45% of Illinois public school children are poor. And the number is growing.
While Reformy groups like the well-funded Oregon-based Stand for Children concentrate on non-issues like tenure, and teacher-blaming issues like teacher collective bargaining rights, the number of children who qualify for free lunch programs continues to rise.
As a group, Illinois’ public school children are fewer in number, increasingly poor, more diverse and more likely than in recent years to spend the entire school year at the same building, according to new data.
Nearly half of the state’s 2.1 million public school children came from families who were considered low-income during the last school year, as the recession nudged more families toward poverty. About 45.4 percent qualified for a free or discounted school meal, the highest rate in decades.
“It’s a trend I am worried about,” said state schools Superintendent Christopher Koch. “We are seeing additional stress on families … and we know this impacts students.”
Maybe somebody can explain to me the correlation between the collective bargaining rights of teachers and children in poverty.
Fred Klonsky 
Ironically, after plugging mayoral hopeful Del Valle on my fb page, my soon to be nephew-in-law writes: “I can understand why you guys (me and my wife) like him as he clearly aligns with teachers unions 100%. However, he doesn’t therefore seem to have any plan on how to cope with those city schools (particularly in poorer neighborhoods) which tend to have high rates of under-qualified (including under-educated) and already tenured teachers and are consistently failing their students. Del Valle seems more concerned about stepping on anyone’s heals (in education or business policy) than repairing the cracks in the system.”
A perfect example of how those misinformed individuals in the public are so easily swayed by phony political rhetoric coming from such philanthropic groups.
Interesting use of language, isn’t it? It’s not the neighborhoods that are poor. It’s the kids that are poor. Aside from the fact that nothing of what your future in-law says about the teachers in those schools is true. But why be confused with facts when you can even blame poverty on teachers?
“But what’s a principal supposed to do? Get dad a job? Or get the kid a dad?” This has become such a common response when anyone brings poverty up in the school reform debate. Reformers acknowledge poverty as an “issue,” but don’t think it’s something they can change. It is, however, cheap and relatively easy to blame teachers and “fix” them. Makes me irate – why help people, when we can just blame people?
If we truly care about breaking inter-generational poverty, yes, school principals and teachers will have to get involved with national policy. After the National Assoc. of Secondary School Principals looked at the data from the PISA scores and removed the scores of children attending high poverty schools, the U.S. actually scored #1 in the world in reading. Right now, almost 22% of U.S. children live in poverty and the number is predicted to go to 25% by 2014. For a capitalistic society that likes to present itself as a beacon to the rest of the world, this is very bad news indeed. If we look at nations that scored well on the PISA test and see that they have poverty rates of less than 10%, we must question what we are doing wrong. We don’t have to pour money we don’t have at this problem. Instead we can change our monetary, fiscal, tax and other policies. That is what the UK did when its poverty rate was the same as ours — and the UK has lowered its poverty rate to about 16%. Still not great — but better than ours. Why aren’t we looking at Denmark , Finland, Belgium — and even the Czech Republic to see what they’re doing differently in the way of policy decisions? Instead of spending so much time micro-managing American schools, Congress would do better to address poverty in our country. One strategy would be to provide early childhood education whose purpose would be to get students prepared to be successful kindergartners. Slowly but surely, as more and students from high poverty schools graduate from high school, they will break the cycle of intergenerational poverty.I am sure there are other solutions, such a providing incentives to businesses to provide training and jobs in these areas. We have to tackle this problem.
http://www.inthetrencheswithschoolreform.com
http://www.saveourschoolsmarch.org