Cover Story

No More 'Poor'

How can we help low-income students achieve? Raleigh's answer: Don't isolate them.

Math teacher Laura Brown leaves home at 6:15 a.m. and heads for Carnage Middle School in Raleigh, North Carolina. She drives past downtown and turns onto a street lined with tiny, wood-frame houses with loose shingles and sagging roofs. Many are boarded up.

Thousands of educators work in poverty-stricken neighborhoods, and some feel a certain level of dread as they contemplate another day battling social problems beyond their control.
But not Laura Brown. As she walks into her classroom and straightens out the desks for her first group of eighth grade students, she's upbeat and excited.

"You never know what's going to happen," she says. "It's challenging, but great things happen in my classroom."
Wake County, which includes Raleigh and its suburbs, is one of the few school districts in America working to boost the achievement of low-income students by making their schools more middle class. How? With an infusion of middle-class students into their schools.

A third of the students at Carnage come, voluntarily, from middle-class neighborhoods where the typical family's problems are more manageable and the students come to school expecting, and expected, to do well.

Carnage, a magnet school, attracts them with a program for academically gifted children, a big drama program, dance, a school television station-"anything they want," says Brown.
Every inner-city school in Raleigh has magnet programs.
Raleigh teachers say the strategy is working. Many low-income students pick up higher expectations. Many more affluent students learn about the world around them, while maintaining their own academic progress.

Carnage language arts teacher Peggy Credle says all students benefit from mixing. In her cooperative learning groups, she says "The more academically able can grow by explaining what they have learned. And sometimes the less able students grasp a concept better from another student."

Credle, like Brown, reports little friction between the bused-in students and those from the neighborhood. While many Carnage neighborhood children benefit from the special programs and from contact with students from the suburbs, others from this low-income area are bused to magnet schools outside the city.
Many go to Durant Road Middle School, attracted by its year-round school calendar. Some wind up in Peggy Larson's English class.

As Larson's students discuss Alfred Noyes' poem "The Highwayman," it's hard to see who are the locals and who just spent more than half an hour on a bus. Larson herself says she can't tell without looking at the student records.

She used to teach in another Wake County school where low-income and middle-class students were much more separate. The reason Durant is different, she thinks, is that the Durant students' parents choose to send their children there, so they feel more involved in their children's education. At the other school, low-income students were assigned.

Durant uses an unusual hook to pull parents in. Instead of having teachers lead parent conferences, students themselves go over their work, with teachers facilitating. Larson says 80 to 90 percent of parents show up, even among city parents who must drive a long way.

Not many school districts are mixing the social classes to improve low-income students' achievement, but a high-powered task force headed by former Connecticut Governor and Senator Lowell Weicker, Jr. (see Q & A, above) is looking for ways to promote this strategy.

The task force members include NEA member Judi Sikes, a teacher from Louisville, Kentucky.

In 1998, Sikes served on a Jefferson County Teachers Association committee looking for ways to raise achievement in low-income schools. They surveyed teachers and looked at schools in other communities, and concluded that the key was to avoid having all the low-income children together in the same schools.

The teachers told school officials that children teach each other, and every school needs a critical mass of motivated learners, who are more likely to come from families that aren't struggling in poverty.

"Of course, we have good students who live in low socioeconomic circumstances," says Sikes. "But many of them qualify for advanced placement, and if your school doesn't have that, they're gone."

Jefferson County school officials, however, had little interest in breaking such new ground.

There are two major barriers: First, many middle- and upper-income parents fear that their children's achievement will suffer if they go to school with low-income children. And second, the distances can make for very long bus rides.

For both reasons, 16 of Wake County's 120 schools don't meet the district's target: a maximum of 40 percent of the students in each school eligible for free or reduced-price lunches, and no more than 25 percent scoring below grade level.

But Carnage is one of many Raleigh schools that do successfully attract a wide range of students. As a result, teachers like Laura Brown feel their work is a challenge, not a nightmare.

Brown has been a teacher for three years. "At the end of my first year," she recalls, "I thought I would never be able to do this and I talked about leaving. My second year, I found I could handle it."
And now, she says, "I believe everyone's life has a purpose. I'm supposed to be here." 4
-Alain Jehlen

Resources

• The NEA Priority Schools Resource Guide offers practical advice for turning around schools where greater resources are needed to raise student achievement. The guide is posted at www.nea.org/issues/lowperf/priorityschools/. Many other relevant NEA resources are at ww.nea.org/issues/lowperf/resources.html.
  
  
• Much of the NEA's Priority Schools Initiative is based on research found in Closing the Achieve-ment Gap, published by the Association for Super-vision and Curriculum Development, $20.95 on the Web at http://shop.ascd.org. Order by phone at 800/933-2723.
  
  
• Order All Together Now by Richard Kahlenberg, $29.95 on the Brookings Institution Web site at www.brook.edu/press/online_search.htm.
  
  
• Excerpts from Kahlenberg's book were published by The Washington Monthly in December 2000 and are available online at www.washingtonmonthly. com/features/2000/0012.kahlenberg.html.
  
  
• Equality and Education, a Century Foundation Web site at www.equaleducation.org/, features information and ideas about mixing social classes to improve achievement, especially in the section called "Integration." This site also has links to information on the Century Foundation's Task Force on Promoting Quality and Integration in Public Schools, headed by Lowell Weicker, Jr.
  
  
• E-mail Raleigh's Laura Brown at lmbrown@wcpss.net, and La Crosse's Barbara Schultz at bschultz@mail.sdlax.k12.wi.us.

New Pioneers In America's Heartland

A small city takes on a bold experiment
to mix students by income level.

Residents of La Crosse, Wisconsin, a city of 50,000 on the Mississippi River, were surprised when the national media showed up in 1991. One told a San Francisco reporter, "There's nothing here. Just bored white people."

But the journalists had not lost their way. La Crosse was the site of a pioneering and controversial-effort to help low-income children achieve.

The plan, which originated with teachers, was to spread the city's low-income students among many schools instead of leaving them concentrated in a few.

Barbara Schultz, a guidance counselor who led the La Crosse Education Associa-tion at the time, says teachers at the low-income schools were dealing with so many problems, "they didn't have enough time to actually do the teaching."

At one school, more than half of the children moved in or out each year because their parents didn't have steady jobs. Some children spoke English poorly. Large numbers of Hmong immigrants had settled in La Crosse during the previous decade.

Two new schools were about to open, so district lines had to be redrawn anyway. Teachers proposed that they be drawn so that all schools had a mix of rich and poor.

The superintendent and school board got behind the plan, but it quickly met strong opposition, mostly from wealthier parents.
Actually, the school drama that gripped La Crosse from 1991 to 1993 was a sequel. In 1980, La Crosse reassigned students from affluent Central High School to Logan High, which had been a blue-collar school with an inferior academic program. The move sparked impassioned resistance, but the plan went ahead. Logan was quickly up-graded. The result: higher achievement for the low-income students with no loss for the wealthier students who joined them.

So when educators started talking about a similar move in the elementary schools, they had a successful precedent. The superintendent was the same person who had led the high school reform, and the school board president was a surgeon who was proud that his son was one of the first doctor's sons to go to Logan.

The board approved the changes, but this new plan provoked even more opposition than high school integration had, and not all of it was due to class or racial prejudice. Some parents just didn't want their children moved, or wanted them close to home.
In the uproar, four board members were ousted in a dramatic recall election.

But the new board, taking office in July, de-cided it was too late to repeal the plan totally. Instead, they allowed parents to transfer children back to their original schools-and some did. Two schools remained low-income.

Still, the La Crosse schools opened that autumn much more integrated than when they had closed in the spring. And the sky didn't fall in. In fact, most people liked the change. News reporters discovered that children were a lot more adaptable than their parents.

In the next election, three newcomers who had stormed in to stop the program were thrown out. The top vote-getter across the city was a Hmong community leader.

Today, says Schultz, at the schools with more balance between rich and poor, everyone is benefiting. Many students with limited English are advancing rapidly. And the other children are learning that the world is bigger than their neighborhoods.
This year, a new community task force is seeking ways to improve the social class balance in La Crosse schools.

Low-Income Children Do Better In Middle-Class

Do students from low-income families achieve more in schools where most of their classmates are not poor?
Definitely, says Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and a leading proponent of this approach to reducing the achievement gap between affluent and low-income children. In his book All Together Now, Kahlenberg describes a long line of research that consistently supports his conclusion.
In one study, involving 60,000 Minne-sota children, the researchers found that "the degree to which poor children are surrounded by other poor children … has as strong an effect on their achievement as their own poverty."

Another study showed the long-term effects of attending schools where most children are poor. Low-income children in these schools were three times more likely to become low-income adults than poor children who had wealthier classmates.
These findings are consistent with what every educator and parent knows: Children are influenced by their friends.
But doesn't it follow then that the achievement of wealthier students will suffer if they are in classes with low-income children? This fear is perhaps the biggest source of opposition to proposals for mixing middle- and low-income students. Even parents with strong social consciences don't want to sacrifice their children's futures for the sake of other people's children.

Kahlenberg says they needn't worry. He cites several major studies that found that the problems children of poverty bring to school do not affect their affluent classmates if the school remains mostly middle class. This research suggests that the middle-class majority forms the school culture and other students join in.
Kathlenberg is against putting a few middle-income children into a school that remains mostly low-income, because then their achievement is likely to decline.
"So long as a majority of the students are middle class," he says, "the middle- class kids are going to do fine."

Charting A New Course For Children Of Poverty

Lowell Weicker, Jr. was a senator from Connecticut from 1971 to 1989 and governor from 1991 to 1995. He started as a Repub-lican but switched to Independent, establishing a reputation as a maverick willing to stake out tough positions on issues he felt were important such as racial integration and taxes.
Weicker now heads a task force of people from the worlds of politics and education looking for ways to reduce the isolation of children from different social classes in our schools.

How can your task force promote social class integration?
I asked myself the same thing as we started: Is there an answer? Or are we all just sitting here beating our chops to no end?
We realize that anything we suggest should have a chance to succeed.

I think there will be some element of public school choice. We're not for a coercive solution.

We're trying to create incentives for middle-class families to choose schools with a broad constituency, like the one in Bridgeport, Connecticut where the marine sciences are featured.
Schools could feature computers, or arts-they could feature a thousand different things that have an attraction and will get people to say, "Okay, granted my kid's going to be seeing more diversity than he's seen in the past. On the other hand, he's going to see more in the way of educational subjects."

Are you optimistic? Do you think in 20 years the situation will be better?

When I was governor, we were dealing with problems of racial isolation. It was amazing how everybody had an abundance of ideas that percolated right from the ground up, as to what could be done about it.

After I left, the legislature figured, "This is a pretty tough subject, so let's wash our hands of it and not really do much of anything."
If you leave it to the politicians, I'm not optimistic. If the American people are allowed to express themselves on choice and how you achieve it, I'm optimistic.

You have seven sons. Would you have put them in a school that had 40 percent low-income students?

Absolutely. Two of my sons had that experience. I want my children educated in a diverse setting. That's the world.
What's the purpose of education? It isn't just to go through a series of tests. It's to prepare people for the world. 4