when teachers like you tell me how frustrating their jobs are, I’m on your side. I’ve been a teacher. I work with teachers, and I know the profession well.
So, let’s use that. Let’s drill down and learn some of the most relevant changes affecting your classroom when we talk about students from poverty. We’ll examine the hard evidence of the new normal, what the resulting poverty means to you, and how poverty may affect your students.
Poverty and Hard Evidence of the New Normal
Poverty in the United States is getting worse, not better. The new normal is this: we now have a majority of students in public schools who qualify as poor based on school data (Suitts, 2015). In the five most populated states (California, Texas, Florida, Illinois, and New York), 48 percent or more of public school students are in poverty (Suitts, 2015). Pause and wrap your head around this.
But it gets worse. In 2016, two out of three student dropouts were from low-income families. Across the country, the graduation gap between the poor and nonpoor ranged from 3 percent to 24 percent. Nationwide, although many states have closed the graduation gap, almost one third of all states have seen increases in the gap (DePaoli, Bridgeland, Atwell, & Balfanz, 2018). This new normal is a mindset game changer for everyone, especially educators. The trend is not our friend.
Also part of the new normal is the disappearing middle class. Gone are many good-paying jobs that required a high school diploma and hard work (manufacturing, mining, automobiles, oil and gas, and more). Technology (robots, automated software and websites, and smartphones) has replaced people for many of those jobs. Trucking is the most popular job in twenty-nine states (Bui, 2015). But around the world, multiple manufacturers are actively developing, testing, and deploying automated trucks, so those trucking jobs may be eliminated as soon as 2030 (Campbell, 2018). Imagine the disruption this will cause: the number-one job in over half the states will be automated (Bui, 2015).
Often, poverty occurs when the cost-of-living increase does not keep pace with inflation, and real wages for the middle class and poor go down. Real middle-class annual wages (adjusted for inflation) have declined dramatically, from $57,000 a year in 2000 to just under $52,000 in 2014 (Economic Policy Institute, 2014). That means the average U.S. household has lost nearly 10 percent in wages to inflation since 2000. Even for the declining middle class, life has gotten harder and 2018 brings few signs of positive change (Drum, 2018).
This is the new normal, and you’re not alone. Roughly 76 percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, with essentially zero savings (Bankrate, 2012). The number of people on food stamps has doubled between 2008 and 2014 (U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service, 2016). About half of all children born in 2015 will be on food stamps at some point in their lives (Rank & Hirschl, 2015).
Over half (51 percent) of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year. The federal poverty level for a family of five is $28,410, and yet almost 40 percent of all American workers do not even bring in $20,000 a year (Social Security Online, 2016). See figure I.1 for a breakdown of the new normal workforce.
Source: Social Security Online, 2016.
Figure I.1: The new normal workforce in America.
Let me summarize this for you. From 2000 to 2014, the share of adults living in middle-income households fell in 203 of the 229 U.S. metropolitan areas. Think about that; in almost 90 percent of the United States’ metro areas, the middle class is shrinking (Pew Research Center, 2016).
However, understanding all this is only where our battle begins. We must understand what poverty is in real terms.
What More Poverty Means for Teachers
Saying that someone is from poverty tells us nothing about the family. Is it fragmented or intact, caring or careless? We don’t know because, on the surface, all poverty means is having a low socioeconomic status, but it does not define the individual. My own definition is less focused on federal standards for annual income. Instead, I focus on the common effects of poverty via an aggregate of risk factors. Here’s how I define poverty in this book: poverty is a chronic condition resulting from an aggregate of adverse social and economic risk factors.
Working with students from poverty means you’ll need to deeply understand what is going on around you. In short, many poor students are different because many of their experiences are wiring their brains differently. The brain’s neurons are designed by nature to reflect their environment, not to automatically rise above it. Chronic exposure to poverty affects the areas of the brain responsible for memory, impulse regulation, visuospatial actions, language, cognitive capacity, and conflict (Noble, Norman, & Farah, 2005).
Evidence suggests the brains of children from poverty are more likely to differ via four primary types of experiences: (1) health issues from poor diet and exposure to toxins and pollutants, (2) chronic stress, (3) weaker cognitive skills, and (4) impaired socio-emotional relationships (Evans & Kantrowitz, 2002). Although not every single child from a household with a low socioeconomic status will experience all of these factors, the majority will.
This means that you’ll see behaviors that show the effects of toxins (poor memory and distractibility) or chronic stress (learned helplessness, apathy, hypervigilance, and in-your-face aggressiveness). In a classroom, you’ll also see the results of less exposure to cognitive skills (deficient vocabulary, poor reading skills, and weak working memory) and impaired socioemotional skills (poor manners, misbehaviors, or emotional overreactions). Indeed, there is a powerful connection between emotion and cognition:
When we educators fail to appreciate the importance of students’ emotions, we fail to appreciate a critical force in students’ learning. One could argue, in fact, that we fail to appreciate the very reason that students learn at all. (Immordino-Yang & Damasio, 2007, p. 9)
Teachers who do not know what these behaviors really are may inappropriately judge a student as lazy, unwilling to follow directions, a poor listener, low achieving, and antisocial. This may foster classroom friction, a huge achievement gap, annoyed students, and even dropouts. And worse yet, the teacher may blame the behavior on the student. Conversely, when students feel a connection with their teachers and feel respect and trust, they behave and learn better.
Student-teacher relationships have a strong effect on student achievement and are easily in the top 10 percent of all factors (Hattie, 2009). Relationships between students and teachers are more important to students who don’t have a loving parent at home. For comparison, teacher subject-matter knowledge is in the bottom 10 percent of all factors (Hattie, 2009). Students care more about whether their teachers care than what their teachers know.
The Brain’s Changing Design
As an educator who works with schools all over the United States, I’ve heard just about every story there is about why students from poverty supposedly can’t succeed. In rural Kentucky, I hear about coal mine closings that are causing student hopelessness. In New Mexico, I hear about how a lack of jobs fosters low expectations in students. In Hawaii, I hear about the beach culture that supposedly makes students more interested in surfing than learning. These, and many like them, are the devastating community-driven narratives that are killing the chances for student success.
Likewise, you may know someone who has the impression that people don’t change. In other words, some people spread lies like, “A student who is a troublemaker at age eight will always be one.” This is also an example of a toxic mindset. Do you see the pattern?
