School authorities argue that public schools can’t give inner-city kids a good education because poor parents have less time and resources to help their children in school. While it is certainly true that struggling poor parents often have to work longer hours to support their children, the facts do not support the poverty excuse. As we noted earlier, a 1990 Rand Corporation study of Catholic versus public schools in New York City confirmed the fact that poverty has little to do with academic achievement.
A few rare inner-city public schools manage to give their students a better-than-normal education. These schools prove that poverty can’t be used as an excuse for bad education. Samuel Casey Carter, researcher and Bradley Fellow of the Heritage Foundation, investigated twenty-one of these schools where low-income children received a better education than kids in other public schools:
“Under principal Irwin Kurz, the 6th grade at P.S. 161 in Brooklyn, New York, has the second highest reading scores in all of New York State.”
KIPP Academy in Houston, Texas, under Michael Feinberg, is 95 percent low-income and 90 percent Hispanic. Within one year, students who enter the middle school with passage rates of 35B50 percent on the state assessment test are passing by more than 90 percent in both math and reading.
Seventy-eight percent of the students in Bennett-Kew Elementary in Inglewood, California, are low-income. For 20 years, Nancy Ichinaga’s school has been one of the highest performers in all of Los Angeles County.20
Carter found that these principals succeeded where most other public-school principals failed because they followed seven important rules in running their schools:
1) Effective principals are free to decide how to spend their money, whom to hire, and what to teach; 2) Effective principals use measurable goals to establish a culture of achievement; 3) Master teachers bring out the best in a faculty; 4) Rigorous and regular testing leads to continuous student achievement; 5) Discipline is anchored in achievement; 6) Effective principals work actively with parents to make the home a center of learning; 7) Effective principals require hard work. 21
Many charter and private schools use these same educational rules, which is why low-income minority kids succeed in these schools. In contrast, millions of low-income children fail in public schools because the schools don’t apply these rules.
One more example will suffice to show that poverty is no excuse for most public schools’ dismal performance. Harvard University did a two-year study of tuition-scholarship programs for minority children in New York, the District of Columbia, and Dayton, Ohio. Students were picked by lottery to receive the tuition scholarships. Minority students who transferred to a private school from a public school soon did better in their studies.
Critics of previous tuition-scholarship studies where public-school students did better in a private school had claimed that students’ performance could have improved because of other factors, such as motivation or family background. But in the Harvard study, children were randomly assigned by lottery to private or public schools. As a result, neither poverty nor parents’ motivation explained the difference in achievement.
