He starts with a charge that is, unfortunately, quite common among left-leaning folks concerned about poverty: Because NCLB is designed to help improve the education provided to poor children, it takes away pressure to make those children not poor. As evidence of this, he cites the fact that child poverty increased from 2000 to 2004. In other words, because we've decided that schools can help poor children, we're less concerned that they are poor, and thus more have become poor.
Let's put aside the fact that NCLB wasn't enacted until 2002 and didn't really get up and running until well after that. 2000 was a historic low for child poverty, a fact that's almost entirely a function of larger economic trends. Here are child poverty rates from 1995 to 2004, according to the U.S. Census:
1995: 20.2%
1996: 19.8%
1997: 19.2%
1998: 18.3%
1999: 16.6%
2000: 15.6%
2001: 15.8%
2002: 16.3%
2003: 17.2%
2004: 17.3%
I'm by no stretch of the imagination a supporter of the economic, taxation, wage, or spending policies of this administration or Congress. But the recession that began in 2001--and the resulting, inevitable increase in child poverty that followed--wasn't their fault, any more than the previous expansion was of their making. They could have done a lot more to help those poor children, but they by and large didn't make them poor to begin with. If you believe otherwise, than you'd logically have to give the current Congress credit for the overall reduction in child poverty over the last decade, even though their attitudes toward welfare, housing, nutrition, the minimum wage, etc. are no better now than they were then.
More to the point, I think Ed's characterization of the essential debate here is mistaken. He says:
...the policy disagreement that reformers like Kevin have with reformers like Richard is over the role that maximizing the quality of a given minute of instruction can play in closing the achievement gap vs reforms that add minutes or otherwise address poverty head on.
Why is it maximizing quality vs more minutes and addressing poverty head on? I'm whole-heartedly in favor of doing both, and there is no reason that both cannot be achieved. I'm not saying that increasing the minimum wage is getting in the way of holding schools accountable for performance or increasing the quality of classroom teaching, because if students' parents can earn a fair, decent wage, it doesn't matter if their schools are any good. Why Ed and Rothstein believe the converse is puzzling, to say the least.
Ed asks for evidence: how about all the data from the urban NAEP and the Council of Great City Schools that show that some big-city urban schools systems are much more effective than others when it comes to student learning, even though they have similarly poor students, and that some systems have already succeeded in improving performance for poor students despite the barriers that Rothstein says are insurmountable? Or the myriad studies that show that some teachers are far more effective than others, and that poor students are amost always more likely to be assigned to the least experienced, least qualified, and least effective teachers? Or the incontrovertable success of schools like KIPP? Or plain examples of school mismanagement, incompetence, and--rarely, to be sure--illegal conduct, like that perpetrated by the leadership of the AFT's affiliate here in Washington, DC?
Strong leadership, recruiting and supporting good teachers, more appropriate reading instriction, aligning curricula to teaching, effective unions--all these things can, and do, help poor students learn. But they're not easy to implement, and they're made harder still when people like Rothstein argue that they won't matter much in the end, or might actually hurt poor students by diminishing the imperative to alleviate their poverty. This kind of attentuated argument of perverse consequences is a staple of reactionary discourse, and simply makes the hard job of educators harder still.
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