I don’t see why we should complain about, or try to get rid [poverty], unless it is because it creates deficits [ie. destructive habits, especially culturally mediated ones]

and emphasise that I think people on the Left, especially in the US, have very good reasons for being wary of such ‘deficit’ arguments.

s/b ‘what Harry seems to assume’, cf. #52

It seems like you have just ignored most of the points made above.

1) If you mean deficit in a common sense way, then ‘unfairness’ appears to involve a ‘deficit’ (someone has got less than what he should have got) but you can have moral reasons for objecting to something that don’t involve fairness, contrary to Harry’s claim.

2) If you mean deficit in the sense in which objectors to the ‘deficit model’ appear to use it—roughly, a set of destructive personal dispositions—then it is perfectly consistent to argue both that poverty is unfair on the poor and that it does not create ‘deficits’.

3) Opponents of the ‘deficit model’ do not in fact argue this, but that such ‘deficits’ are over-emphasised.

Sure, you need to be worried about the wrong people co-opting your poverty creates deficits movement. But it seems really easy to convincingly argue the poverty creates deficits and those deficits are why things are unfair for poor people.

The trick is explaining to people why you can’t blame poor people for having a culture that doesn’t value education (or whatever deficit it is). B/c the default human instinct is to do so, even though when examined in the light of logic, it doesn’t make any sense.

The movement we need is one that convincingly argues and demonstrates that you can’t blame poor people for these deficits. I mean, really. If a poor black kid grows up in inner-city Baltimore and the life he experiences prevents him from valuing education… how is this his fault? I think once people start thinking more about this, they will eventually realize it doesn’t make sense. At least, that’s how I see it.

I take it that it is supposed to refer to approaches to poverty that focus on the destructive habits developed by individuals. But then your claim that—
If you reject the idea that poverty, or inequality, creates deficits… I just don’t see what the moral reasons are for wanting to create a more equal, poverty-free, social environment.

seems very odd. I’d have thought there are plenty of obvious moral reasons why the levels of poverty and inequality we see today are unacceptable quite apart from any effect they have on the individual dispositions of the poor. Do you really not think so?

I’m not really clear what you mean in this post by ‘deficit’. But if you mean that there is some scale, on which poor people get a lower value than rich people, and you can’t see why we should complain about poverty unless it has this effect, then I don’t think this follows.

That’s because someone could believe that the existence of inequality damages all of us, rich and poor alike, and we would all benefit from its removal, without it necessarily being possible or desirable to make comparisons in the current state of affairs about who is worse off than who. This might involve a view of human flourishing that was somewhat at odds with the dominant assumptions of our culture.

Now I’m not saying I see things this way, I’m just pointing out that I think that your inference—that people who don’t see poverty as a ‘deficit’ can have no reason to care about poverty—seems too quick.

Actually I would say that this is a problem for all schools. It’s just that kids from richer home backgrounds typically are better placed for dealing with poor instruction so their strong cognitive skills mask out poor instruction.

And it’s not just ambiguity, it’s a million and one details. Ambiguity is just one example. Another example – if you are going to use tests as feedback to improve your lesson plan you need valid and reliable tests. Which are difficult to write. I have serious doubts about the validity and reliability of many tests in the USA as the questions are not released publicly.

A second example – are inexperienced teachers supported by the administration in dealing with difficult student behaviours? You’d think this would be obvious, basic stuff, but I hear so many reports of even brand-new first year teachers being left to sink or swim!

As far as I can tell, teaching is really a profession because the details are extremely important and can make or break an enterprise, regardless of the big ideas animating it. Good quality education is really demanding of its practitioners.

It’s unfortunate that through no fault of its own, DI implicitly plays into a different debate re: whether teaching, esp. teaching high poverty, often brown kids, should be a respected, highly skilled, semi-autonomous profession, or a low-status, low-skill, dependent trade. Would you like fries with that? Your call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes. Hello-my-name-is-Tammy-what-seems-to-be-the-problem.

I know what you mean. Commentators seem to often confuse “reading a script” with low-skilled, low-status, totally ignoring that professional actors are certainly not low-skilled. And of course, what a teacher in a DI classroom is doing is even more complex than what an actor does, as the teacher is adjusting the lessons on the fly in response to feedback. And an actor on tour may perform the same play four times a week, while the teacher has a new lesson each day.

I’m from an engineering background, and so I’m used to the notion of minimmising our mental burdens, and turning as much work as possible into routine stuff, so we can focus our minds on the problems that haven’t been solved yet.

As for tutition at the elite public schools – I am rather skeptical about how much of the tuition at those elite schools buys a better education, as opposed to the social benefits of mixing with a lot of other rich kids. There’s been a bit of research done in NZ that suggested that they don’t provide much value-added educationally, but sadly I can’t find that online.

I think a deficit model is when the observer decides it’s the poor people’s own damn fault. It’s the folk epistemology that governs our politics. Observing the obvious truth that poverty has bad consequences is not the same thing—so I, too, absolve thee.

Indeed. So it comes down to whether you think one of the major problems for schools serving impoverished and often mainstream-isolated populations is an excess of ambiguity in instruction.

“So what do you think of Direct Instruction”

I think (lowercase) direct instruction is one important tool in the teacher’s toolkit. (Upper case) Direct Instruction – well, I’ve never gotten around to reading all the research (maybe I should be spending less time blogcommenting?), but there certainly are some interesting aspects – the cycle of testing and refinement, for example – that if nothing else suggest useful methods.

(It’s unfortunate that through no fault of its own, DI implicitly plays into a different debate re: whether teaching, esp. teaching high poverty, often brown kids, should be a respected, highly skilled, semi-autonomous profession, or a low-status, low-skill, dependent trade. Would you like fries with that? Your call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes. Hello-my-name-is-Tammy-what-seems-to-be-the-problem.)

It’s odd that what might seem a somewhat dull and specialized subject – obscure curriculum details – tends to attract very strong feelings, sometimes even in people with no formal connection or training in the field. Whole Language vs. Phonics (back in the day), Everyday Math-style programs vs. traditional back to basics, etc., etc. – each one seems to attract random acolytes who push their newfound method as the One Best Way, often to the exclusion of all other considerations. Very odd.

Re: DC private schools: back in ‘06, the Washington Post reported that “Tuition at some of the region’s elite private schools will exceed $26,000 this fall, ” Now, of course, we’re talking elite private schools – that’s certainly not the average tuition. (And if your factor in external spending and its equivalents, the amount being invested in these privileged tykes is truly remarkable.) For example, the article also cited a Catholic school where tuition was jumping from $4,900 to $5,390 – but of course, Catholic schools certainly don’t depend mainly on tuition, with much of the money coming from the arch/diocese, not to mention various non-generalizable costcutting strategies (in fact, that’s why catholic schools are in so much trouble in many places – a shrinking collection plate (through movement or loss of parish population), no longer staffed by nuns, etc.)

One of the things with funding high-poverty schools is that a moment’s thought reveals that they’ll need to be funded rather better than high-privilege schools, if we’re going for some sort of rough equality of opportunity.

$24,000 per pupil spending in Washington D.C public schools, versus ~$14,000 per pupil at the average private school. For a class of 20 students, which seems low, that’s an extra $200,000 per year to deal with all their additional problems caused by poverty.

Now, obviously that’s not the end of the story; what’s funded has to be both efficient and effective,to build as much as possible on children’s strengths and capabilities, and- given public attitudes towards funding poor/brown children’s education – any way to reasonably do more with less is very, very important.

So what do you think of Direct Instruction – the curriculum programme that came out best in Project Followthrough in terms of educating kids from poor schools? (Project Followthrough was an effort to work out the most effective way of teaching kids in poor schools. Direct Instruction did best in terms of tests not merely of basic skills, but of cognitive skills, and affective skills (self-esteem and a sense of self-control).
http://www.projectpro.com/ICR/Research/DI/Summary.htm

Project Followthrough’s curriculums were tried on the schools you are talking about, the ones with students that didn’t have breakfast, and there’s gunfire in the streets, and no formal enrichment programmes at home. The developer of Direct Instruction started off with a curriculum with a first reading lesson that called for the kids to touch the letters as the teacher said them. Shortly he realised he needed a “zeroth” lesson for the kids who didn’t know what the word ‘touch’ meant. And this wasn’t kids who were foreign immigrants, these were kids with English as their only language, who were arriving at school not knowing the meaning of the word ‘touch’.

I agree that there is a minimum of money that is needed to support educational achievement. As far as I can tell though, schools in the western world are way above that, judging by the lack of correlation between educational spending and outcomes. And when I look at what happens in a programme like Direct Instruction, the lack of correlation between educational outcomes and spending makes sense. What happens in Direct Instruction is not any magic bullet, but is instead a lot of focus on details. For example lessons are written to remove ambiguities on the basis that if a teacher says something that can be intepreted two ways, Murphy’s law will kick in and half the kids in the class will pick the wrong intepretation, and get confused. No amount of money would, by itself, make a school strive to eliminate all the ambiguities from its teaching.

Honey, did you read the links you sent?

The first one is just a list of per capita spending with no information about educational achievement. The second, in the very first page of the executive summary, says:

The information, analysis, and measurements in this report confirm there is no evident correlation between pupil-to-teacher ratios, spending per pupil, and teacher salaries on the one hand, and educational achievement as measured by various standardized test scores, on the other.

The links you provided show absolutely no support for your statement that there is a strong correlation between achievement and the amount of money devoted to it.

Whatever my hangup about Washington D.C., at least I can read.