ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, August 17, 1996 TAG: 9608190024
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
THE U.S. Education Department reports that poverty is not the sole cause of the failure of inner-city kids to do well in school. The report doesn't dismiss poverty as a contributor, but says other conditions of city life may be as much to blame.
Of about half the urban-school problems that were examined, a federal official said, there was something about the urban setting itself that was the major contributing factor. Equally poor students in rural settings, the report found, tend to do better.
Maybe so. But if urban conditions other than poverty itself are often the culprit, those other conditions generally have a link to poverty.
The report notes, for example, that low-income youngsters in cities often attend schools with large enrollments, high rates of teacher absenteeism, and abundant discipline and safety problems. Such students are likelier to watch more television and spend less time on homework. They also come more frequently from single-parent families and change schools more frequently.
The ``something about the urban setting,'' we'd add, might also include kids' easy access to drugs and alcohol, and to guns and other lethal weapons. Daily and personal exposure to criminal elements, we'd suggest further, might be making raw fear part of the ``something about the urban setting'' that deters educational progress among children in America's worst city neighborhoods.
To be sure, poverty is not the only ill associated with urban life, and poverty is too often cited by urban school officials as reason in itself for low test scores or high dropout rates in their districts.
But the conditions of city life that seem to work against doing well in school aren't products of a city's water supply or sewage system. Almost all - drugs, crime, single-parent households - are related to poverty and exacerbated by poverty.
Many of us, of course, have known individuals who grew up in inner cities and in abject poverty, and who - with pluck, perseverance or the blessing of a high IQ - were superachievers in the classroom. But the poor educational track record of inner-city kids, in the aggregate, remains among the country's most urgent problems.
The Education Department's findings may offer a clue as to why a solution seems so vexingly elusive: Urban poverty breeds conditions that work against the very thing - educational achievement - that brings liberation from poverty.
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