Joe Klein of U.S. News

¶ … Joe Klein of U.S. News & World Report (2009), the continued failure of American public school systems to meet the needs of poor students (in particular) is attributable to what he calls a culture of excuses that applies to students, teachers, and school administrators throughout the educational system. Klein maintains that public focus mistakenly emphasizes finding solutions to urban poverty as its primary methodological approach to improving public education. Klein acknowledges that this is not an argument against finding workable solutions to the problem of urban poverty at all. Rather, Klein objects to the philosophy and public policy of addressing poverty as the most direct means to resolving the problems with public education. He also acknowledges that poverty is indeed another (independent) variable that also impacts on relative opportunity beginning in very early childhood.

The author's central thesis is that the current trend of trying to improve public education by focusing on ancillary matters such as nutritional programs, pre-school services, and counseling for students and their families is not an effective way to address the (acknowledged) many educational problems typically associated with school systems serving underprivileged communities. Instead, the success of various "no-excuse"-type of educational programs that demand excellence and provide the necessary instruction and support to motivate students, teachers, and administrators to do their absolute best prove that the detrimental effects of poverty on educational potential and opportunity can be substantially overcome irrespective of poverty issues. In that regard, the author offers several examples of no-excuse educational programs that have achieved superior educational outcomes in very poor communities. He also refutes the argument that such schools only succeed because they select only the most gifted students in the first place. In fact, that is not the case at all according to the examples offered by Klein.

Tie-in with Classroom Learning

Obviously, the natural tie-in with classroom learning is that, if Klein is right in his analysis, teachers (and school administrators) often expect less from poor students in underprivileged communities and that those expectations are self-fulfilling. The apparent success of the no-excuse model of public education suggests that many of the techniques that have been applied with positive results in those educational environments would be equally useful in public schools in poor communities. Instead of viewing poor academic achievement as inevitable or as understandable among poor students, teachers should realize that they are handicapping their students even further by failing to expect as much of them as of their more fortunate counterparts simply by virtue of their being underprivileged.

Integrating Information into Teaching