Poverty firmly linked to inferior performance in classroom,
but some schools buck trend

By FREDREKA SCHOUTEN
Gannett News Service

PUEBLO, Colo. — On paper, the students at Beulah Heights Elementary School are destined to fail.

More than six of 10 students are poor and Hispanic. And conventional wisdom argues that poverty — and the problems it spawns — hold children back.

Yet, when the state released standardized test scores last spring, Beulah beat the odds: 100 percent of Hispanic third-graders at the school scored at the proficient level or higher.

Those results came as no surprise to Beulah's staff. Pueblo School District 60 has spent more than $2 million since 1998 training teachers on reading instruction. A reading specialist, Gina Gallegos, works full time at the 320-student school and coaches other teachers. Teachers use sophisticated diagnostic exams to uncover students' weaknesses and chart their progress.

And everyone on the school's professional staff — including Principal Keith Owen — takes turns staying after school to run intensive reading groups for struggling students.

"You can't say that one group of kids can't perform because of their home life or address," said Owen, an earnest 33-year-old who has run the school for almost three and a half years. "These kids are just as smart as any other kids."

In scattered locations around the country, schools like Beulah Heights are spending money on new strategies to improve the quality of teaching for the nation's neediest children. The Pueblo school district has emphasized teacher training.

Others offer salary bonuses and housing incentives to lure teachers to high-poverty schools. City officials in Chattanooga, Tenn., for example, are offering special incentives to teachers who have a record of significantly boosting student achievement and who agree to work in one of the city's nine failing schools. The incentives include an extra $5,000.

Still, at schools across the country, the children who need the most help — those who come from impoverished homes - are taught by the least qualified teachers, a Gannett News Service analysis has found.

Poverty is firmly linked to inferior performance in the classroom. Black and Hispanic students are more likely to come from poor households and are more likely to start school behind.

A recent study by the Educational Testing Service found that only 57 percent of black kindergarten students could recognize the letters of the alphabet, compared with 71 percent of white kindergartners. And only 50 percent of Hispanic children recognized the letters.

Yet poor, black and Hispanic students are more likely than their white and affluent peers to be taught by teachers with no more than three years of experience, the GNS investigation found. Nearly half of principals who run predominantly Hispanic schools, for example, used substitutes to fill long-term teaching vacancies.
^Applicants lining up

Beulah defies those statistics. The school's teachers have an average 16 years of experience. Most hold master's degrees, and all meet state licensing standards. Experienced teachers at other area schools are clamoring to work at Beulah, which draws its student body from a working-class neighborhood that includes government-subsidized apartments and a trailer park called the Oasis Mobile Country Club.

Last year, a fourth-grade teaching vacancy at the school drew 60 applicants.

"We've been able to pick and choose the faculty we have here," Owen said. "It's the Number One thing we can do to impact student achievement — the quality of the teacher."

Two years ago, parent Diane Archuleta was so frustrated with the school that serves her middle-class neighborhood that she transferred her son to Beulah. Michael has learning difficulties. When he finished the first grade at his old school, he could not read.

"He cried every day," Archuleta recalled.

After three years of intensive reading instruction at Beulah, Michael's teachers say he now reads at grade level.

"School is still not his favorite thing," Archuleta said of Michael, who is in the fifth-grade. "But he's made tremendous progress."

Michael and his schoolmates are doing so well that they team up these days with students at a high school across town for biology class — an example of the new achievement standard at Beulah Heights.

Michael and his high-school "bio-buddy" recently dissected sharks together.

"It's been fun, except they smell," Michael said.

Megan Farnsworth, an education fellow with the Washington-based Heritage Foundation, has studied Beulah for a forthcoming book on high-performing, high-poverty schools.

"Too many teachers and schools believe that demography is destiny," Farnsworth said. "If every single teacher knew how to teach reading the way those teachers know how, the world would be a much better place."

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