The selfless NC teachers fighting to breach poverty’s barrier

The number of children living in poverty is no secret in North Carolina. In one of the most economically vibrant states of the richest nation on earth, nearly 600,000 of our children live below the stingy federal threshold. We do our best not to think about it.

But not all of us have that luxury. Some can’t avoid looking into its face.

In schools across North Carolina, thousands of teachers work in classrooms dominated by students living in deep poverty, children always fighting through the struggles and pressures of the moment.

“The brightest and most privileged kids are smarter than ever,” says Angela Scioli, a 22-year veteran teacher in Wake County schools. “Our poor kids are poorer than they’ve ever been. Being poor used to mean just that you didn’t have money. Now that’s only the tip of the iceberg.”

Americans famously believe that education is the way out of poverty. But poverty is a potent barrier to education as well. It should have surprised no one that on North Carolina’s new report card, almost all high-poverty schools received Ds and Fs while almost all low-poverty schools got As and Bs. This series examines the contributions of teachers fighting to breach poverty’s barrier – educators who with remarkable skill, affection and selflessness commit to what Brendan Fetters, an elementary school teacher in Raleigh, describes as “a calling within a calling.”

When a fifth-grader hasn’t had enough to eat or has been up all night because of fights in the neighborhood, concentrating on learning is difficult, Fetters says. Poverty is the elephant in the classroom – never mentioned, but affecting everything.

“It’s hard for an 11-year-old to focus when she has to go home and take care of a younger brother or cook dinner for the rest of the family,” he says. Or when a child, whose mother works the late shift, has to stay up all night with a sick baby. It’s not realistic to expect that, under such pressures, students will perform at 4 or 5 levels on end of grade exams, he says.

The stories teachers of impoverished students relate can sear, revealing hurdles and hardship beyond toleration for ones so young. They also often illustrate the surpassing service, and heart, of some of the best of us – service that, stunningly, is frequently met with derision and disdain by much of our political class. For this, perhaps, no outrage can be sufficient.

Nor is it possible to refute the growing sense, among such near-heroic educators, that they are being set up for failure as scarce resources are diverted to private systems, essential assistants are eliminated, state support levels plummet to the national cellar and high-poverty schools are disparaged with grading measures that speak only to the economic hardship of their students. As several teachers explained, the state grades them on things beyond their control, pronounces them failures and then makes it harder for them to do their work. For this, too, no excuse can satisfy.

“The Title I schools,” Fetters notes, “are extraordinarily taxing – day in and day out, facing the tough challenges of poverty.” They aren’t the schools the superintendent goes to visit. “The politicians who say we’re failing never come here, either,” he notes. It is apparently more fruitful to visit the new (and wealthy) institutions in Apex and Cary. The pattern isn’t lost on teachers.

In Durham, NaShonda Cooke, a 16-year veteran teacher, knows well the challenges poor children face, situations that have only worsened over the past decade as parents have lost jobs or, more often, started working longer hours for poorer wages. The kids try to hide it.

“I’ll go on a home visit and there’s no food, no furniture – the children say, ‘Please don’t tell anyone, Ms. Cooke, we’re OK.” But, she explains, “I grew up in public housing myself. I know why they’re acting out.”

Fortunately for these children, it is their lives and not the opinions of folks at the statehouse that teachers care about, Cooke says. Inspiration springs from their faces, from the opportunity to improve their life chances. If there is any truth to the notion that you make a living by what you get, but you make a life by what you give, these teachers’ lives are beyond abundant.

This story was originally published August 15, 2015 at 1:10 PM with the headline "The selfless NC teachers fighting to breach poverty’s barrier."