by AFT President Sandra Feldman
October, 2002

We must stop
ignoring poverty’s
impact on school
achievement.

How can we explain the achievement gap between poor children and more advantaged children? School critics usually assume that the schools are to blame, and blaming schools is easier than admitting that poverty affects the education of children in this wealthiest of nations.

Now, there’s no question that we need to continue to improve the underfunded, understaffed, and overcrowded schools that most poor children attend. But if Americans are serious about closing the achievement gap—and I believe they are—then our leaders must stop ignoring the evidence of poverty’s corrosive impact on achievement.

Thanks to some good, new national and international studies, we now know that the achievement gap for poor children as a group is established before they even begin school. For example, when the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) studied a nationally representative sample of children just entering kindergarten, it found that the poor children, on average, were significantly behind other children academically, socially, and in terms of their health. NCES also found that, while the poor children had substantially closed the gap by the end of their kindergarten year, a gap remained, and it often widened as the children went on in school. There are several reasons for this.

First, although most poor children make huge strides during kindergarten, other children are progressing, too. That’s great, but unlike their more advantaged peers, poor children fall back academically during the summer because they usually don’t have access to the academically enriching vacation experiences that middle-class children take for granted—museum visits, organized sports, camping, etc.

So, it is necessary to accelerate dramatically the pace of learning for poor children who are behind or they will never catch up, even though they learn as much and progress as rapidly as other kids during the school year. Disadvantaged children are just as smart as middle-class kids. But they need more time and opportunity for learning.

Two Important Summers

The best solution to this problem is obvious—universal access to high-quality preschool, with priority given to poor children. The AFT has been pushing hard for this, but our nation is so far behind on early childhood education that it’s not easy to get where we need to go, especially in today’s economy.

However, we can make a "down payment" on quality preschool by extending the kindergarten year for disadvantaged children.

To do this, the federal government should help states and districts provide a "Kindergarten-Plus" program that would enable disadvantaged children to start during the summer before they would ordinarily enter kindergarten and then continue through the summer preceding first grade. Such a program would accelerate the progress of poor children and help them maintain it.

The infrastructure for Kindergarten-Plus is already in place. The schools exist; many or most of them already have kindergarten; and we have a pool of qualified public-school kindergarten teachers.

It’s Affordable

Four extra months of kindergarten would cost about $2,000 a child. Approximately 580,000 poor children would qualify, for a total of $1.16 billion. Too much to pay for dramatically reducing the achievement gap? Not if we consider that in one year alone, WorldCom got $1.1 billion in tax breaks, with no benefits for our nation, while Kindergarten-Plus would reduce the need for remediation and special education, lower dropout rates, increase the supply of productive citizens, and ultimately save us billions.

And surely we can afford to make Kindergarten-Plus possible for at least 145,000 children, the poorest of poor children, at a cost of $290 million a year. Or are they less deserving than Enron, which in 2000 received $494 million in tax breaks despite earning $618 million in profits?

Schools alone, even with an expanded kindergarten year, cannot fully inoculate children against the effects of poverty. Schools cannot ensure the health of children, create decent jobs for their parents, or provide a living wage to the working poor. But education remains our best hope for lifting children out of poverty.

We must continue to improve the schools poor children attend. But leaving no child behind has to mean dealing with poverty’s impact on a child’s education and making that effort as important a part of the national strategy for closing the achievement gap as school reform is. A good first step would be getting behind Kindergarten-Plus.