Stop Marginalizing Students Who Live in Poverty

Many of our students who do not graduate high school college and/or career ready are our marginalized students. Our educational systems often marginalize these students, inadvertently, when they:

• Place students in below level reading groups rather than ensuring they are mastering grade level reading expectations.
• Place students in basic or remedial math classes rather than ensuring they are mastering rigorous, higher-level math.
• Fail to teach all students the academic language to master rigorous content classes such as economics, chemistry, and music theory.
• Fail to demand that all students take advanced classes in high school and develop academic skills needed for success in college and/or career training.
• Fail to provide the mental health care some students need in order to overcome trauma and other issues so that they can focus on the learning of academics.
• Provide lower expectations to some students by placing them in isolated classes that only teach basic English or lower-level math rather than including them in rigorous, grade-level classes with high expectations.
• Blame student circumstances of poverty or an incarcerated parent, etc. as reasons that the student is not achieving at grade level rather than providing the additional support needed to meet high expectations.

These are some of the ways that our educational system often marginalize students and fail to ensure that all students graduate high school college and/or career ready. I write about these systems in Equity in Our Schools: Ensuring Marginalized Students Achieve at a High Level. As educators we do not intentionally marginalize students, it happens when we fail to recognize that our systems, our long-standing practices, are creating conditions where some students are receiving a lesser education than others. It happens when we fail to do whatever it takes for each individual student to master rigorous grade level content.

Paul Gorski also researches and writes frequently about how our educational systems marginalize students in poverty even further. His recent article in ASCD’s Educational Leadership, Stop Punishing Poverty in Schools summarizes many of his findings over the years. I was particularly struck by how it illustrates the marginalization of students through everyday practices that humiliate students by expecting those who need financial assistance to ask for it over and over again to participate in rigorous courses and school activities. He continues with examples of how our systems often price students out of learning by denying students more rigorous learning opportunities that their more affluent peers are able to partake of.

Gorski includes an exercise, in his article, that schools can engage in to identify many of those unrecognized inequitable conditions that exist in our schools and the accumulative impact they have on students from poverty. I encourage educators to read his article and reflect on the practices in your school and/or district that may be further marginalizing students without us even noticing. What will you do about those practices you identify?