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Health & Fitness

BLOG: Ensuring Our Students' Success in Any School

Smaller classes, new teaching techniques and more time in the classroom won't help our kids learn. The problem we need to fix is much more basic than that.

Recently the media has reported on a study which links third-grade reading levels and high school graduation levels. Third grade is a pivotal year in which students move from learning to read to reading to learn. The study divided students into three socioeconomic levels: those who have never been poor, those who have spent some time in poverty and those who have never lived in poverty. Not surprisingly, children who never lived in poverty had much higher reading skills in third-grade and eventually went on to have the highest high school graduation rates of the three groups.

I thought of this as I sat across from my third-grade daughter's teacher in a conference to discuss my child's education. She is doing well, reads at a 4th grade level, turns in all of her school work and arrives at school eager to learn.

The next day I received a letter from Minneapolis Public Schools reporting on each MPS school's AYP (Annual Yearly Progress) designation as required by the No Child Left Behind Law. A letter accompanying the scores explains the Minnesota Department of Education's stance that using a single test to evaluate a school's ability to educate its students is unfair to the school. My children's school passed—many others did not.

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I thought back to the study as my daughter's teacher talked about her appreciation of the parents' involvement in her classroom, and of having a room rep who helps coordinate the parents' volunteerism.

My child comes to school having eaten a good breakfast. She brings lunch to school every day, and doesn't have to think about if she'll have dinner that night.

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My child comes home to the same house every night. She doesn't wonder if we'll still be living here tomorrow or if she'll have a bed to sleep in.

She doesn't worry if her parents will be available to help her with homework because we don't have to work two jobs to make ends meet and we don't struggle with addiction, which could make us unavailable to our children.

She has decent clothes to wear every day, and as the air turns chillier this time of year she has a coat and warm shoes to wear. She has athletic shoes for gym class and a sweater if she needs it.

My daughter's teacher has worked in schools in which these are luxury items. Many families had no permanent address to send notes home to, no phone number to call, and no way for the teacher to communicate with the families. Very few showed up for parent-teacher conferences or volunteered in the classroom.

Whether or not a school "passes" the No Child Left Behind testing will not indicate whether that school is a quality school or its teachers quality teachers. It will indicate that the students in that school come from families struggling to survive, where parents aren't involved in their children's education, whatever the reason.

If we start putting more resources toward helping families escape poverty, we will help our children learn.

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