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Article from The Atlantic

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The early results out of a Boston nonprofit are positive.

Alastair Grant / AP

And the science is clear-when brain capacity is used up on these worries and fears, there simply isn't as much bandwidth for other things.

Raising the most diverse generation of Americans ever
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Economic Mobility Pathways, or EMPath, has built its whole service-delivery model around this science, which it described in its 2014 report, " Using Brain Science to Design New Pathways Out of Poverty." The Boston nonprofit started out as Crittenton Women's Union, a merger of two of the city's oldest women-serving organizations, both of which focused on improving the economic self-sufficiency of families. It continues that work with a new name and a burgeoning focus on intergenerational mobility.

After years of coaching adults and watching those benefits trickle down to children, EMPath has brought children into the center of its model-offering a way out of intergenerational poverty with brain science.

Elisabeth Babcock, the president and CEO of EMPath, said people in poverty tend to get stuck in vicious cycles where stress leads to bad decision-making, compounding other problems and reinforcing the idea that they can't improve their own lives.

"What we're trying to do is create virtuous cycles where people take a step and they find out they can accomplish something that they might not have thought they could accomplish, and they feel better about themselves," Babcock said. Maybe that step helps them earn more money, solves a child-care problem that leads to better child behavior, or simply establishes a sense of control over their own lives. All of these things reduce stress, freeing up more mental bandwidth for further positive steps.

Intergen mentors visit participating families and facilitate conversations that prompt both adults and children to make future-oriented and contextualized decisions, ones that take into account other important domains. Their goal is to help the adults in the families become mentors for themselves and their children. Eventually, they hope, they make their own contributions obsolete.

Stephanie Brueck, the senior coordinator of the Intergenerational Mobility Project, recently sat down with a single mom, Ginnelle V., who asked her last name not be used to preserve her family's privacy, and Ginnelle's five children, four girls and one boy who range in age from kindergarten through college-aged.

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Over the last year, Brueck has helped the family think through both personal and family goal-setting. Ginnelle's youngest, 5-year-old Cyres, has a medical condition that likely will require an invasive surgery that can be delayed through certain exercises. The family's doctor gave them an overwhelming list of dozens of exercises, few of which Cyres can do on his own. Still, exercise became Cyres's personal goal for the Intergen Project.

Brueck created an easier-to-use fitness plan and helped Ginnelle think about working up to the doctor's original list-starting with five push-ups, for example, and helping Cyres eventually reach the recommended 25. Looking back, Ginnelle thinks it's strange she couldn't break down an overwhelming task into more approachable steps on her own.

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The early results out of a Boston nonprofit are positive. And the science is clear-when brain capacity is used up on these worries and fears, there simply isn't as much bandwidth for other things.

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Jacqueline Novogratz

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Jacqueline Novogratz: An escape from poverty

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Jacqueline Novogratz tells a moving story of an encounter in a Nairobi slum with Jane, a former prostitute, whose dreams of escaping poverty, of becoming a doctor and of getting married were fulfilled in an unexpected way.

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The Story We Tell About Poverty Isn't True

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The Story We Tell About Poverty Isn't True

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TED Talk Mia Birdsong

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Mia Birdsong: The story we tell about poverty isn't true

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As a global community, we all want to end poverty. Mia Birdsong suggests a great place to start: Let's honor the skills, drive and initiative that poor people bring to the struggle every day. She asks us to look again at people in poverty: They may be broke - but they're not broken.

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TED Talk Rita Pierson

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Rita Pierson, a teacher for 40 years, once heard a colleague say, “They don’t pay me to like the kids.” Her response: “Kids don’t learn from people they don’t like.’” A rousing call to educators to believe in their students and actually connect with them on a real, human, personal level.

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A principal, superintendent, parent, and social worker weigh in on mitigating the impact of poverty on the nation’s schools and children.

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A principal, superintendent, parent, and social worker weigh in on mitigating the impact of poverty on the nation's schools and children. Principal, March/April 2014 Web Resources

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Where Nearly Half of Pupils Are Homeless, School Aims to Be Teacher, Therapist, Even Santa

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Where Nearly Half of Pupils Are Homeless, School Aims to Be Teacher, Therapist, Even Santa

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"It's fine," Amiri, the eldest son, said of their living situation. "We're only here because my dad got a divorce. It's fine."

But Amiri said he missed his old school, a charter in Brooklyn. While he could rattle off a list of activities he had joined at the Island School - art, gymnastics, sports on Saturdays - he said he liked his classmates at his old school better. He had never been in a fight before he came to the Island School, he explained. Now he has.

"Some of the other kids," he said, "they like to talk about a lot of other people's families, and that's not a good thing. That's where the fights come up."

Amiri could have stayed at his old school. By law, when families move, they are entitled to keep their children enrolled in their schools, even if they move outside the school's zone.

But if children stay in their old schools, they may have to travel long distances, even across boroughs, and they will often be late to school.

Mr. Boyd, the second-grade teacher, said there was a girl in his class who traveled each day from the Bronx, and she routinely dropped into her seat at 11 a.m. A bright girl who did well in math but struggled with reading, another teacher said, she needed time in class to improve her skills. But in the mornings, she was just not there.

The school arranged for her to be tutored by volunteers from Reading Partners, a nonprofit group. The group was told never to come for her in the morning - the girl would not be there.

Trouble at Home

Ms. Ramos, the principal, breezed through the blue hallways of her school in early December, sheathed in her customary black suit and air of purposefulness.

"I love you, Ms. Ramos," said a second grader, thrusting her face forward.

Ms. Ramos paused to smile and answer, "I love you, too."

Out of earshot, Ms. Ramos explained that the girl thought her mother did not love her. So she needed to be told "I love you," and she needed to say it.

"Walk in the shoes of these families, their issues, for one day," Ms. Rosales, the parent coordinator, said.

Ms. Rosales's job is to be the connection for parents at the school, to find answers to their questions when they come to her, and to seek them out if their children's footing begins to slip. At P.S. 188, she knows everybody. She has lived on the Lower East Side for 30 years and worked at the school for 20.

At P.S. 188, Ms. Rosales said, students in temporary housing do not have a monopoly on trauma or difficult circumstances.

On a recent spring day, a slight second-grader ran up to his teacher in the hallway to say that a classmate had been hitting him. Before the teacher had a chance to respond, he whipped around and started screaming curses, threatening his classmate with language that would be shocking from an adult. From a child so small, the words were only sad. He has a home, a school staff member said, as well as a sick family member and experience in foster care.

"I would say 80 percent of our kids could benefit from some kind of counseling," said Jessie Solomon-Greenbaum, who worked as a therapist at P.S. 188 until earlier this year, with a nonprofit group called the Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services.

Some children are separated from their parents or caregivers, perhaps for reasons related to immigration. Many are surrounded by violence in the community that elevates their sensitivity to danger. There is domestic violence - one of the leading reason families end up in the shelter system, according to the Institute for Children, Poverty and Homelessness. There is instability. Nearly two dozen children are in foster care. And for almost all of them, there is poverty.

While being uprooted from home can correlate with lower attendance and slipping test scores, teachers at P.S. 188 emphasized that a child's residence in temporary housing does not tell much about him or her.

Milagros Ramirez, a dual-language teacher, has taught at the Island School for nearly 20 years and grew up in the area.

By now, she knows the address of the shelter across the street, so when she is handed records for new students with that familiar marker, she knows where they are staying. But, she said, she does not know anything else.

"I've had kids who are so great and so well behaved" who are staying in a shelter, she said. "You can't go by, 'Just because they live there, they behave a certain way.' You can't stereotype them.

"The only thing you can expect," she continued, "is that they don't have books, don't have pencils. When I see a kid from the shelter on my list, we start begging. Do you have any book bags upstairs?"

For all of the challenges they bring to school, they are still just children. Ms. Inoa, the first-grade teacher, said many of her new students stood up on their first day in class and announced their living situation without a hint of shame.

"The kids say, 'Oh, I'm new,'" Ms. Inoa said. "'I'm from the shelter.'"

Services Beyond Education

Just before Christmas, two students in Ms. Ramirez's second-grade class came to school wearing matching shoes, simple black sneakers with a blue-and-white Toms label affixed to the back. They had plenty of company marching the halls that day, because the school had received hundreds of pairs of the shoes for students, their siblings and even their parents.

In the spring, the halls were a parade of matching backpacks, navy or red, from another school giveaway, all part of an expansive view of what a school provides.

The Island School is part of the city's Community Schools program, a longstanding initiative taken up by the Education Department to integrate more support for students and families, like counseling and health clinics, into schools with needy populations. The de Blasio administration has pumped $103 million into its Community Schools program this year at 130 schools.

But while P.S. 188 only recently joined the Community Schools program, it has been offering the same kinds of services for more than 15 years.

About 20 years ago, there was a break-in at the school during spring recess, Barbara Slatin, the principal at the time, said. It turned out that those who had forced their way inside were students. Ms. Slatin decided that the school should have been open, she said, so she began expanding its hours and tacking on services for families.

Today, the building is open on Saturdays, during the summer and every weekday until 6 p.m. It has five social workers, English classes for parents and a washer and dryer that families will be able to use for free. Lawyers come in once a month to help with issues like immigration. And during the winter holiday season, every child gets a present.

Defining Success

At a school like P.S. 188, what does success look like?

On the standardized state tests taken every year, its scores are flatly disappointing. Only 9 percent of its students met state standards in English last year, compared with 30 percent of students citywide. Just 14 percent of children scored at grade level in math, less than half of the citywide rate of 35 percent.

But over the past three years, nearly 50 of its students have been accepted at some of the city's most competitive high schools, including Brooklyn Technical, Stuyvesant and Millennium, Ms. Ramos said. Of the three high schools that students from the Island School attended the most last year, two have above-average graduation rates, while the other caters to children who are still learning English.

On annual school surveys, families and teachers give the school and its principal very high ratings. Teachers say they trust the principal and one another. Students say they feel safe and respected, and that they know what their teachers want them to learn. At the Island School, there are outbursts and fights, but the hallways usually feel calm. Children walk from class to class in neat rows, or a rough approximation of them.

To Ms. Ramos, when she looks back at the end of the school year and asks herself how the school did, her definition of success reaches far outside the classroom. Is a child who needs counseling now receiving it? Did a father write a résumé? Did a mother get a job?

"We have so many families who come in with so many issues," Ms. Ramos said. "Success is how much we have done for the family, not just for the child."

But as hard as many of the teachers and administrators try to reach students and their parents, the moment they break through, the family might be gone.

"My caseload revolves quite a bit," said Eddy Polanco, a guidance counselor for the elementary students. "As much as we hate to see them go, often when they leave, it's because they've found an apartment. So we're happy for them."

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Where Nearly Half of Pupils Are Homeless, School Aims to Be Teacher, Therapist, Even Santa

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"It's fine," Amiri, the eldest son, said of their living situation. "We're only here because my dad got a divorce. It's fine." But Amiri said he missed his old school, a charter in Brooklyn.

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How Can High-Poverty Schools Engage Families and the Community?

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How Can High-Poverty Schools Engage Families and the Community?

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The story of Luis is a good example of the benefits of engaging parents and families. A simple home visit by the teacher revealed how, previously unbeknownst to the school, a young ESL student was connecting his tutoring and schoolwork with his family. In turn, Luis' family was most appreciative of their son's progress in school and welcomed his newly gained English skills that were helping them learn.

Families living in poverty often work multiple jobs, may have limited English language skills, and in some cases may have had few positive experiences with their children's teachers or schools. These factors frequently work against a school's attempts to form relationships with families living in poverty and authentically engage them in their children's education. Even in high-performing schools, this problem is an ongoing concern. Leaders in high-performing, high-poverty (HP/HP) schools continually look for ways to provide opportunities for involvement and to gain back their trust.

The Critical Importance of Trust

In a recent study of public schools in Chicago, Anthony Bryk, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and his colleagues concluded, "Relationships are the lifeblood of activity in a school community" (Bryk, Bender Sebring, Allensworth, Luppescu, & Easton, 2010, p.137). In one high-poverty elementary school, a teacher remarked, "Without a trusting environment in our classroom and with the families of my kids, it's all uphill. We never make the progress we could. . . we never can 'click.' Trust is what makes it all happen for us." The development of trusting relationships lies at the heart of successfully engaging parents, families, and the community.

Here are seven strategies and practices to build trust between schools, students, and families.

Create Full-Service Schools and Safety Nets

Many HP/HP schools connect vital social and medical services with their students. These full-service schools typically provide services such as social workers, physicians, dentists, vision and hearing specialists, grief counselors, and family counselors on site. Some schools provide a childcare center, a family resource center, or hunger/homelessness support to assist families in meeting their basic needs. Research shows that when a full-service school works well, student achievement increases, attendance rates go up, suspensions drop, and special education placements decrease (Dryfoos, 1994; Dryfoos & Maguire, 2002).

Create Links Between School and Home

Strengthening the family's ability to support their children's academic achievement and other forms of success in school is a priority in HP/HP schools. One school organizes a learning academy on Saturday mornings to assist families of refugee students. Other schools employ school-family liaisons who connect families with schools in a variety of ways. Sadowski (2004) identifies six activities that a school might consider to establish linkages between students' homes and school:

1. Dual-language classes for students

2. English as a second language, GED, and parenting classes

3. Home-school liaisons (with fluency in the home language)

4. Preschool and early literacy programs

5. Early assessment

6. Community and school activities and events

Offer Mentoring to Students

Most educators have long known that a meaningful relationship with an adult is what kids want and need most. Mentors provide such a relationship. The National Dropout Prevention Center identifies mentoring as one of the most effective strategies to keep kids engaged and in school. The Western Regional Center for Drug-Free Schools and Communities identifies five positive outcomes of mentoring programs (Jackson, 2002):

1. Personalized attention and care

2. Access to resources

3. Positive/high expectations for staff and students

4. Reciprocity and active youth participation

5. Commitment

Many HP/HP schools operate their own programs with local staff and volunteers; others access the help of Big Brother/Big Sister programs, local YMCA/YWCA services, and a host of other community-affiliated programs that offer adult mentoring.

Provide Opportunity for Community-Based and Service Learning

"Our kids actively work to support their community. Through clubs and classes, they raise money for families in need, work on a 'coats for kids' project, plant trees, build park benches, help with efforts of the Northwest Blood Center, Children's Miracle Network, American Cancer Society, March of Dimes, Red Cross, and many others. They rake leaves in our parks and do yard work for our elderly folks in need. Our students feel better because of these efforts, and our community values the extra help that the school gives back to them. When everyone is supporting one another, it makes Tekoa a great place to live and raise children." (Wayne Roellich, principal, Tekoa High School)

Noted for connecting academic learning to real-world problems beyond school, community-based learning, particularly service learning, has become common in HP/HP schools. Many benefits accrue from service learning (Billig, 2000a, 2000b):

Enhanced academic achievement

Increased school attendance

Improved student motivation to learn

Decreased risky behaviors

Increased interpersonal development and student ability to relate to culturally diverse groups

Improved school image and public perception

Community-based learning also provides an excellent means to initiate career exploration, internships, shadowing, and jobs.

Conduct Home Visits

Many HP/HP schools encourage and conduct some form of home visits. Fourteen years ago, test scores in the Mason County School District ranked in the lowest quartile of all districts in Kentucky. Inspired by the idea of building closer connections to students' home lives, the district, with a cadre of volunteer teachers, embarked on a goal of visiting every home of the 2,800 kids enrolled. Maintaining this commitment over the years, together with positive administrative and collegial support and the requisite professional development, has resulted in every family receiving at least one home visit annually from their child's teacher. The district has experienced consecutive years of student achievement growth and a 50-percent drop in discipline referrals, as well as reduced achievement gaps and increased attendance.

Ensure Effective Two-Way Communication

We know that a "whatever it takes" attitude prevails in HP/HP schools. This is especially true in their efforts to communicate with the parents and families. Despite often-limited resources, educators in these schools make it a priority to develop authentic connections with students' parents and families. The goal of fostering two-way communication between school and home requires school leaders to be relentless in their insistence that communications be respectful, honest, and timely.

Use the School as a Community Center

Many HP/HP schools engage parents, families, and other community members by opening their doors and expanding their schedules to offer clubs, parent support and education, early childhood activities, GED programs, advisory groups, community education classes, and a host of other events and activities of interest to the community. These HP/HP schools partner with community or city organizations, local foundations, state and municipal agencies, service clubs, universities, and businesses to host these valued endeavors in their buildings, as well as offer services at times that better fit families' work schedules.

The Principal's Role

Principals, working with teacher-leaders and staff leaders from various vantage points within the school, are positioned to address the wide spectrum of environmental needs that confront high-poverty schools. HP/HP school principals can take a variety of actions (PDF) that will surround every student with the positive supports and scaffolds necessary to ensure his or her individual success.

High-performing, high-poverty schools don't go it alone -- and they don't reinvent the wheel. They access support, resources, and guidance whenever and wherever they can to foster a healthy, safe, and supportive learning environment. The resources and organizations listed below can guide a school's efforts to build strong relationships with parents and families:

Action Advice

Monitor data to ensure a safe learning environment. Are we making sure that every student is always safe?

Build a common understanding of how poverty impacts learning. Do we all understand how living in poverty may negatively influence the ability of our underachieving students to catch up?

Plan for mobility. Are we ready for mobile students' arrival -- providing welcome packets, diagnostic testing, and appropriate placements? Do we develop "catch-up" plans if needed? Do we provide built-in opportunities for new friendships with peers? Do we make it a practice to communicate with parents during the first six weeks after enrollment? Do we address transportation issues if a student is mobile within our district?

Make sure that all students are connected to a caring adult. Do we know which students come to school without the support of a caring adult?

Start student advisories. Is every secondary student connected to an adult at school who regularly monitors his or her progress?

Personalize relationships through small learning environments. Is the size of our school presenting problems for some students and preventing us from forming caring relationships?

Provide opportunities for all students to participate in extracurricular activities. Do our students have an equitable opportunity to participate?

Work to engage every family with school. Do we have a plan in place for guiding our efforts to build trust and connect with our families?

Personalize the connection between school and the student's home. Who among our staff visits the homes of our kids?

Initiate an effective mentoring program. How are we connecting students with caring adults and positive role models?

Offer community-based learning and service-learning opportunities to all students. Are we connecting students with the community? Are we teaching students about the value of giving back? Are we providing opportunities for students to explore career options in the local community?

Visit every student's home. Do we have a plan in place to guide us in conducting productive home visits?

Ensure two-way communication between homes and school. This includes:

Language-appropriate written and verbal contacts

Translation assistance when needed

Respectful and clear communications

Frequent contact through the most effective mode

Authentic requests for feedback or response

Willingness to help with requests and family needs

Personal invitations to participate in school conferences

Timely invitations to activities and events

Open the school to the community. Have we created a plan to provide welcome and needed services to our community?

Join a network to enhance school, family, and community relationships. Can we improve our connections with our families and communities?

Notes

Billig, S. (2000a). Educator's guide to collecting and using data: Conducting surveys. Denver, CO: RMC Research Corp.

Billig, S. (2000b). Profiles of success: Engaging young people's hearts and minds through service-learning. Berkeley, CA: Grantmaker Forum on Community & National Service.

Bryk, A.S., Bender Sebring, P., Allensworth, E., Luppescu, S., & Easton, J.Q. (2010). Organizing schools for improvement: Lessons from Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dryfoos, J.G. (1994). Full-service schools: A revolution in health and social service for children, youth, and families. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Dryfoos, J.G., & Maguire, S. (2002). Inside full-service community schools. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Jackson, Y. (2002). "Mentoring for delinquent children: An outcome study with young adolescent children." Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 31(2), pp.115-122.

Sadowski, M. (Ed.). (2004). Teaching immigrant and second-language students. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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How Can High-Poverty Schools Engage Families and the Community? | Edutopia

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The story of Luis is a good example of the benefits of engaging parents and families. A simple home visit by the teacher revealed how, previously unbeknownst to the school, a young ESL student was connecting his tutoring and schoolwork with his family.

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Five Things Most People Don’t Know About Poverty & Student Achievement

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Stop Looking to the Government for Help. It's been 50 years since the start of the "War on Poverty" and enactment of 1965 ESEA legislative funding (Title 1- VII programs). Today, the U.S. Senate Budget Committee says we have 83 overlapping government welfare programs that together represent $1.03 trillion in fiscal spending by federal and state agencies (this year alone), based on data from the Congressional Research Service (CRS). We now have 22% of all school age kids (12 million) from poverty in K-12 schools. The government's approach, over 50 years, isn't working.

The Real Causes of Poverty. Since 1970, the dollar has lost 80% of its purchasing power. Those in lower or middle class, on a fixed income, lose the most. The inflation is a result of government debt and printing money. While it's true that depressed job markets have some correlations with greater poverty, the greatest factors are rarely talked about:

a) marriage rates have dropped in half in the last 50 years; yet cohabitating married couples, who have children after age 21, reduce their chances of poverty to under 5%.

b) high school graduation rates for poor and minority students are still a coin flip or worse in most of the nation's 50 largest cities (including Detroit at 25%, Indianapolis at 30% and Cleveland at 34%). No diploma means job chances go down.

c) "job ready" life skills; schools rarely prepare kids for life in the real world (relationship skills, effort-building, executive function skills, positive attitudes and money/finance skills). If you're educated, with good life skills and married, your odds of being poor are under 2%.

Teacher's Roles Have Changed Dramatically. Many teachers work long hours at school. Some work on weekends. For most, but not all, effort is not an issue. What is an issue that many still work with the "mental model" of what teaching used to be 50 years ago. We often see the same "stand and deliver" and the same "apple-sorting" of kids, with desks in a line with reduced movement, emotional support and brain-building.

What's different? Almost everything; there's compliance paperwork, more collaboration, more focus on test scores and far more accountability. The list could go on. Kids don't look to teachers for knowledge anymore; Google can provide knowledge. Teachers have tough new choices to make. They either must "upgrade" their teaching every year, or fall further behind. This shift is not easy to make and many teachers struggle with it.

Teachers Affect the National Rate of Poverty. Is there a correlation between student achievement and the rate of poverty in the U.S.? Yes; nationally over 7,000 students a day (1.2 million/yr.) get so fed up, they drop out. Each dropout costs our economy three quarters a million dollars over his or her lifetime.

1. Teachers often come into the profession as a chance to "make a difference." But making a difference can go both ways. If students achieve well, the difference is positive. If students struggle, our nation struggles. If teachers raised student achievement by 10%, the U.S. schools would not only rank among the top 5 in the world, it would also raise gross domestic product by 1% a year. Over the next two generations, this would boost the economy by 112 trillion (not a typo). The government has tried for 50 years and failed; but educators can erase poverty in our own lifetime.

2. Here's what we do know, as of today: a) the classroom teacher is still the single most significant contributor to student achievement; the effect is greater than that of parents, peers, schools or poverty, b) the effectiveness of classroom teachers varies dramatically, especially within schools, c) research shows teachers in the top 20%, based on year-on-year progress with their students, will completely erase the academic effects of poverty in five years, d) most teachers simply don't know how be a high-performer and others have lost hope and don't try any more.

Results of a Recent Study. We live in an era of unprecedented academic and neuroscientific research. I just finished doing a study on twelve high poverty schools from three time zones and five states. Every one of these schools had 75% or more students from poverty. But, half of them were high-flyers, with school achievement scores in the top 25% of their state. The other half of the schools struggled; their scores were in the bottom 25% of their state. The demographics were identical. The two cohorts of schools (low and high performers) also shared many of the same values. When I offered statements such as, "I believe in my kids," both school staffs said, "I strongly agree." So, what was different?

It's not poverty that makes the difference; it was the teachers. The difference was that the high-performing teachers actually "walked the walk." First, the classroom and school climate was MUCH better at the high-performers. Secondly, the teachers at the high-performing schools didn't complain about kids not "being smart" or being unmotivated. They made it a priority and built engagement, learning, thinking and memory skills every day. In short, they didn't make excuses; they just rolled up their sleeves and built better student brains. I show you how they did it in my new book on poverty, but first a preview.

What Have We Learned? Here is what we have learned (so far) to boost student achievement in high-poverty schools. The list is NOT in any order at all.

Relationships still matter, and they matter a lot. Strong relationships and family connections do help.

High expectations are not enough. Help students set crazy high goals, and then actively point out to them how their daily actions connect to their long-term goals.

The most important cognitive skills to build are: 1) reasoning, 2) working memory, and 3) vocabulary usage.

Build academic optimism so that kids hear and believe every day that they can and will succeed. Zero doubt equals better effort.

Increase feedback on the learning and zero it in on the specifics of effort used, strategies applied or attitude engaged.

If you don't like the student's attitude, change it. Use hope building and the growth mindset every day, all day.

Engage like crazy using more social collaboration, energizers, participation and affirmations. When kids feel liked, have goals and energized, they work harder.

Finally, having a positive attitude or opinion is useless; IF you fail to act. IF and HOW you act on it is... priceless.

Now, go make a miracle happen today.

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Five Things Most People Don't Know About Poverty & Student Achievement

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Stop Looking to the Government for Help. It's been 50 years since the start of the "War on Poverty" and enactment of 1965 ESEA legislative funding (Title 1- VII programs). Today, the U.S.

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BrainBased Jensen Learning

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Take This 90 Second "Kids From Poverty" Quiz and Decide if You Should Be "Upgrading" Your TITLE 1 Classroom Skill Set in July

Before you begin, grab something to record your answers with. Go ahead and get out paper... Are you ready?

1. How much of student achievement in kids from poverty is correlated with their parent's IQ scores?

a) Significant amount
b) Moderate amount
c) Negligible amount

2. Classroom behavior problems from with kids from poverty are based in the very same issues as with the non-poor (need for structure, clear rules, and consistent enforcement).
True or False?

3. What is the biggest academic predictor (at age 5) for how kids will do at age 11?
a) reading and math scores
b) positive attitude about school
c) working memory
d) IQ scores
e) having parent participation

4. Many poor kids who show you an "attitude" when you are disciplining them typically need an authority figure to show them the rules and consequences.
a) That's the truth
b) Some truth, but not all
c) Mostly untrue

5. Which 3 are the most common disorders among the poor?
a) Delayed development, stress and AD/HD
b) Dyslexia, oppositional defiant disorder and de-motivation
c) Dyscalculia, dyslexia and oppositional defiant disorder
d) Drug abuse, depression and dyslexia

You're getting this quiz for a reason. In the United States, about 22% of all schoolage kids come from families of poverty. These kids form the largest identified subgroup in America with unmet academic and behavioral needs. While every school in America has SOME kids that are more poor the rest of the students, many of you are seeing those numbers continuing to rise. The trend is "up" everywhere.

Now, why did I ask you the above questions? Two reasons.

First, I wanted you to find out what you know and what you don't know. If you want to reach and teach the poor effectively, you'll need to be very, very good. You'll need 80% or greater (4 or more right) to qualify as "effective."

Your answers to the above quiz are in the book Teaching with Poverty in Mind. They are: 1- C, 2 - False, 3 - C, 4 - C, and 5 - A. Go ahead and score yourself.

Next, if you did not get a top score, you really do need to consider "upgrading" your skill set. Maybe you've seen our website, you've gotten our emails, and now I have just one more bit of news for you...

We have just opened a brand new "Teaching with Poverty in Mind" workshop.

It's from July 6-9th (4-Days) in San Antonio, TX. In this amazing workshop, you'll learn:

* How to understand the crazy responses you get from kids

* Which academic subskills will skyrocket achievement scores

* How to keep the energy sky high in every class

* Top secrets for disciplining your students

* Best strategies for academic success

* How to make every class move quickly and smoothly

You can get all of these and more. But the workshops are filling fast this year. In fact, nearly every one is full.

Act quickly and you can still get in this summer. Listen, we can't even promise you'll get in unless you act immediately. We sold out last year, and we're about to sell out this year.

More information? Click here to get yourself started. Teaching with Poverty in Mind 4-Day Workshop

Thanks!

Eric Jensen

Other Great Summer Workshops:
Teaching with the Brain in Mind 6-Day Workshop
Tools for Maximum Engagement 2-Day Workshop
photo credit: mistersnappy

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90 Second Kids From Poverty Quiz | Brain Based Learning | Brain Based Teaching | Articles From Jensen Learning

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Before you begin, grab something to record your answers with. Go ahead and get out paper... Are you ready? 1. How much of student achievement in kids from poverty is correlated with their parent's IQ scores? a) Significant amount b) Moderate amount c) Negligible amount 2.

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Why Teach Differently to those from Poverty

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Why Teach Differently to those from Poverty

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BrainBased Jensen Learning