range on tests for math and letter and word recognition.

"We went looking for the effects of cocaine," Hurt said. But after a time "we began to ask, 'Was there something else going on?' "

While the cocaine-exposed children and a group of nonexposed controls performed about the same on tests, both groups lagged on developmental and intellectual measures compared to the norm. Hurt and her team began to think the "something else" was poverty.

Basically, the study determined that poverty is really bad for children.  It's not hard to think of better headlines for this story (Poverty Bad for Children: Science).

As the children grew, the researchers did many evaluations to tease out environmental factors that could be affecting their development. On the upside, they found that children being raised in a nurturing home - measured by such factors as caregiver warmth and affection and language stimulation - were doing better than kids in a less nurturing home. On the downside, they found that 81 percent of the children had seen someone arrested; 74 percent had heard gunshots; 35 percent had seen someone get shot; and 19 percent had seen a dead body outside - and the kids were only 7 years old at the time. Those children who reported a high exposure to violence were likelier to show signs of depression and anxiety and to have lower self-esteem.

McDonald's sample budget and convenient explanations of poverty

(Updated below)

I can't comment any more thoroughly on the sheer inanity of McDonald's sample monthly budget for minimum wage employees than Annie-Rose Strasser did over at Think Progress.  It's worth reading in full.  But it's also worth noting that I have never seen a better example of the typical underlying assumption of American poverty.

What is most amazing about this budget is that it was put out without any sense of irony.  The people who published this clearly think it is reasonable--why else would they have published it?  And yet, this is the most effective indictment of McDonald's wage policies there could possibly be.  Twenty dollars for health insurance?  Zero dollars for heating?  No money allotted for food?  The only way to make a McDonald's job look like a livable wage is to make absolutely absurd assumptions.  There can be no more effective indictment of McDonald's wage practices than this--try for yourself to make a life out of this; of course you can't.  If McDonald's policies were intentionally malicious, they would never have published this.