Standard 10, collaboration, ethics, and relationships. A teacher must be able to communicate and interact with parents or guardians, families, school colleagues, and the community to support student learning and well-being.

Student learning and well-being are enhanced by close communication with families, especially those families who face daily challenges due to employment toils, housing problems, and discrimination.  Families who struggle need to hear good things about how their children are doing in school.  I make a point of contacting families frequently to let them know when their child has succeeded in school.  But many children from families who fight to make a living face daunting disadvantages, and the wider community cannot disavow responsibility for these young students who want to grow up and contribute to our society.

The paper below details the monumental and multi-dimensional afflictions that many of our school children face.  As an extension of this study, a paper could be developed that looks at the outcomes of Minneapolis’ Northside Achievement Zone, which is working to help families and the community nurture students and prepare them for higher learning.    

Poverty in the Community

and its Relationship to Learning Disabilities

Poverty places children at higher risk for disabilities and low academic achievement.  The link is obvious, but stating this relationship and its effect on students has fallen out of favor with policymakers in recent years.  In this paper my goals are to examine the link between poverty and childhood special needs, look at specific health problems from which many special education students suffer, and suggest remedies.

Sadly, childhood disability status is highly related to poverty levels (Turnbull et al., 2013, p. 67).  According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2012), today the official poverty income level for a family of four is $23,050.  More than a third of students with disabilities live in families with incomes under $25,000, based on a study cited by Turnbull et al (2013, p. 67).  Yet in the general youth population only 24 percent of children reside in families with yearly earnings less than $25,000.  Students with disabilities disproportionately reside in single-parent households with family members with low education levels, contributing to economic hardship.  “Low education of mothers has a positive correlation with various risks for disability” (Turnbull et al 2013, p. 70). 

As a nation we appear to invest far fewer resources in our education and related supportive systems resulting in more child health problems and lower academic outcomes.  UNICEF looked at the 24 high-income OECD nations (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) and noted that the U.S. had one of the worst records for childhood health, education, and material well-being.  In contrast, the top nations were Denmark and Finland.  In these noteworthy countries complaints of childhood maladies were low and educational resources and math and science scores were above average.

The Federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law contributes to our pivot away from the connection between poverty and childhood special needs and learning disabilities.  NCLB assumes that poverty should not matter in student achievement.  (Gerstl-Pepin, 2006).  The narrative contained in the law stresses that student failure is the result of schools (and teachers) not being held accountable.  NCLB focuses on the race of students with never a word about the disproportionate levels of poverty that afflict communities of color.  One of the chief goals of NCLB was to make sure that disadvantaged and special needs students were not ignored; but the law neglected to address the challenges that these children carry into the classroom.  Indeed, special education teachers in high-poverty districts report having higher caseloads, fewer materials, and less support from administrators compared to special education teachers in more affluent districts (Fall & Billingsley, 2011).  

Let us examine specific disabilities that afflict poor children at high rates.  I will highlight how poor health and nutrition hinder childhood development and learning.  Compared to middle-class children, many acute medical problems affect impoverished school children.  Ear infections, vision problems, high lead levels, and asthma contribute to the difficulties encountered by our school children with special needs.   New research paints a vivid and disturbing picture of the negative roll stress hormones play in child brain development, leading to thinking impairments that diminish the ability to learn.   

In the richest nation on earth it is disconcerting to talk about the prevalence of childhood hunger and the frequency that we see very hungry children in our classrooms.  I have seen famished children lunge for food when breakfast bars are offered as a Friday morning classroom treat.  I have heard children say that there is “…only a pitcher of orange drink at home in the frig, and that’s the way it’s been for a few days.”  We know that recently the Chicago teacher’s strike was resolved promptly partly because the union was aware that students were at home with very little to eat.  Undernourished children become more apathetic and have weakened cognitive capacity according to David Berliner (2009).     

Both rich and poor children contract ear infections; poor children, however, are more likely to suffer from their long-term ill effects (Berliner, 2006).  When ear infections frequently recur during a child’s first three years of life, hearing loss often results, leading to problems with language development and later reading problems.  Those of us who have worked with poor children in early childhood special education know some of these early warning signs: two-year-olds with allergies and frequent ear infections who don’t speak; the same child as a preschool student who aggressively acts out because he or she can’t communicate.

Untreated vision problems also plague poor children and their families.  In a study cited by Berliner (2006), 50 percent of vision-tested children in Boston and New York City had a correctable deficiency, but the majority received no intervention.  It may not be until lengthy special education assessments occur in elementary school that a child’s vision difficulty with close-up print is identified.

High lead levels disproportionately affects poor children and children of color, consigning too many in this group to “low ability” academic levels (Berliner, 2009).  Berliner notes that the harm that lead does is almost always permanent.  Even very small amounts of lead diminish intellectual functioning and reduce the child’s capacity to learn.  Berliner goes on to say (2009, p. 976):

“Though a reduction of 4 or 5 IQ points is not disastrous in a single poisoned child, the IQ reduction in a population will increase by 50 percent the number of children who qualify for special education, just about what we see in the schools serving the poor.”

Air pollution also affects schooling and learning disabilities.  One section of New York City had an asthma prevalence rate of 21-23 percent.  In cities diesel emissions are the culprit most responsible for childhood asthma.  Asthma reduces school attendance, and sometimes children enter a downward spiral of absenteeism and lower grades, requiring intervention such as labeling the student as having a special education designation of “other health impairment.”  Berliner (2009) states that pollutants of all kinds—lead, air, mercury, pesticides—tend to be higher in inner cities and rural areas, and involve poor children to a greater extent.  Nicholas Kristof writes in the New York Times that the removal of lead from gasoline may have boosted American children’s I.Q.s by six points over the last several decades. 

“Childhood stress can have long lasting neural effects, making it harder to exercise self-control, focus attention, and delay gratification...” says David Brooks in a recent New York Times editorial (2012).  Known as toxic stress, the hormone cortisol floods the brain of an infant or a growing fetus, and disrupts metabolism and brain development.  “We’re beginning to get a pretty compelling biological model of why kids who have experienced adversity have trouble learning,” says a doctor who is quoted in a similar editorial by Nicholas Kristof (2012).  Both Brooks and Kristof call for greater investment in prenatal and early childhood interventions to break a growing problem: the long-term, destructive effects of stress on children that consigns too many of them to educational failure.  

In order for young children’s brains to develop most favorably, they require good nutrition, stress reduction, supportive relationships with parents and caregivers, and screenings and referral to services if necessary.  Kristof describes the Nurse-Family Partnership Program that assigns a home-visiting nurse to young, poor, first-time pregnant women to make a plan for healthy living during pregnancy, and later encourages the new mothers to breast feed their baby to develop immunities.  Follow-up data on the Nurse-Family Partnership reveals that the children were less likely to have intellectual problems at age six compared to similar children whose mothers were not visited by a nurse.        

Another early childhood education program intervenes with children living in poverty who are at high risk for lower cognitive, language, and social skills (Peterson et al., 2010).  Under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Individualized Education Improvement Act (IDEA, 2004), Part C requires that beginning at birth, children and their families have a right to early intervention services that are tailored to meet their needs.  Early intervention services may be warranted due to a young child’s developmental delays in cognition, communication, socialization, emotional behavior, fine or gross motor skills, or adaptive development (Turnbull et al., 2013, p. 10).  Part C requires the identification of services, partnering with families, coordinating services among providers, maximizing inclusive practices, and monitoring child progress and development.  Peterson’s study found that children who were most at risk of cognitive delays or language problems (e.g., poor children and families of color) also were the least likely to access Part C services.  Collaboration among community partners, such as Head Start staff and health care providers, helped to assure that families in this large study received appropriate assistance.  For example, Head Start program staff kept an eye on young children through home visits, reassessed developmental progress (or lack of progress), and referred children and parents to special services when it was apparent that children’s development was stalled.  Further, children with significant disabilities (e.g., Cerebral Palsy) were accommodated in inclusive childcare Head Start programs, giving parents hope that their child would not be forever excluded from normal childhood life.

Poverty is correlated with poorer childhood physical health, learning disabilities, and developmental delays.  When you take a close look at recent, prominent educational initiatives, one becomes aware of a huge dark void in our attention to general child well-being and its relationship to academic achievement and learning disabilities.    We get stuck in a rut of blaming schools and teachers, and ignore the multiple unmet needs of the more than 20 percent of our U.S. children who are poor.    

Bibliography

Berliner, D. (2009). Are teachers responsible for low achievement by poor students? Kappa Delta Pi Record, Fall, 19-21.

Berliner, D. (2006). Our impoverished view of educational reform.  Teachers College Record, 108, 949-995.

Brooks, D. (2012). The psych approach.  New York Times.  Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/28/opinion/brooks-the-psych-approach.html on September 27, 2012.

Fall, A. & Billingsley, B. (2011). Disparities in work conditions among early career special educators in high- and low-poverty districts. Remedial and Special Education, 32:1, 64-78.

Gerstl-Pepin, C. (2006).  The paradox of poverty narratives: Educators struggling with children left behind. Educational Policy, 20:1, 143-162.

Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA). (2004). (Public Law 108-446).  C.F.R.300.

Kristof, N. (2012). A poverty solution that starts with a hug.  New York Times.  Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/opinion/sunday/kristof-a-poverty-solution-that-starts-with-a-hug.html on January 7, 2012.

Peterson, C., Milgram-Mayer, L., Summers, J., Luze, G. (2010). Meeting needs of young children at risk for or having a disability.  Early Childhood Education Journal, 37: 509-517.

Turnbull, A., Turnbull, R., Wehmeyer, M., & Shogren, K. (2013). Exceptional lives: Special education in today’s schools, 7^th ed. Boston: Pearson.

UNICEF. (2010). The children left behind.  Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/11/opinion/11blow.html?ref=global on December 10, 2010.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. (2012).  2012 HHS Poverty Guidelines.  Retrieved from http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/12poverty.shtml on October 28, 2012.