No Excuses, Teachers: Raise Homeless Students' Test Scores, or Else

Last week I suggested that EdSec Arne Duncan's plan to hold teachers accountable for - and to evaluate, retain, pay, and promote them based upon - their classes' standardized test scores would be invalid, unless they factored in the "one bad apple" effect of disruptive students, which recent research suggests causes lower test scores for their entire class.

Here's another factor that demands to be added: student homelessness --

The National Alliance to End Homelessness has predicted that at the current rate, the recession will result in 1.5 million additional homeless people within two years. According to the advocacy group First Focus, nearly two million children will be impacted by subprime foreclosures, including some half a million Latino children and more than 280,000 Black children. In a national survey of school systems, several hundred districts reported a surge in homeless children last fall compared to the previous school year.

I'm serious. Bleating "No excuses" to teachers for poor classroom performance when their desks are filled with homeless students is unfair to teachers and students - and the schools that face closure for low test scores. No homeless student is going to have the emotional stability needed to excel in class. Simply being bullied in high school transformed me from an A to a C student. Imagine the effects of homelessness on Mary Quaker's grades:

For many families, staying intact may mean staying on the streets. The dilemma may be deepened by a looming fear of separation by child welfare authorities, who may place children in foster care.

For Yolanda James's 16-year-old daughter, Mary Quaker, the threat of separation dwarfed material hardship. She struggled through living in a car, even sleeping in her school gym when her mother could not afford a motel, but she clung to what mattered. "I just wondered," she recalled, "is she going to put us somewhere so we can be able to eat and take a shower and all that? I'd always tell everybody, 'Just don't split us up. We'll all get through it together.'"

So Secretary Duncan, please commission some economic think tank to factor homelessness into your value-added data metrics.