Although education has long been thought to be an essential tool in overcoming poverty, is it actually the “great equalizer” that public education promoter Horace Mann believed it to be?
Peter W. Cookson, Jr., a senior research fellow at the Learning Policy Institute and an instructor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, has written a slim new book that addresses people living on what he calls “the outskirts of hope” due to abject poverty.
School Communities of Strength: Strategies for Educating Children Living in Deep Poverty
By Peter W. Cookson, Jr.
Harvard Education Press, 160 pages
Release date: April 2024
“Poor and deeply poor children are treated as though they are invisible,” he writes in School Communities of Strength: Strategies for Educating Children Living in Deep Poverty. But not only are they not invisible, their numbers are enormous.
“Five million children in the United States live in deep poverty,” Cookson reports, and they live in every region of the country, from big cities and suburbs to rural towns. Most live in families that survive on less than $15,000 a year for a household of four.
Not surprisingly, children in deep poverty experience a slew of deprivations: becoming unhoused, malnourished, and mentally and physically ill at higher rates than their wealthier peers, family members, and neighbors. Racism adds another burden, since extreme poverty exerts a disproportionate impact on children of color.
These realities, of course, are not new. In fact, Cookson notes that the percentage of children living in deep poverty has not changed in more than fifty years. Cookson finds this morally unacceptable and makes his indignation explicit throughout School Communities of Strength.
After outlining the conditions that education promises to alleviate, Cookson recounts the history of America’s social and pedagogical failures over the past half-century. He then centers the book on the belief that public education is a public good and has to do more than teach academic subjects. He asserts that education can and should serve as a focal point for community liberation, a position that draws on the theories of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. According to Freire, per Cookson, “education holds the key to social justice,” and has the power to free “the imagination and genius of the poor and deeply poor.”
So how do we do this and move poor children from invisibility to visibility?
Harvard Education Press
First, Cookson writes, educators need to be trained to treat students as if they matter, deserve respect, and are capable of learning. It sounds obvious, but biased and dismissive teachers often reflect widespread societal biases. In fact, educators who have unexamined supremacist beliefs about race and gender write off low-income Black, brown, and disabled students as uneducable with staggering frequency.
The physical surroundings also matter. As Cookson writes, school buildings need to be well-lit, clean, colorful, and have the tools needed for twenty-first-century learning, including working computers and up-to-date books, conditions that are currently lacking in nearly half of the nation’s more than 100,000 public schools.
Additionally, he believes that small group and project-based lessons—largely self-guided research projects that allow students to work together to find solutions to vexing questions with limited direction and guidance from teachers and librarians—are key to student engagement. Research, Cookson notes, has shown that project-based learning helps students retain content, perform well on tests, problem-solve, collaborate, and have a positive attitude about learning.
Lastly, there’s the community in which a school is located. Cookson advocates for the development of “community schools,” a growing national trend in which ties between educators, students, caregivers, and neighborhood institutions are regularized and nurtured.
Such programs provide an alternative to schooling-as-usual. “Community schools that fully embrace their neighborhoods and are dedicated to the fundamental values of fairness and excellence educate all children in an atmosphere of care and compassion. Their doors are open year-round and on weekends,” he writes. “They welcome diversity and empower teachers and students to create learning communities that are alive with the hopefulness that springs from the freedom to experiment and innovate.”
As he envisions them, well-funded community schools get rid of metal detectors and so-called safety officers who patrol hallways and building entrances. Instead, a host of wraparound services, including food pantries and medical care, provide students and their guardians with sustenance and attention. Cookson supports creating restorative justice circles to mediate conflicts, and he chastises schools for an overreliance on suspensions, expulsions, and the use of police to quell schoolroom disruptions.
The upshot, he writes, is that “we often stigmatize children living below the poverty line as being less capable of achievement than other children. This socially constructed form of blaming the victim was exposed as a myth decades ago . . . . Low expectations are self-fulfilling prophecies.”
Of course, he’s right. But Cookson neither addresses the role of teacher and staff unions in forging the changes he supports nor does he mention the McKinney-Vento Homeless Student liaisons who work to assist unhoused kids and their families in school districts throughout the country.
Despite these omissions, School Communities of Strength is a powerful look at educational policy and a compassionate plea for enacting social policies to end, or at least significantly reduce, child poverty. “Deep poverty is not caused by chance, human failure, or fate,” he concludes. “It is caused by a social and economic system designed to reproduce inequality in service to privilege . . . . Giving people crumbs that fall off the table of affluence is not the same as empowering people.”