Nearly 85 percent of Chicago Public School students come from low-income households. Or look at it this way: Out of the 400, 545 students currently enrolled in Chicago’s public schools, over 340,463 of them face an uphill battle against poverty. Barely a third of those students will meet Illinois state exam standards in reading, math and science. Only 69 percent of them will graduate from CPS within five years, well below the national graduation rate.

 

When educators think of CPS, this is what comes to mind.

 

Mosaic Magazine spoke with Chicago Teachers’ Union vice president Jesse Sharkey about the connection between poverty and school performance and what can be done in schools, as well as in society at large, to address the issues that plague these young students.

 

Mosaic: What exactly is the connection between poverty and poor scholastic performance?

Sharkey: Academic achievement tracks the academic achievement of a student’s parents which in turn closely tracks wealth. You can tell more about what kind of test scores students in a school get by looking at the kind of cars that are in the parking lot of the school than you can by looking at the grades of the students.

 

Mosaic: Can we say that an economic gap correlates to an education or achievement gap? Is it just a matter of parents having more money and education and passing that to their kids or is there more?

Sharkey: It massively correlates. For example, a student who grows up in an environment where they’re worried about where their next meal is coming from or whether or not there is going to be a roof over their head because they’re dealing with foreclosure or homelessness or eviction or whatever, Those students almost necessarily are going to be less able to focus on academic performance. They’re going to be sitting there preoccupied by a set of things and worries that a student who not only is totally secure in their lodging but is getting to think about the vacation they’re going to take to France or whatever is going to have a huge advantage in that regard. Being in an environment where there is a quiet place to do homework versus people that have a huge family in a very small place. That’s an academic challenge. It’s true that teachers are important but the home environment of the student has three times as much effect on the academic outcome of a student as a teacher does.

 

Mosaic: What can be done from the school angle that you feel is effective?

Sharkey: If you’re the school that’s in a community where violence is a big issue for example, you know that you’re going to have students dealing with grief, with loss, where there’s going to be some post-traumatic stress, those things can really destabilize an academic environment. You’re going to need to have some kind of a plan that there should be council on staff, there should be training for staff so that people have some awareness of what to say and what not to say. That’s not going to be a magic bullet for the academic performance of the school but it can certainly have an impact.

 

Mosaic: Studies have shown that there is a lot of difficulty in these communities that have a lot of poor students that it’s difficult to attract and retain skilled teachers? How do we get good teachers in these schools and how do we make them stay?

Sharkey: What’s the incentive of a person to try to stay in an inner city school and teach? If essentially there’s a teleology that says that good teaching produces good test scores, the test scores of your students are bad therefore you can’t be a good teacher. If you’re a bad teacher, therefore you deserve to be fired. Now I want to be a good teacher, I go work in a tough school, but why would I stay there if I can already tell in advance that I will be considered bad if I stay in the school? We have to respect the profession; we have to stop trying to load it up with standardized tests. The other thing I would say it has to do with trying as a society to have some way to understand what poor kids are dealing with, to not just make a pathology out of their poverty. We’re being taught to see all the things that are wrong with those communities.

 

Mosaic: Do nonprofits fulfill a valuable role in all of this?

Sharkey: I think that we’re going to need something that looks more like a political movement. You’re not going to solve the question of revenue for the schools if you leave that question only to the people who have a narrow technical expertise of how k-12 public inner city education works. You’re going to need broader segments of society saying we care about educating children in our entire society, therefore we’re willing to pay more taxes, therefore we’re willing to have a progressive income tax in the state of Illinois. I think broader layers of our society coming to be more familiar with what’s going on in the schools and the education helps. It helps broaden out that awareness and make the demands for educational justice be more widespread.