Statewide Analysis

IV. Supporting students -
Kids face more challenges than ever

Who are our students?

Characteristics of students attending school in this state

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This year the numbers for the "students who participate in public schools" was extended to one decimal place, allowing enough detail to see students who are being home-instructed. As with the rest of the nation, RI's small number of home-instructed students is rising.

Children's social statistics strain the teacher/student relationship

The growing rate of poverty among children has received much attention, and we note it now only to re-emphasize that poverty has a strong negative impact on student performance for a whole host of reasons. Often low-income parents are too consumed with the challenges of survival to have the extra time or attention to provide their children with homework help, getting involved with the school, or clear, consistent, informed discipline strategies. Schools cannot overcome the stresses of poverty by themselves, and the larger community needs to pay considerable attention to help students overcome the stresses and distractions poverty inevitably brings.

Without the same force as poverty, single parent families can also present a hardship to the child. Of course, many single-parent families are thriving, and their children are not necessarily hampered by their single-parent status. But we do know that as a group, children in single-parent families face statistically greater challenges. This is especially true for single teen mothers. Nationally, the teen pregnancy rate is dropping, but RI's is coming down at the slowest rate in the country.

According to Kids Count, in 1997 22% of RI's children lived in single parent households. Thirty-seven percent of the children in the core cities rely on one parent. In general, we know that roughly half of all children have experienced a divorce or never did live with both parents. The proportion of children living with one parent has almost doubled since 1970. In 1997, 70% of children living below the poverty line lived with a single mother. The 2000 Kids Count reports, "Compared with teenagers who grow up with both parents at home, adolescents who have lived apart from one of their parents during some period of their childhood are twice as likely to drop out of school, twice as likely to have a child before 20, and one and a half times more likely to be out of school and out of work in their teens and early twenties." (2000 Kids Count, Page 8) School stability and personalized attention is one way to support children struggling with limited or inadequate support at home. The struggles some children bring with them from home add stress to their student/teacher relationships and can depress the efficacy of teaching and learning.

Better community support for children

Selected SALT Survey Findings

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Ill-Used Out-of-school Time

Parents, communities and schools need to work together to help students use their out-of-school time to better purpose. On the SALT survey responses, parents tell us that most of them have at least fifteen minutes a night with which they could help their children with school-related learning, but they do not know what to do. In general, parents need more information about what parenting strategies best support a student's learning. Often schools do not assign useful and challenging homework because their experience is that it does not get done. Closer partnerships between school and home are essential for a number of reasons, but promoting the use of out-of-school time to support learning would substantially enhance a culture of learning among our young people.

Homework

The purposes of productive homework are to:

• Reinforce skills learned at school, such as math computation and spelling conventions;
• Allow children to revise work which has not yet met the standard of mastery;
• Teach children, with guidance, to complete projects on their own while learning to budget their time, do independent research and assemble reports or undertakings (such as inventions or photographic essays);
• Explore the world outside of school for information resources and instructive experiences (libraries, museums, internet, work places, etc.).

Well-designed homework helps children meet proficiency standards

The SALT survey reveals that the overwhelming majority of middle and high school students report spending less than an hour a night doing home work. Indeed, 62% of 6th graders, 61% of 8th graders and fully 70% of 10th graders do an hour or less of homework on school nights. Teachers find it very frustrating when portions of the class do their homework and portions do not. Still, time spent on well-designed, relevant homework is time well-spent indeed. Over 30% of all of RI students, at all levels watch TV three hours or more before or after school every week. Another 18% of 4th graders, dropping to 11% of 10th graders play video or computer games before or after school every school day. Clearly, translating some of this fruitless time into homework time will support the capacity of the teacher to introduce new skills and materials and would bolster the students' ability to meet proficiency standards.

Schools need to work with the students' homes to communicate clear homework standards and expectations, provide ways for parents to check to see what is assigned – especially long-range projects – and help parents provide appropriate support for their children. (Parents should never do their children's homework.) Homework is always a student responsibility first and foremost, but school communities and parents must cultivate a culture of learning and training to reinforce the expectation and importance of its completion.

Home Alone

Students who are left unsupervised are at greater risk of teen pregnancy, committing a crime, drug and alcohol involvement, and smoking cigarettes. Again, communities, parents and schools need to work together to generate more safe, enriching, interesting sports, clubs, tutoring opportunities and so on. Students need to be productively engaged during the after-school hours when parents are often still at work, getting more exercise physically and mentally. Communities who have created before- and after-school programs (such as Medicaid-funded after-school care) have often seen dramatic reductions in the incidence of social ills such as daytime crime and teen pregnancy.

Reading outside classwork

Too few children are reading outside of their classroom assignments. Outside reading drops precipitously from 4th grade to 10th grade where it levels off to about 20% of high school students reading beyond assigned classwork. The relatively robust reading habits of RI 4th graders do not persist over time.

However, there is some good news about reading

Certainly the most dramatic change in the SALT survey student results from the school year 97-98 to 98-99 was the number of students who reported reading significantly more books. The percentage of students who reported reading no books – zero – as part of an English Language Arts program dropped 30 percentage points in grades 4 through 8, then 20 percentage points in grades 9 and 10, until the 11th and 12th grades when the drops are more like 10 percentage points. This is good news. Schools have taken to heart getting their students to read more, and students seem to be responding.

Increased outside reading among students is another example of a "small improvement" which can, coupled with other small improvements, create a geometrically growing, positive effect on school climate, and later on student achievement.

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