The numbers of homeless children are climbing here in rural southern Vermont, as they are everywhere. As stated in the article Lou posted, though, the numbers of homeless children "do not begin to paint a complete picture of the problem." In every school that I know of, children arrive daily with hunger pangs and financial fears. We can feed them breakfast, but can't assure them that their parents will find a new job or that the landlord won't evict them. In one kindergarten class that I'm familiar with, children help the teacher choose a question each afternoon to be written on the board and answered as they arrive the next morning. One day in December, a boy asked if the next day's question could be "Do you have a home?" This lack of financial security translates into anxiety that's felt by all family members, not just parents. We know that anxiety disrupts working memory, thus affects students' ability to learn. We also know that health care is increasingly unaffordable for many families and know the debilitating effects of illness on learning. It's quite clear that the material conditions in which many of our students live are not condusive to learning. We do our best to feed children, bring in clothing for them, arrange medical care when possible, and generally create safe classroom environments to minimize the anxiety that children bring to school with them every day. Oh yes, and we do still teach, in spite of the increasing amount of time devoted to standardized tests for NCLB. Yet teachers all over the country hear that it's our fault that students aren't learning. We read that schools must be reformed, or closed and replaced by charter schools. We're subjected to "professional development" presentations from Ruby Payne's for-profit business, aha! Process Inc., in which we're told that the "culture of poverty" is a mindset that causes poverty and prevents students who come from economically disadvantaged homes from learning. If we can just help these students to adopt middle class values about education, they will succeed. Interestingly, I'm hearing more teachers (generally a conservative group) say that capitalism just doesn't work. Karen (WL. note: the last sentence means it is time to establish a communist pole - polarity, and the masses are yearning for such explanations of the current crisis.)
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