Five Strategies for Schools Serving Children Living in Deep Poverty

• In Event: How School Districts Can Address the Needs of Students Furthest From Opportunity

Abstract

Families living in deep poverty face profound material, social, and emotional hardships; they suffer from food shortages, unemployment, unstable housing, inadequate medical care, electrical shutoffs, and isolation. Deep poverty is a multidimensional social ecology that confronts families with a world of vulnerability, marginality, and often violence.

Deep poverty is a world of hardship that, in the words of poverty scholar Matt Desmond, can be characterized as acute, compounded, and persistent. For households living in deep poverty, material deprivation is extreme --- this deprivation is the gateway to a host of other economic, social, and personal challenges which can lead to increased isolation and marginalization. Generally, the struggles of the deeply poor last a lifetime. In addition to the virtual disappearance of the social safety net for the poorest families is the likelihood that deeply poor families live in communities of concentrated poverty where nearly everyone is deeply poor. These communities have few, if any, social services, little access to the basic necessities of life, endure housing that is inadequate and sometimes dangerous, and send their children to schools that are underfunded.

Key to creating schools where students from deep poverty households thrive is to adopt a strong conceptual framework focused on the root causes of deep poverty, which are historical and structural. Rather than focusing on “fixing” students, it is important to understand the ways in which social structures and school organizations need to be reformed to serve them well.

While educators should recognize with compassion the challenges children face every day, they should also recognize their assets when creating and redesigning curricula and programs that allow them to flourish. Schools can adopt the following strategies to support and serve children in deep poverty.
1. Develop a Deep Poverty Whole Child Teaching and Learning Culture. Recent research in child development and neuroscience is the basis for developing learning environments that meet the needs of students living in deep poverty in ways that are culturally responsive and consistently caring.
2. Build Strong Community Schools. Schools educating students living in deep poverty should be more than academic buildings, they should be community hubs that serve students, families, and neighborhoods in the spirit of co-creation.
3. Collaborate with Deep Poverty Communities. Drawing on the strength and knowledge of families and communities living in deep poverty enhances and expands the education vision and capacity of schools to design policies and programs built on the academic and cultural assets of their students.
4. Equalize Funding. To achieve equality of opportunity schools with a large number of students from deep poverty backgrounds should receive more funding than schools that have a low percentage of students from poverty and deep poverty backgrounds.
5. Think Big and Share Successes and Failures. Policymakers and educational leaders should embrace regional and statewide community school designs by building lasting and robust networks of schools and communities and by sharing the successes and failures of deep poverty policies and practices.

Author

• Peter Willis Cookson, Learning Policy Institute
  Presenting Author