Poverty in Education: The Brain

Welcome back to my series on poverty in education. Hopefully you saw the first post, Poverty in Education: Prevalence, which discussed the prevalence of poverty in America - specifically the 16 million kids living below the federal poverty line [1]. Schools are increasingly charged with the important but arduous task of educating these students and closing the achievement gap between, among others, students from low socioeconomic (low SES) backgrounds and students from high-income families. But that is easier said than done when a different gap is at play - the word gap. As you remember in my last post, “a child from a high-income family will experience 30 million more words within the first four years of life than a child from a low-income family” [2]. Additionally, a new book making waves in education circles, called Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis by Robert Putnam is arguing there is another gap, according to this article. (The book is next on my to-read list!) The gap that Putnam refers to is the connection gap.

“‘Poor kids are incredibly isolated from everything … What they most lack is some adult who is steadily caring for them. It’s not just love, but providing them with the kind of guidance that people coming from [well-off] homes are increasingly surrounded by. I don’t just mean guidance about careers, but guidance about life’” [3]

Low SES students are coming in to school incredibly behind their peers, with less access to support, and unfortunately, our current school system struggles to make any changes in status. According to a recent report from University of New Hampshire Carsey School of Public Policy, “it is now harder for children born into poverty to move into higher socioeconomic classes than in the past” [4]. The report has graphs for every state that show the opportunity gaps between high- and low- income families going back to 1960. (I highly recommend looking at your state to see where you fall. Interesting information!) Unfortunately these graphs show that social mobility and “the American Dream” are becoming fantasies instead of realities; our current system is just replicating poverty.

So how do we go from replicating poverty to empowering our students from poor backgrounds to further their education and status?

Step 1: Understand how poverty affects the brain.
Step 2: Make classroom-level changes, both in thought-processes and actions
(Check back for later posts on schoolwide strategies to implement at your school.)

Poverty and the Brain
I just finished reading the book Teaching with Poverty in Mind by Eric Jensen that explains the science behind poverty and the effects it has on the brain. I highly recommend it as a way to help understand, empathize with, and teach your low SES students. There is also a great study guide from ASCD that asks thoughtful guiding questions to ponder as you read.

The most important understanding to take from the book is that “chronic exposure to poverty causes the brain to physically change in a detrimental manner” [5].

Children growing up in poverty are more likely to be exposed to risk factors that will adversely affect their physical, socioemotional, and cognitive well-being than high-income families.  Jensen’s primary risk factors include the following: 

1. Emotional and social challenges
   
2. Acute and chronic stressors
   
3. Cognitive lags
   
4. Health and safety issues [5]

Our poor students are not choosing to misbehave or perform poorly in academics -- they just have bigger obstacles to overcome every. day. that our high-income students don’t have to face.

Emotional and Social Challenges
This section of Jensen’s book was eye-opening for me. In it he explains that there are only 6 emotional responses that are hardwired into our brain.

Emotions Hardwired

1. Sadness
   
2. Joy
   
3. Disgust
   
4. Anger
   
5. Surprise
   
6. Fear [5]

This means that everything else (empathy, shame, cooperation, patience) needs to be taught and modeled. Students from low-income backgrounds often miss out on learning these emotional responses at home, due to overworked and overstressed caregivers, among many other reasons. (The connection gap!) Therefore, these emotions need to be taught in the school setting. I know there have often been times when I have been exasperated with a student who didn’t show some of these emotional responses - like cooperation or patience. Instead of showing frustration, I should have asked myself - “Have I taught and modeled this emotion? Is this student even capable of this emotion at their developmental stage?” Just as I would not expect a kindergartener to decode 3 syllable words, I can’t expect appropriate emotional responses from someone who hasn’t formed them yet.

Acute and Chronic Stressors
Not surprisingly, low SES students are more likely to experience chronic and acute stressors than their more affluent peers. Look at the following list of side-effects from stress, and it won’t be hard to understand why these students struggle to be successful in an academic setting.

Stress…

• is linked to over 50% of absences
  
• impairs attention/concentration
  
• reduces cognition, creativity, and memory
  
• diminishes social skills and social judgement
  
• reduces motivation, determination, and effort
  
• increases the likelihood of depression
  
• reduces neurogenesis (growth of new brain cells) [5]
  

The two side effects of stress that stood out the most to me (as I’ve lost the most sleep and pulled out the most hair from these issues in my classroom…). were impulsivity and learned helplessness. Jensen explains that impulsivity is actually an exaggerated response to stress (think survival of the fittest). So every instance of a stressor will increase a students impulsivity and ability to defer gratification. In addition, “exposure to chronic or acute stress is debilitating”[5], presenting itself as learned helplessness, when students give up or become passive about school. This is actually an adaptive response to life conditions [5]. Again, our students aren’t choosing to act impulsively or to give up - these reactions are just survival mechanisms.

Cognitive Lags
The most interesting finding in this section was the connection between socioeconomic status and language. For example, socioeconomic status had an extremely high effect size (1.0) on the difference between low-income and high-income 5 year olds performance in language [5]. This makes sense because we know there is a huge discrepancy between the quantity, quality, and type of communication between low-income and high-income households.

Health and Safety Issues
This section of Jensen’s book reminds us of Maslow’s hierarchy. Unless our students’ basic needs are met, we will struggle to educate them. Low SES kids are more likely to suffer from issues like malnutrition, environmental hazards, and insufficient health care. Consequently, their immune systems adapt to these conditions and “diminish their ability to concentrate, learn, and behave appropriately” [5].

Change for the Better
It is so imperative that we understand the physical changes that occur in the brain when our students are growing up in low-income households. While I attempted to highlight the major “a-ha” moments that I had, I really can’t get at everything that Eric Jensen explained in the book. Once we have an understanding of where are students are starting, we can start to make a plan about how to reach them and support them. I want to leave you with the idea that Jensen stresses throughout the book: We can change things for the better.

“Because the brain is designed to adapt from experience, it can also change for the better. In other words, poor children can experience emotional, social, and academic success.” [5]

1. “Child Poverty.” National Center for Children in Poverty. n.p., n.d. Web. 10 Mar. 2015.
   
2. Hart, B. & Risley, T.R. “The Early Catastrophe:The 30 Million Word Gap by Age 3” (2003, spring). American Educator, pp.4-9. 
3. Sparks, Sarah D. "Education Week." Education Week. N.p., 9 Mar. 2015. Web. 25 Mar. 2015.
4. Klein, Rebecca. "These 9 Graphs Show The Sad State Of Child Poverty In America." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 11 Mar. 2015. Web. 24 Mar. 2015.
5. Jensen, Eric. Teaching with Poverty in Mind: What Being Poor Does to Kids' Brains and What Schools Can Do about It. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2009. Print.

Tune In
Check back next week for posts on schoolwide and classroom level strategies to implement to address the needs of your low-SES students.

What was your “aha moment” when reading about science behind poverty?