How High-Poverty Schools Can Meet the Needs of Students Living in Deep Poverty

• In Event: Building School Communities for Students Living in Deep Poverty: Strategies for Success

Abstract

The first panelist is a distinguished researcher and policy advocate whose work has been instrumental in bringing to light the human and social cost of educational injustice. Her most recent work has focused on how schools can meet the learning and wellbeing needs of students living in poverty and concentrated poverty. The findings of this line of research have resulted in state-level policy innovations and reinventions. In particular, she and her colleagues have found that establishing and maintaining racially and economically inclusive community schools is an evidence-based success strategy well designed to meet the needs of students living in deep poverty.

Her symposium paper is a case study of New Mexico—a state that is seeking to use state policy to create a system of school communities that respond to the needs of children in deep and concentrated poverty. For most of its history, New Mexico’s social and economic context has been unable to lift a large proportion of young people out of poverty or address the barriers that poverty creates to school success. Weaknesses in the education system, together with the state’s extraordinarily high poverty and limited economic opportunity, have undermined the state’s stability, health, and quality of life, and led to the state’s bottom rankings on nearly every index of childhood and adult well-being.

The recognition that children and young people who face barriers to school success from poverty and marginalization are the norm in the state, rather than exceptions, has led state and local policymakers to re-design its educational system with the needs of children in poverty at the center, rather at the periphery, where they might get “special” help. Specifically, New Mexico is using the authority and resources of the state to create a statewide system of community schools built on the idea that, although schools alone can’t “fix” widespread poverty, evidence-based interventions can mitigate some of the barriers schooling disadvantages associated with it. Collaborating with local partners, community schools provide health and social supports, expanded learning opportunities, and strong family and community engagement to meet community needs and uses community assets.

The New Mexico case documents the strategies that state policymakers can use—fiscal support, technical assistance, and learning opportunities—to build the capacity of local communities to create and sustain such schools.

The essential question this panelist will address is: What strategies can community schools implement to meet the learning and well-being needs of students living in deep poverty households?

Author

• Jeannie Oakes, University of California - Los Angeles