Linking Poverty And Educational Achievement

(Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO)

“The IMPACT model for evaluating teacher performance is very numerically based,” says Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy in a recent interview with journalist and social activist Pete Tucker. “It fails to recognize the artistry involved in teaching which cannot be captured on some statistical test,” he said. In the interview, Milloy questioned whether some of the recent gains in school reform and student achievement are the result of gentrification. “The city lost 12,000 affordable homes and apartments last year. Somehow 4000 students have just disappeared out of the school system. And in those schools, where most of these students came from, if they were poor, yeah, test scores did do a little blip up, as you would expect when you lose poor people out of the system. That doesn’t mean that you’re educating them. It means that they’re just not there to bring your test scores down.” Tucker argues that, unlike Fenty, Rhee and the Post, Milloy has insisted on linking poverty and educational achievement. “No matter how great a teacher may be, there’s no way you can educate a child who is not in class,” says Milloy. “It’s pretty hard to get a girl to perform well on a test if she’s keeping some painful secret about being pregnant or abused, for example.” Click here to listen to the full interview on Tucker’s website, The Fight Back. – photo: thousands of area students, community supporters and union members rallied at Freedom Plaza to demand respect for District teachers in October, 2009; photo by Adam Wright