Ask a group of adults—educators, business people, or community activists—why disadvantaged students don't perform as well as their peers, and they'll point to the usual suspects, said Paul Ruiz, a principal partner at the Education Trust, Inc., a nonprofit group that works for the high academic achievement of all students.
Paul Ruiz
"The adults will say, "The students don't know English. They come to school without having eaten breakfast. They're watching HBO until four o'clock in the morning. The family doesn't value education," Ruiz reported.
When disadvantaged young people, however, are asked the same question, they give a very different response, he said. "They tell us that their counselors suggest they shouldn't take the rigorous stuff because they might flunk the course, and what they really need is to [graduate]," he said. "They tell us that principals don't take them seriously, and that principals spend most of their time with the 25 percent of students who don't cause problems."
Disadvantaged students also say they have too many teachers who don't know their subject matter, Ruiz noted. "The school doesn't make it a point to get the best and brightest teachers to teach them. In fact, the schools get the best and brightest to teach the A.P. and honors courses. [Disadvantaged students] get the new teacher, the out-of-field teacher, the emergency-certified teacher, the burnt-out teacher."
Unfortunately, many adults have developed the mind-set that disadvantaged students can't be expected to do well in school, Ruiz said. "When I was taking [education] courses at the university," he recalled, "I was heavily influenced by the Coleman Report, as many of us were. That was the ground-breaking report that basically said if you're poor, if you come from a broken family or impoverished neighborhood, the schools are relatively neutral, and there's very little schools can do for you.
"So," he continued, "we grew up as teachers, as principals, throwing our hands up in the air, saying, 'These students are poor, they come from broken homes, they don't value education, so there's not much more we can do. They're doing about as well as we can expect them to.' We were socialized into making those conclusions," Ruiz said.
Today, his attitude is the reverse. "At the Education Trust, we're unequivocally convinced that teachers make all the difference in the world—especially for low-income and minority kids." (For more information, visit http://www.edtrust.org/main/index.asp.)