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Documentary focused on an eight year old boy and his family in rural Nova Scotia

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In this personal documentary, award-winning photographer and filmmaker Nance Ackerman invites us into the lives of a determined family for a profound experience of child poverty in one of the richest countries in the world. 20 years after the House of Commons promised to eliminate poverty among Canadian children, 8-year-old Isaiah is trying hard to grow up healthy, smart and well adjusted despite the odds stacked against him. Isaiah knows he's been categorized as "less fortunate," and his short life has seen more than his share of social workers, food banks and police interventions. His parents struggle to overcome a legacy of stereotypes, abuse and dysfunction. More than anything, they want Isaiah and his siblings to have access to opportunities they never had. Ackerman spent 2 years with Isaiah and his family. As her portrait of the family unfolds with the help of Isaiah's creative input, curiosity and zest for life, so do Ackerman's own feelings about the responsibilities of Canadians to raise all children as our best investment in the nation's future.

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In this personal documentary, award-winning photographer and filmmaker Nance Ackerman invites us into the lives of a determined family for a profound experience of child poverty in one of the richest countries in the world.

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Beginning again with Marginalized Parents

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Beginning again with Marginalized Parents

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Beginning Again With Marginalized Parents (2)

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April 2008 | Volume 65 | Number 7
Poverty and Learning Pages 48-52

Ruby Payne

Students from families with little formal education often learn rules about how to speak, behave, and acquire knowledge that conflict with how learning happens in school. They also often come to school with less background knowledge and fewer family supports. Formal schooling, therefore, may present challenges to students living in poverty. Teachers need to recognize these challenges and help students overcome them. In my work consulting with schools that serve a large population of students living in poverty, I have found nine interventions particularly helpful in raising achievement for low-income students.

1. Build Relationships of Respect

James Comer (1995) puts it well: "No significant learning occurs without a significant relationship." Building a respectful relationship doesn't mean becoming the student's buddy. It means that teachers both insist on high-quality work and offer support. When my colleagues and I interviewed high school students in 1998 about what actions show that a teacher has respect for them, students identified the following:

The teacher calls me by my name.

The teacher answers my questions.

The teacher talks to me respectfully.

The teacher notices me and says "Hi."

The teacher helps me when I need help.

The nonverbal signals a teacher sends are a key part of showing respect. I have found that when students feel they have been "dissed" by a teacher, they almost always point to nonverbals, rather than words, as the sign of disrespect. Nonverbal signals communicate judgment, and students can sense when a teacher's intent is to judge them rather than to offer support. Although it's hard to be conscious of nonverbal signals at times, one way to sense how you're coming across is to deeply question your intent. Your gestures and tone will likely reflect that intent.

2. Make Beginning Learning Relational

When an individual is learning something new, learning should happen in a supportive context. Teachers should help all students feel part of a collaborative culture. Intervene if you see an elementary student always playing alone at recess or a middle or high school student eating lunch alone. Assign any new student a buddy immediately and ensure that each student is involved with at least one extracurricular group at lunch or after school. Whenever possible, introduce new learning through paired assignments or cooperative groups.

3. Teach Students to Speak in Formal Register

Dutch linguist Martin Joos (1972) found that every language in the world includes five registers, or levels of formality: frozen, formal, consultative, casual, and intimate (see fig. 1, p. 51). Both school and work operate at the consultative level (which mixes formal and casual speech) and the formal level (which uses precise word choice and syntax). All people use the casual and intimate registers with friends, but students from families with little formal education may default to these registers. Researchers have found that the more generations a person lives in poverty, the less formal the register that person uses, with the exception of people from a strong religious background, who frequently encounter formal religious texts (Montana-Harmon, 1991). Hart and Risley's (1995) study of 42 families indicated that children living in families receiving welfare heard approximately 10 million words by age three, whereas children in families in which parents were classified as professional heard approximately 30 million words in the same period. Teachers conduct most tests through formal register, which puts poor students at a disadvantage. Teachers should address this issue openly and help students learn to communicate through consultative and formal registers. Some students may object that formal register is "white talk"; we tell them it's "money talk."

Have students practice translating phrases from casual into formal register. For example, a student I worked with was sent to the office because he had told his teacher that something "sucked." When I asked him to translate that phrase into formal register, he said, "There is no longer joy in this activity." Teachers should use consultative language (a mix of formal and casual) to build relationships and use formal register to teach content, providing additional explanation in consultative register.

4. Assess Each Student's Resources

One way to define poverty and wealth is in terms of the degree to which we have access to the following eight resources.

Financial: Money to purchase goods and services.

Emotional: The ability to control emotional responses, particularly to negative situations, without engaging in self-destructive behavior. This internal resource shows itself through stamina, perseverance, and good decision making.

Mental: The mental abilities and acquired skills (such as reading, writing, and computing) needed for daily life.

Spiritual: Some belief in a divine purpose and guidance.

Physical: Good physical health and mobility.

Support systems: Friends, family, and resource people who are available in times of need.

Relationships and role models: Frequent contact with adults who are appropriate role models, who nurture the child, and who do not engage in self-destructive behavior.

Knowledge of unspoken rules: Knowing the unspoken norms and habits of a group.

School success, as it's currently defined, requires a huge amount of resources that schools don't necessarily provide. Teachers need to be aware that many students identified as "at risk" lack these outside resources. Interventions that require students to draw on resources they do not possess will not work. For example, many students in households characterized by generational poverty have a very limited support system. If such a student isn't completing homework, telling that student's parent, who is working two jobs, to make sure the student does his or her homework isn't going to be effective. But if the school provides a time and place before school, after school, or during lunch for the student to complete homework, that intervention will be more successful.

5. Teach the Hidden Rules of School

People need to know different rules and behaviors to survive in different environments. The actions and attitudes that help a student learn and thrive in a low-income community often clash with those that help one get ahead in school. For example, when adult family members have little formal schooling, the student's environment may be unpredictable. Having reactive skills might be particularly important. These skills may be counterproductive in school, where a learner must plan ahead, rather than react, to succeed. If laughter is often used to lessen conflict in a student's community, that student may laugh when being disciplined. Such behavior is considered disrespectful in school and may anger teachers and administrators.

Educators often tell students that the rules they come to school with aren't valuable anywhere. That isn't true, and students know it. For example, to survive in many high-poverty neighborhoods, young people have to be able to fight physically if challenged-or have someone fight for them. But if you fight in school, you're usually told to leave.

The simple way to deal with this clash of norms is to teach students two sets of rules. I frequently say to students,

You don't use the same set of rules in basketball that you use in football. It's the same with school and other parts of your life. The rules in school are different from the rules out of school. So let's make a list of the rules in school so we're sure we know them.

6. Monitor Progress and Plan Interventions

One teacher alone cannot address all students' achievement issues. Monitoring and intervening with at-risk kids must be a schoolwide process. Take the following steps:

Chart student performance and disaggregate this data by subgroups and individuals.

Keeping in mind your district's learning standards, determine which content you need to spend the most time on. Bloom (1976) found that the amount of time devoted to a content area makes a substantial difference in how well students learn that content. Set up a collaborative process for teachers to discuss learning standards and make these determinations.

Plan to use the instructional strategies that have the highest payoff for the amount of time needed to do the activity. For example, teaching students to develop questions has a much higher payoff for achievement than completing worksheets.

Use rubrics and benchmark tests to identify how well students are mastering standards; discuss the results.

Identify learning gaps and choose appropriate interventions. Interventions can include scheduling extra instruction time, providing a supportive relationship, and helping students use mental models.

Schedule these activities on the school calendar regularly.

7. Translate the Concrete into the Abstract

To succeed in school, students need to move easily from the concrete to the abstract. For example, a kindergarten teacher may hold up a real apple and tell students to find a drawing of an apple on a given page. Even though the two-dimensional apple on the page doesn't look like the real apple, students come to understand that the drawing represents the apple. In math, students need to understand that a numeral represents a specific number of items.

Teachers can help students become comfortable with the abstract representations characteristic of school by giving them mental models-stories, analogies, or visual representations. Mental models enable the student to make a connection between something concrete he or she understands and a representational idea. For example, in math, one can physically form a square with the number of items represented by any square number. We can teach students this concept quickly by drawing a box with nine Xs in it. The student can visually see that 3 is the square root of 9, because no matter how the student looks at the model, there are 3 X s on each side.

Excellent teachers use mental models all the time, although they may not call them that. I have found that using mental models decreases the amount of time needed to teach and learn a concept.

8. Teach Students How to Ask Questions

When you have asked a student what part of a lesson he or she didn't understand, have you heard the reply, "All of it"? This response may indicate that the student has trouble formulating a specific question. Questions are a principal tool to gain access to information, and knowing how to ask questions yields a huge payoff in achievement (Marzano, 2007). In their research on reading, Palincsar and Brown (1984) found that students who couldn't ask good questions had many academic struggles.

To teach students how to ask questions, I assign pairs of students to read a text and compose multiple-choice questions about it. I give them sentence stems, such as "When ___________ happened, why did __________ do ___________?" Students develop questions using the stems, then come up with four answers to each question, only one of which they consider correct and one of which has to be funny.

9. Forge Relationships with Parents

Many low-income parents are so overwhelmed with surviving daily life that they can't devote time to their children's schooling. Even when time is available, the parent may not know how to support the child's learning.

It is essential to create a welcoming atmosphere at school for parents. Ask yourself these questions about the kind of experience parents have when they enter your building:

How are parents usually greeted? With a smile, a command, a look, or the parent's name?

What is the ratio of educators to parent in meetings? Six educators to one parent? Many parents experience such a situation as being "ganged up on." To avoid this perception, designate a person to greet the parent five minutes before the meeting starts and tell him or her who will be present and what is likely to happen. This is much better than having the parent walk into the room cold. When the meeting is over, have all the educators leave the room (and don't have another obvious consultation in the parking lot). The person who met the parent ahead of time should walk the parent out of the building, ask how he or she is feeling, and find out whether the parent has more questions.

Is the language used in parent meetings understandable, or is it "educationese"?

Are parents often asked to make interventions they do not have the resources to make?

Do parents realize that people at the school care about their children? Parents want to know first whether the school cares about and respects their child. Communicate this message early in the conference. It also helps to say, "We know that you care about your child, or you wouldn't be here."

I recommend doing home visits. Arrange to have a substitute for a particular day and send a letter home to a few parents saying that because teachers always ask parents to come to school, a pair of teachers would like to come by their house, say hello, and bring a gift. The gift should be something small, such as a magnet listing the school's name, phone number, and hours. If a parent wants to have an in-depth talk about the child, schedule a time that's good for both parties to talk further. Schools that have taken this approach, such as East Allen County Schools in Fort Wayne, Indiana, have strengthened the rapport between parents and teachers and lessened discipline referrals.

The Gift of Education

Educators can be a huge gift to students living in poverty. In many instances, education is the tool that gives a child life choices. A teacher or administrator who establishes mutual respect, cares enough to make sure a student knows how to survive school, and gives that student the necessary skills is providing a gift that will keep affecting lives from one generation to the next. Never has it been more important to give students living in poverty this gift.

References

Bloom, B. (1976). Human characteristics and school learning. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Comer, J. (1995). Lecture given at Education Service Center, Region IV. Houston, TX.

Hart, B., & Risley, T. R. (1995). Meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young American children. Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes.

Joos, M. (1972). The styles of the five clocks. In R. D. Abrahams & R. C. Troike (Eds.), Language and cultural diversity in American education (pp. 145-149). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Marzano, R. J. (2007). The art and science of teaching: A comprehensive framework for effective instruction. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Montana-Harmon, M. R. (1991). Discourse features of written Mexican Spanish: Current research in contrastive rhetoric and its implications. Hispania, 74(2), 417-425.

Palincsar, A. S., & Brown, A. L. (1984). The reciprocal teaching of comprehension-fostering and comprehension-monitoring activities. Cognition and Instruction, 1(2), 117-175.

Ruby Payne is President of aha! Process. Her most recent book is Under-resourced Learners: Eight Strategies to Boost Student Achievement (aha! Process, 2008); RubyPayne@msn.com.

KEYWORDS

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April 2008 | Volume 65 | Number 7 Poverty and Learning Pages 48-52 Ruby Payne Students from families with little formal education often learn rules about how to speak, behave, and acquire knowledge that conflict with how learning happens in school. They also often come to school with less background knowledge and fewer family supports.

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Living poverty and literacy learning (2)

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One families struggle to find affordable housing for their children.

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This cinéma vérité documentary is an intimate look inside one family's struggle with poverty. Kay Rice, her partner Karl and 6 children move from town to town in search of affordable housing. Unable to find steady work, the Rices rely on food banks and charity to make ends meet. "I know we're poor, but it's what we are, not who we are," says Kay, as she embarks on a fresh start by fixing up a rundown rental home. When things turn sour with the landlord, Kay fears his veiled threats may mean losing her children and decides to take him to court. In capturing the stark realism of a life with few options, No Place Called Home puts a face on what it means to be poor in Canada.

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This cinéma vérité documentary is an intimate look inside one family's struggle with poverty. Kay Rice, her partner Karl and 6 children move from town to town in search of affordable housing. Unable to find steady work, the Rices rely on food banks and charity to make ends meet.

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Life On Victor Street. 2012. 30 mins. This short documentary depicts an Aboriginal Winnipeg teen's struggle to stay in school and away from local gangs. Filmed ...

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Beating the Streets traces six years in the lives of Marilyn Brighteyes and Lance Marty, two inner-city Aboriginal teenagers struggling to turn their lives around. And it is ...

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James Arnold
Superintendent, Pelham City Public Schools
Pelham City, GA

I must state from the outset that I am innately suspicious of the underlying motives or claimed educational benefits of any initiative-Common Core included-supported by the Governor of Georgia who, having instituted austerity cuts in 2003, led Georgia to be one of the only states to use teacher furloughs to balance the state budget, and who consistently under-funded public education in order to promote quality fishing.

Common Core is a standardized national curriculum. Why is this problematic? From an historical context, a centralized school curriculum serves the goals of totalitarian states. It's also illegal. The General Education Provisions Act, the Department of Education Organization Act, and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act all forbid or protect against the USDOE sticking its nose into the curriculum choices of state and local districts. In spite of these measures, the USDOE has been funding, since 2010, the efforts of two separate testing companies to create a national curriculum for English and mathematics. In reference to the creation of the USDOE in 1979, President Carter said in his State of the Union Address that "states, localities and private institutions will continue to bear the primary responsibility for education." Carter's Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, Joseph Califano, said, " Any set of test questions that the federal government prescribed should surely be suspect as a first step toward a national curriculum [and] a national control of curriculum is a form of national control of ideas."

In spite of the inherent legal issues, Common Core was created through a secretive process, with no thoughts for opportunities for public input, no attempt at the solicitation of public dialogue, no evidence of discussion or critique from experienced educators, no foundational research or pilot programs, and created on the assumption that any standardized national curriculum was better than no standardized national curriculum at all. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, evidently immune to mundane legalities and to legal advice, immediately made acceptance of the Common Core a requirement for approval of state applications for exemptions to the No Child Left Behind Act.

"From where did the Common Core originate?" you might ask. You might, but evidently most states either did not ask, or did not care. The National Governors' Association Center for Best Practice, the Council of Chief State School Officers, Achieve, Inc., ACT, the College Board, the State Higher Education Executive Officers, and the National Association of State Boards of Education all claim credit for developing these standards on behalf of the states. States quickly jumped on the Common Core train before they were aware of exactly what the standards would be or, perhaps more importantly, what they would cost to implement. State DOEs in states that have rushed to adoption are apparently unbothered by the fact they have relegated themselves to the role of administrative agents for a nationalized curriculum, with little or no thought to the cost of implementation.

There are additional issues:

There are few interdisciplinary connections among subjects. Research for many years has shown the positive effects of interdisciplinary connections on student learning and achievement. Innovation is at best ignored and at worst proscribed for teachers and for students. Standards, by their very nature, insist that if anything at all must be excluded because of the constraints of time in class, whether it be the length of the school term or year, or the amount of "material to be covered," it must not, at any cost, be the standards themselves. Creativity will no doubt be the first casualty.

Citizenship, personal development and the promotion of democratic values are ignored. Again I quote Califano: "[A] national curriculum is a form of the national control of ideas." I do not believe for one second that the omission of democratic values was inadvertent or unintentional. I do believe these standards will be, by design and intention, difficult to amend in any way, shape or form.

Georgia was quick to hop on the Common Core bandwagon. The rationale given by the Georgia Department of Education behind this mandated implementation of Common Core was three-fold. The Common Core, they contend, provides:

1. an answer to the problem of student mobility;

2. an opportunity to create an economy of scale, and;

3. an opportunity to compare "apples to apples" when ranking schools, systems, or students between and among states.

Student achievement seems to be missing from that particular continuum. The Common Core, along with the denigration of public school teachers, the constant assertions that public schools are failing miserably, and an insistence on the "market based" (translated to mean "privately owned for-profit educational agencies") approach to education are promulgated by Republicans[1]. "For Republicans and for the benefit of Republicans" fits nicely into the anti-public education agenda of the last decade. None of the reasons presented for the adoption of the Common Core had anything to do with improving achievement but had everything to do with flushing public education down the tubes until the public gives up, throws its collective hands into the air, and consents to pay for the private education of the privileged few. The abandonment of public education to its own financial devices will serve to maintain the traditional lifeline of the uneducated for those who depend upon them for labor, for as long as possible. Public education can only do more with less for so long. Just for the record, I find it personally difficult to believe that the minority parents who make up the majority of the 93% or so of students in public education have not seen that attack directed toward the education of their own children. Go figure.

Adopting a curriculum to solve societal mobility issues is like measuring flour with a yardstick; it defies credibility, and even the rather relaxed laws of common sense. There are easier solutions. "Economies of scale" mean little when our legislature continues to underfund public education. When you can't afford textbooks, the opportunity to not buy new ones at a cheaper price is hardly an advantage. It is rather troubling to note the number of educational "reforms" that ignore educational research, as if invoking the magic word "reform" is enough to allow any imposition, however implausible.

With adoption of the Common Core standards, you can rest assured that Common Core standardized testing is not far behind. How can we expect a single, nationwide standardized "pick-a-bubble" machine-scored test to measure what is taught in practically every school system in the U.S. effectively? The documented testing issues we already see with state assessments will increase exponentially. The June, 2012 Georgia State Board of Education minutes listed over $25,000,000 in state contracts for testing and test development for 2013. Whether these investments are educationally justifiable or wise never seems to be the question. The point of ranking states, schools, systems, and students eludes me, unless it is an attempt to shame low performers into magically doing better. I feel that neither anger nor shame can serve as a prime motivational tool. Cooperation and collaboration, however, have worked wonderfully, but are consistently in absentia from those whose declared purpose is educational reform.

Standardized tests were designed, once upon a time, to serve as prescriptive tools to help teachers help students. Presently they serve as autopsy reports that include first-time test-taker results with the primary purpose, not to assist teachers in improving student achievement, but to rank schools and systems. Teachers cannot effectively use data provided at the end of the school year to assist students who leave their classes two weeks later. If we were serious about using these tests to measure achievement-and there's a mighty big "if" about whether they do-we would give them at the beginning of the year to provide substantive data for teachers.

In a time when parents-and, as an extension, the public-are demanding more and more personalization for their children's educations, Federal and state educational agencies continue to insist upon more and more standardization-falling once again into the fallacy of "what's good for one child is good for all children."

The Common Core standards will ultimately serve not to improve student achievement but to increase the profits of standardized testing companies. The effects of poverty, family and socio-economic factors on education will continue to be largely ignored in our infatuation with the misguided belief that student achievement will improve through intensified measurement. The "teach to the test," "test prep," and "testing pep rallies" environments will grow stronger through the implementation of annual growth measurements (annual growth = 100%-the 2011 proficiency rate of first-time test-takers divided by 6) for schools, and flawed teacher evaluation models that tie teacher ratings and salary to student scores will serve as almost insurmountable incentives for teachers to teach to the test, by the test, and for the test.

The U.S. has, since the 1950s, been rated in the bottom 25% of every educational rating system imaginable. The fact that our country has set the economic standard for the rest of the world, that our creativity, achievements, and scientific progress far overshadow the nearest competitors would seem to lead us toward the beginnings of a discussion about the efficacy and reliability of the ranking systems we seem to trust as infallible measurements. Those that point to our nation's rank among international educational rankings also conveniently forget to mention that in our country every child is entitled, not just to attend school, but to expect to achieve, or at least to be tested. Every score from every student counts. There is no selective testing or tracking, and no other country makes the effort to educate every child. When our best students' scores are compared to those of other countries-surprise, surprise!-our rankings compare favorably with anyone's.

Sooner or later even legislators must see that it's not about race, it's about poverty; it's not about a test score, it's about student achievement; it's not about a standardized curriculum, it's about good teaching; it's not about the business model, it's about personalization; it's not about competition, it's about cooperation. Until that time, we will continue to get the kind of legislature and public education system that we vote for.

Relevant content and applications of knowledge through critical thinking, problem solving, modeling, and higher order thinking skills should be the focus and goal of our educational processes. Education is not supposed to be about determining or defining a specific amount or trove of material that must be learned in order to advance to the next level, but about cultivating and growing students' inquisitiveness and curiosity, which eventually grow into life skills. None of these skills or processes can be measured with any degree of reliability, accuracy, or validity by a multiple choice machine-scored test.

My suggestion is that we trust teachers enough to give them the freedom to do what they do best: teach children on personal and individualized levels. Micromanagement is an egregious sin and an almost irresistible temptation for State and Federal officials.

I predict a period of extensive frustration on the part of teachers before they get to the point that they must eventually reach in order to decide that, if anything is to be done to effectively implement the Common Core Curriculum, they must do it themselves at the local school level. Teachers, in this case as in so many others, are not the problem; they are our unrecognized salvation. Just as with the Georgia Performance Standards, the efforts of teachers will eventually-in spite of everything politicians can do to make them look like scapegoats for what are truly societal issues-be the salvation of Common Core implementation. Teachers will prevail in spite of state and Federal mandates and implementation schemes, and not because of them; until, of course, the next big reform comes around the corner, and the rules and expectations change once again.

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James Arnold Superintendent, Pelham City Public Schools Pelham City, GA I must state from the outset that I am innately suspicious of the underlying motives or claimed educational benefits of any initiative-Common Core included-supported by the Governor of Georgia who, having instituted austerity cuts in 2003, led Georgia to be one of the only states to use teacher furloughs to balance the state budget, and who consistently under-funded public education in order to promote quality fishing.