By Lisa Farhi
“We’re citizens and teachers—and neither is easy. Good luck.”
— Deborah Meier, 2002, inscription in my copy of “In Schools We Trust”
Back in 2002, I approached the microphone at the Washington D.C. bookstore Politics and Prose and told the author of “In Schools We Trust” that as a teacher degreed in human development, I was feeling
(Mike Keefe/DENVER POST) muzzled by the burgeoning high-stakes standardized testing movement. I said that in 10 years we would be slapping ourselves, saying, “OMG, we forgot about poverty” in our driven pursuit for so-called “accountability” of teachers and schools. We were choosing to ignore the conditions in which children live and how they affect their achievement in school.
Deborah Meier, still one of my lifelong heroes in education, told me to fight poverty as a citizen, not as a teacher.
That turned out to be good advice, considering that my schools superintendent at the time was a hard-liner who insisted that great teaching could overcome poverty, and because in the ensuing 10 years, proponents of No Child Left Behind hurled accusations of low expectations bordering on racial bias toward any teacher who raised concerns about economic struggles in the lives of children. I was heartened to read Helen Ladd’s and Edward B. Fiske’s comprehensive New York Times op-ed piece “Class Matters. Why Won’t We Admit It?”, which chastises us as a society for ignoring the effects of poverty on student achievement.

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