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Just west of the rolling, chaparral-covered hills of the Carmel Mountain Preserve and near the northern tip of San Diego sits Ocean Air Elementary School. The school, home to around 500 students, is picturesque. The campus’ bright blue roofs, palm trees and colorful playgrounds melt into neat rows of million-dollar homes.
Of San Diego County’s nearly 800 schools, Ocean Air’s students perform the best on the state’s math standardized tests. Nearly 91 percent of the school’s students meet or exceed state standards. The student’s English test scores clock in fifth countywide, with around 89 percent of students meeting or exceeding state standards. Respectively, that’s about 55 and 42 percentage points higher than California’s math and English averages.
But in another metric, Ocean Air is dead last countywide: the percentage of students who qualify for free or reduced priced meals. Only three percent of its students qualify.
In short, Ocean Air’s families have money.
If you think those facts are a coincidence, they’re not. Research has long shown that poverty and educational outcomes are inextricably linked. As poverty goes up, student performance goes down, and vice versa. This trend is similarly repeated when looking at other educational indicators like chronic absenteeism.
“The evidence is overwhelming,” Stephen Krashen, emeritus professor of education at the University of Southern California, once told me. “Poverty is probably the biggest factor (in student outcomes) – period.”
Kevin Welner, the director of the University of Colorado’s National Education Policy Center, told me “We can predict with sickening accuracy what the academic outcomes for kids are going to be based overwhelmingly on poverty.”
So, it makes sense that schools like Ocean Air excel. Pretty much all wealthy schools do.
There are a lot of reasons for this age-old imbalance and many of them are common sense. Lower-income families are less likely to be able to afford tutors if their child falls behind, parents may work multiple jobs and have less time to work with their kids on homework, kids may suffer from housing insecurity that makes it harder to get work done at home or food insecurity that makes it harder to focus in class because of hunger. The list goes on and on.
There’s also a cruel symmetry to this correlation because education, as has also been widely shown in research, can be a key to ending generational poverty. Education also is a powerful predictor of where kids end up later on in life. What’s worse is that while some schools can and have bucked this trend, they’re often asked to perform miracles when all the cards are stacked against the kids they serve, Welner said.
“We can’t kneecap kids in their lives outside of school and deprive them of stable housing, security and health care and then expect schools to step in and make everything okay,” he said.
Solving many of the challenges students face would take a wholesale orientation that is currently out of reach. However, some attempts to fill those gaps have popped up, like community schools – which are schools that provide additional resources and services to students and families like healthcare or counseling.
There’s no magic bullet for school success, but schools like Edison Elementary have also long shown that there are ways to help kids of all backgrounds succeed. Despite many of Edison’s students coming from lower-income homes, students have for years performed admirably. The school’s potent academic mix – dedicated and experienced teachers who are willing to evolve and whom the community trusts, high standards and a reliance on data and collaboration between all staff – are partly why the school has defied educational gravity.
These in-school strategies also closely mirror five tenets of school improvement developed by researchers at the University of Chicago. The tenets include leadership sparking change, ambitious instruction, talented instructors who are willing to learn and change and a welcoming school environment.
The fifth support, and arguably most important factor, is you – the parent. Taking an active role in a child’s education is vital no matter their background. But getting involved won’t look the same for every family, for understandable reasons. After all, not all parents can spend time volunteering for the PTA.
So, taking an active role may mean working to get kids into early childhood education programs that can help them get ahead, like transitional kindergarten, ensuring they attend class regularly, staying involved in their day-to-day assignments or even enrolling them in after school or summer enrichment programs.
Whatever it looks like though, parents play a vital role in putting kids in the best position to succeed in school – and whatever comes next.