Education and Poverty in Affluent Countries

Carlo Raffo,Alan Dyson,Helen Gunter,Dave Hall,Lisa Jones,Afroditi Kalambouka

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135272036
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

For the first time, researchers, policymakers and practitioners across the world will have access to a comprehensive mapping of research evidence and policy strategies about education and poverty in affluent countries. Although there is widespread agreement that poverty and poor educational outcomes are related, there are competing explanations as to why that should be the case. This is a major problem for practitioners, policy makers and researchers who are looking for pointers to action, or straightforward ways of understanding an issue that troubles education systems across the world. This unique book brings scholarship and analysis from some of the most influential researchers and writers on education and poverty within one text. The authors provide a synthesising framework that will help researchers and policy makers to examine future educational policy in a holistic and comprehensive fashion.

Part I
Education and Poverty: A Mapping Framework

1
Education and Poverty in Affluent Countries

An Introduction to the Book and the Mapping Framework

Carlo Raffo, Alan Dyson, Helen Gunter, Dave Hall, Lisa Jones, and Afroditi Kalambouka

INTRODUCTION

The education systems of many affluent countries contain a paradox. Although education is seen as the way out of poverty, learners from poorer backgrounds consistently do badly in the education system. International data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) study of Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries shows that this is a widespread problem with deprivation having a negative impact on attainment across all OECD countries (OECD, 2008 a&b). This enduring challenge has led affluent countries, in their different ways and based on different types of research, to advocate particular policies and implement a plethora of targeted ‘magic bullet’ intervention strategies to deal with the challenge. Growing evidence, however, suggests that these interventions have, in large measure, failed to deliver systemic change and greater equity in terms of educational outcomes. Although there is widespread agreement that poverty and poor educational outcomes are related, there are competing explanations as to why that should be the case. This is a major problem for practitioners, policy makers, and researchers who are looking for pointers to action, or straightforward ways of understanding an issue that troubles education systems across the world. The situation is made more problematic because there are competing explanations and a plurality of positions that researchers have taken with regards to the field of education and poverty. Put simply, researchers often work in domains within the field that share a similar set of philosophical assumptions, whilst practitioners and policy makers too often reach for the action that is closest to hand, without considering its underlying assumptions about why and how poverty impacts on educational outcomes. As a result, the competing explanations of the poverty-education link have rarely been categorised and synthesised. The purpose of this book is to provide within one text a mapping framework for organising these disparate competing explanations, perspectives, and positions. Hence the book provides an opportunity for multi-disciplinary and multi-perspective researchers to respond to the issues at hand in ways that provide a deeper and more critically diverse set of explanations. What we hope this provides researchers and policy makers is a framework of explanations that can be examined in the light of any particular perspective, position, or viewpoint that might be held—a set of ideas against which practice, policy, and theory might be explored and extended. The mapping framework and expert voices contained in the book emanate from a research project funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation as part of their Education and Poverty Programme. This project enabled the editors of the book to undertake a review of the field and to invite internationally renowned academics to seminars to discuss and develop our review. We then asked them to develop their own detailed thinking about the link between education and poverty that made reference to our review. As part of the project we also developed some initial thinking about the implications of our review for educational policy. The book is the culmination of this project and it is hoped that our coherent synthesis of explanations, with detailed examples of particular perspectives and approaches that link to policy in the UK, US, and beyond, provide a depth of understanding that will transcend time and be as relevant to understanding future educational interventions and changes in government as we hope it does now. It is perhaps the first time that such a major and significant task has been undertaken, and we hope it will be widely used over time and to inform new studies and policy making.

In order to start engaging fully with the issues at hand we should set out our thinking about certain key terms that underpin the book. In our considerations about how to map the major conceptualisations of the relationship between education and poverty we immediately needed to reflect on how both terms might be defined. Although extensive and detailed debates about the concepts are beyond the remit of the book we do offer some broad working definitions of these terms that reflect explanations that we can work with and that at the same time set parameters for the nature of the book.

WORKING DEFINITIONS OF EDUCATION AND POVERTY

Education and Educational Outcomes

When examining notions of education, the book primarily focuses on young people’s experiences of formal education in the primary, secondary, and tertiary sectors in affluent countries, and, more specifically, how these experiences translate into outcomes. Educational outcomes can be both narrowly and more broadly defined. Narrow definitions of educational outcomes generally refer to educational attainments (for example in England by Key Stage [KS] 2, 3, and 4 results, Standard Assessment Targets, and Cognitive Ability Tests). Alternatively they may refer to data regarding enrolment and retention as young people complete their compulsory schooling and progress through further and higher education. Broader definitions of outcomes may also reflect wider notions of valued educational capability and processes that include, for example, creativity, citizenship, social and emotional intelligence, and the development of autonomy and reflect umbrella terms such as educational well-being. Some of these broader definitions of educational processes and outcomes are encompassed in national educational policies in most affluent countries. The book seeks to reflect both broader and narrower notions of education when examining the links between education and poverty.

Defining Poverty

The definition and measurement of poverty is also a highly contested area. Key issues in the definition include the extent to which poverty describes an absolute state or relative inequality. Absolute definitions are based on access to basic resources to sustain life (e.g. food and shelter). Relative definitions are based on indicators of access to goods or activities that are deemed essential or appropriate in particular societies at particular points in time. Absolute poverty is a relatively rare phenomenon in the world’s richer countries and consequently most indicators of poverty in such countries are based on relative indicators.

We, in line with many researchers in the field, refer to poverty as people living in households below 60 percent of median income. In order to illustrate this definition we provide some examples of what child poverty looks like in the UK. National statistics in 2004–05 suggest that there are 2.4 million children living in households with below 60 percent of median income. Poverty is also inequitably distributed geographically in the UK with an increased risk of experiencing child poverty being associated with living in particular regions or localities. A study by Hirsch (2004) for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that 70 percent of the most deprived areas in the UK are found in the four cities of Glasgow, London, Liverpool, and Manchester. They are home to 128 of the 180 local areas where more than half of families are out of work and relying on benefits. Evidence in such areas suggest that those young people most at risk of living in severe and persistent poverty are those in lone-parent families, whose parents are unemployed or working part-time, in families with four or more children, and with a mother aged under 25. Other groups that are also particularly at high risk of living in poverty in such areas are those from ethnic minorities, disabled people, local authority housing association tenants, and those with no formal educational qualifications. Although these are UK statistics, similar types of at-risk groups experiencing parallel levels of relative poverty and concentrated in particular urban regions reflect the demographic features of many affluent countries, particularly those countries with greatest levels of inequality and heterogeneity.

Although levels of relative poverty may vary between affluent countries, the experiences of living in poverty and their effects on personal, family, and community well-being appear to have some strong parallels. A strong theme is how a lack of resources can generate financial pressures on families that result in a whole number of hardships— economic, cultural, personal, and social. Economically, families may struggle to pay bills, may have limited space in their homes for shared living, may need to undertake two or more jobs to try and make ends meet, and may struggle to provide the basic essentials including heating, clothing, and food. The social, cultural, and personal consequences of economic hardships are equally compelling. These may range from family strife and conflict emanating from not being able to cope financially to a lack of self-respect and dignity about living in poverty in a society that apparently has so much to offer and which the media glamorises as being open to all sorts of possibilities. The concentration of poverty in certain communities also has the effects of fragmenting relationships and networks of support, distancing people ever more from potential developments in their localities and stigmatising those areas and people in those areas as ‘unsafe’ and at times ‘not worthy’ of society’s support. Poor areas are also sites that attract those who take advantage of the vulnerability that people can feel when made poor—whether these be loan sharks or those peddling drugs to provide apparent ‘relief’ from the daily grind of poverty. This culture of scarcity can make for a dispiriting existence which impacts on self-confidence, self esteem, and the ability to see further than one’s locality and perhaps those immediately around. It is the material, social, economic, and cultural conditions of poverty, their impact on educational outcomes, and the educational policy challenges required to remediate such outcomes that provide the focus to this book.

THE LINK BETWEEN POVERTY AND POOR EDUCATIONAL OUTCOMES

Although the concepts of poverty and education are at times seen as both complex and contested, the link between education (as defined in various ways and in relation to indicators of enrolment, retention, and outcomes) and poverty in affluent countries has been demonstrated clearly (Chitty, 2002; OECD, 2008a). Those young people who live in conditions of poverty, however defined, are more likely not to enrol or be retained in education, are more likely to achieve poorer educational outcomes and in many other ways are likely to demonstrate lower levels of general educational well-being than young people living in relative affluence. Conversely, those not enrolling or being retained in education and those achieving low educational outcomes in either narrow attainment terms or in more general terms of educational well-being are also more likely to then experience poverty. In some affluent countries (e.g. England) these findings are consistent from one generation to the next (Bynner & Joshi, 2002). Other research has demonstrated the link between schools serving poor communities and some of the lowest levels of aggregate educational attainment to be found in those areas (Kelly, 1995; Mortimore & Whitty, 1997; Demie et al., 2002; Bell, 2003). For example, in England the Social Exclusion Unit found that five times as many secondary schools in the “worst neighbourhoods” had ”serious weaknesses” than was typically the case, and children drawn from poorer family origins were more likely to have been in the lowest quartile of attainment in educational tests compared to their counterparts in other quartiles (SEU, 1998). Evidence from the Department for Children Schools and Families in England highlight that deprivation as measured by free school meals (a crude and yet accessible indicator of relative poverty) and the Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index (a neighbourhood poverty index) is strongly associated with poorer performance on average, at every stage of a pupil’s school career (Schools Analysis and Research Division, Department for Children Schools and Families, 2009). For example at the Foundation Stage (from age 3 to reception class) in 2007, only 35 percent of pupils in the most deprived areas reached the expected level of attainment, compared to 51 percent of pupils in other areas. A deprivation attainment gap (measured by FSM) is also observed in English and maths at primary and secondary school: in each subject, a gap opens at Key Stage 1 (age 7) and increases by the end of Key Stage 4 (age 16). At Key Stage 4, there was a 29 percentage point gap between FSM and non-FSM pupils in English in 2007, and a 28 percentage point gap in maths. Evidence from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (2005) shows that key attainment in 2001-2 increases steadily from pupils in schools that are located in most deprived wards to those in schools in most prosperous wards. In the US, Jencks’ (1972) comprehensive study showed that whatever type of school children attended, their educational performance reflected the socio-economic position of their parents. Finally, the OECD’s PISA (2001) study, analysing the literacy and numeracy levels of 15-year-olds in developed countries found that for most OECD countries the distribution of educational achievement reflected pre-existing inequalities, with differences between high and low attainment accounted for by socio-economic class and by implication levels of relative poverty (Chitty, 2002). This international evidence clearly points to the fact that young people living in poverty in affluent countries are less likely to achieve educational outcomes than their more affluent counterparts. Perhaps what is more disturbing is the depressing fact that the link between education and poverty has been enduring. As Levin states: “ … The problems do not seem to be any smaller today than they were in 1970, and the gaps in achievement between poor urban schools and provincial or national averages remain large just about everywhere” (Levin, 2009: 181–82).

Although the evidence for the link between education and poverty is overwhelming, this is not a deterministic relationship—not all young people who experience poverty do badly in education. As we will establish later in the book, there are many young people who demonstrate forms of resilience that moderate the risks associated with living in poverty. In addition there are also examples of policy interventions that have made a real difference in the educational lives of disadvantaged young people that have resulted in real improvement in educational attainments.

In essence, therefore what this book attempts to do is examine the competing explanations for how and why poverty and education are jointly linked and implicated in maintaining disadvantages and underachievement, what policy makers have attempted to do to resolve the situation, and what other policy possibilities exist to improve the situation.

EXPLANATIONS FOR THE LINKS BETWEEN EDUCATION AND POVERTY—AN INTRODUCTION TO THE MAPPING FRAMEWORK

As we have highlighted, the relationship between poverty and educational outcomes is an international phenomenon and one which has attracted much attention. One reason for this is that, although there is widespread agreement that poverty and poor educational outcomes are related, there is much less agreement as to why that should be the case. Competing explanations—in terms of the differential distribution of educational opportunities, the cultures of poor communities, the dynamics of poor families, the quality of schooling in disadvantaged areas, and many more—have been advanced. Policy makers and practitioners are therefore faced with a bewildering array of possible explanations, each of which seems to be supported by equally convincing evidence and argument. It is hardly surprising, therefore, if their interventions often seem to be based on the latest explanation to be advanced, the one which is argued for most f...