The United States ranks near the bottom of the pack of wealthy nations on a measure of child poverty, according to a new report from UNICEF. Nearly one third of U.S. children live in households with an income below 60 percent of the national median income in 2008 - about $31,000 annually.
In the richest nation in the world, one in three kids live in poverty. Let that sink in.
The UNICEF report pegs the poverty definition to the 2008 median to account for the decline in income since then - incomes fell after the great recession, so measuring this way is an attempt to assess current poverty relative to how things stood before the downturn.
With
32.2 percent of children living below this line, the U.S. ranks 36th
out of the 41 wealthy countries included in the UNICEF report. By
contrast, only 5.3 percent of Norwegian kids currently meet this
definition of poverty.
More
alarmingly, the share of U.S. children living in poverty has actually
increased by 2 percentage points since 2008. Overall, 24.2 million U.S.
children were living in poverty in 2012, reflecting an increase of 1.7
million children since 2008. "Of all newly poor children in the OECD
and/or EU, about a third are in the United States," according to the
report. On the other hand, 18 countries were actually able to reduce their childhood poverty rates over the same period.
The
report finds considerable differences in childhood poverty at the state
level. New Mexico, where more than four in ten kids live in poverty,
has the highest overall rate at 41.9 percent. In New Hampshire only one
in eight kids lives in a poor household, the lowest rate in the nation.
Poverty rates are generally higher in Southern states, and lower in New
England and Northern Plains states.
Map: Childhood poverty rates, by state
"Between
2006 and 2011, child poverty increased in 34 states," according to the
UNICEF report. "The largest increases were found in Nevada, Idaho,
Hawaii and New Mexico, all of which have relatively small numbers of
children. Meanwhile Mississippi and North Dakota saw notable decreases."
There
are some limits to the usefulness of benchmarking poverty in relation
to a country's median income. The median income in the U.S. is going to
be very different than that in say, Estonia. So it means something very
different to say that a given person is making 60 percent of median
income in the former as opposed to the latter.
It's also important to note that a household income of $30,000 puts you in roughly the richest 1.23 percent
of the world's population. The report doesn't deal with the type of
extreme poverty you see in the poor and developing worlds, where roughly
2.7 billion people are trying to get by on less than two dollars per day.
But
UNICEF's relative poverty measure is still useful in that economies are
relative, too. Thirty thousand dollars goes much, much further in
Eritrea than it does in Kansas. And while you might be able to get by -
barely - raising a family on $30,000 in rural Kansas, try doing that in
any of the nation's pricey urban and suburban areas, where many of
America's poor actually live.
For the richest country
in the world to also have one of the world's highest childhood poverty
rates is, frankly, an embarrassment. Like our high infant mortality rate,
child poverty in the U.S. reflects the failure of policymakers to
seriously grapple with the challenges facing the most vulnerable members
of society.
ATTENTION
deficit hyperactivity disorder is now the most prevalent psychiatric
illness of young people in America, affecting 11 percent of them at some
point between the ages of 4 and 17. The rates of both diagnosis and
treatment have increased so much in the past decade that you may wonder
whether something that affects so many people can really be a disease.
And
for a good reason. Recent neuroscience research shows that people with
A.D.H.D. are actually hard-wired for novelty-seeking — a trait that had,
until relatively recently, a distinct evolutionary advantage. Compared
with the rest of us, they have sluggish and underfed brain reward
circuits, so much of everyday life feels routine and understimulating.
To
compensate, they are drawn to new and exciting experiences and get
famously impatient and restless with the regimented structure that
characterizes our modern world. In short, people with A.D.H.D. may not
have a disease, so much as a set of behavioral traits that don’t match
the expectations of our contemporary culture.
From
the standpoint of teachers, parents and the world at large, the problem
with people with A.D.H.D. looks like a lack of focus and attention and
impulsive behavior. But if you have the “illness,” the real problem is
that, to your brain, the world that you live in essentially feels not
very interesting.
One
of my patients, a young woman in her early 20s, is prototypical. “I’ve
been on Adderall for years to help me focus,” she told me at our first
meeting. Before taking Adderall, she found sitting in lectures
unendurable and would lose her concentration within minutes. Like many
people with A.D.H.D., she hankered for exciting and varied experiences
and also resorted to alcohol to relieve boredom. But when something was
new and stimulating, she had laserlike focus. I knew that she loved
painting and asked her how long she could maintain her interest in her
art. “No problem. I can paint for hours at a stretch.”
Rewards
like sex, money, drugs and novel situations all cause the release of
dopamine in the reward circuit of the brain, a region buried deep
beneath the cortex. Aside from generating a sense of pleasure, this
dopamine signal tells your brain something like, “Pay attention, this is
an important experience that is worth remembering.”
The
more novel and unpredictable the experience, the greater the activity
in your reward center. But what is stimulating to one person may be dull
— or even unbearably exciting — to another. There is great variability
in the sensitivity of this reward circuit.
Clinicians
have long known this to be the case, and everyday experience bears it
out. Think of the adrenaline junkies who bungee jump without breaking a
sweat and contrast them with the anxious spectators for whom the act
evokes nothing but terror and dread.
Dr.
Nora D. Volkow, a scientist who directs the National Institute on Drug
Abuse, has studied the dopamine reward pathway in people with A.D.H.D.
Using a PET scan, she and her colleagues compared the number of dopamine
receptors in this brain region in a group of unmedicated adults with
A.D.H.D. with a group of healthy controls. What she found was striking.
The adults with A.D.H.D. had significantly fewer D2 and D3 receptors
(two specific subtypes of dopamine receptors) in their reward circuits
than did healthy controls. Furthermore, the lower the level of dopamine
receptors was, the greater the subjects’ symptoms of inattention.
Studies in children showed similar changes in dopamine function as well.
These
findings suggest that people with A.D.H.D are walking around with
reward circuits that are less sensitive at baseline than those of the
rest of us. Having a sluggish reward circuit makes normally interesting
activities seem dull and would explain, in part, why people with
A.D.H.D. find repetitive and routine tasks unrewarding and even
painfully boring.
Psychostimulants
like Adderall and Ritalin help by blocking the transport of dopamine
back into neurons, thus increasing its level in the brain.
Another
patient of mine, a 28-year-old man, was having a lot of trouble at his
desk job in an advertising firm. Having to sit at a desk for long hours
and focus his attention on one task was nearly impossible. He would
multitask, listening to music and texting, while “working” to prevent
activities from becoming routine.
Eventually
he quit his job and threw himself into a start-up company, which has
him on the road in constantly changing environments. He is much happier
and — little surprise — has lost his symptoms of A.D.H.D.
Photo
Credit
Matt Leines
My
patient “treated” his A.D.H.D simply by changing the conditions of his
work environment from one that was highly routine to one that was varied
and unpredictable. All of a sudden, his greatest liabilities — his
impatience, short attention span and restlessness — became assets. And
this, I think, gets to the heart of what is happening in A.D.H.D.
Consider
that humans evolved over millions of years as nomadic hunter-gatherers.
It was not until we invented agriculture, about 10,000 years ago, that
we settled down and started living more sedentary — and boring — lives.
As hunters, we had to adapt to an ever-changing environment where the
dangers were as unpredictable as our next meal. In such a context,
having a rapidly shifting but intense attention span and a taste for
novelty would have proved highly advantageous in locating and securing
rewards — like a mate and a nice chunk of mastodon. In short, having the
profile of what we now call A.D.H.D. would have made you a Paleolithic
success story.
In
fact, there is modern evidence to support this hypothesis. There is a
tribe in Kenya called the Ariaal, who were traditionally nomadic animal
herders. More recently, a subgroup split off and settled in one
location, where they practice agriculture. Dan T. A. Eisenberg, an
anthropologist at the University of Washington, examined the frequency
of a genetic variant of the dopamine type-four receptor called DRD4 7R
in the nomadic and settler groups of the Ariaal. This genetic variant
makes the dopamine receptor less responsive than normal and is
specifically linked with A.D.H.D. Dr. Eisenberg discovered that the
nomadic men who had the DRD4 7R variant were better nourished than the
nomadic men who lacked it. Strikingly, the reverse was true for the
Ariaal who had settled: Those with this genetic variant were
significantly more underweight than those without it.
So
if you are nomadic, having a gene that promotes A.D.H.D.-like behavior
is clearly advantageous (you are better nourished), but the same trait
is a disadvantage if you live in a settled context. It’s not hard to see
why. Nomadic Ariaal, with short attention spans and novelty-seeking
tendencies, are probably going to have an easier time making the most of
a dynamic environment, including getting more to eat. But this same
brief attention span would not be very useful among the settled, who
have to focus on activities that call for sustained focus, like going to
school, growing crops and selling goods.
You
may wonder what accounts for the recent explosive increase in the rates
of A.D.H.D. diagnosis and its treatment through medication. The
lifetime prevalence in children has increased to 11 percent in 2011 from
7.8 percent in 2003 — a whopping 41 percent increase — according to the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And 6.1 percent of young
people were taking some A.D.H.D. medication in 2011, a 28 percent
increase since 2007. Most alarmingly, more than 10,000 toddlers at ages 2
and 3 were found to be taking these drugs, far outside any established
pediatric guidelines.
Some
of the rising prevalence of A.D.H.D. is doubtless driven by the
pharmaceutical industry, whose profitable drugs are the mainstay of
treatment. Others blame burdensome levels of homework, but the data show
otherwise. Studies consistently show that the number of hours of
homework for high school students has remained steady for the past 30
years.
I
think another social factor that, in part, may be driving the
“epidemic” of A.D.H.D. has gone unnoticed: the increasingly stark
contrast between the regimented and demanding school environment and the
highly stimulating digital world, where young people spend their time
outside school. Digital life, with its vivid gaming and exciting social
media, is a world of immediate gratification where practically any
desire or fantasy can be realized in the blink of an eye. By comparison,
school would seem even duller to a novelty-seeking kid living in the
early 21st century than in previous decades, and the comparatively
boring school environment might accentuate students’ inattentive
behavior, making their teachers more likely to see it and driving up the
number of diagnoses.
Not
all the news is so bad. Curiously, the prevalence of adult A.D.H.D. is
only 3 to 5 percent, a fraction of what it is in young people. This
suggests that a substantial number of people simply “grow out” of it.
How does that happen?
Perhaps
one explanation is that adults have far more freedom to choose the
environment in which they live and the kind of work they do so that it
better matches their cognitive style and reward preferences. If you were
a restless kid who couldn’t sit still in school, you might choose to be
an entrepreneur or carpenter, but you would be unlikely to become an
accountant. But what is happening at the level of the brain that may
explain this spontaneous “recovery”?
To
try to answer that question, Aaron T. Mattfeld, a neuroscientist at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, now at Florida International
University in Miami, compared the brain function with resting-state
M.R.I.s of three groups of adults: those whose childhood A.D.H.D
persisted into adulthood; those whose had remitted; and a control group
who never had a diagnosis of it. Normally, when someone is unfocused and
at rest, there is synchrony of activity in brain regions known as the
default mode network, which is typically more active during rest than
during performance of a task. (In contrast, these brain regions in
people with A.D.H.D. appear functionally disconnected from each other.)
Dr. Mattfeld found that adults who had had A.D.H.D as children but no
longer had it as adults had a restoration of the normal synchrony
pattern, so their brains looked just like those of people who had never
had it.
WE
don’t yet know whether these brain changes preceded or followed the
behavioral improvement, so the exact mechanism of adult recovery is
unclear.
But in another measure of brain synchrony, the adults who had recovered looked more like adults with A.D.H.D., the M.I.T. study found.
In
people without it, when the default mode network is active, another
network, called the task-positive network, is inhibited. When the brain
is focusing, the task-positive network takes over and quiets the default
mode network. This reciprocal relationship is necessary in order to
focus.
Both
groups of adult A.D.H.D. patients, including those who had recovered,
displayed simultaneous activation of both networks, as if the two
regions were out of step, working at cross-purposes. Thus, adults who
lost most of their symptoms did not have entirely normal brain activity.
What
are the implications of this new research for how we think about and
treat kids with A.D.H.D.? Of course, I am not suggesting that we take
our kids out of school and head for the savanna. Nor am I saying we that
should not use stimulant medications like Adderall and Ritalin, which
are safe and effective and very helpful to many kids with A.D.H.D.
But
perhaps we can leverage the experience of adults who grew out of their
symptoms to help these kids. First, we should do everything we can to
help young people with A.D.H.D. select situations — whether schools now
or professions later on — that are a better fit for their
novelty-seeking behavior, just the way adults seem to self-select jobs
in which they are more likely to succeed.
In
school, these curious, experience-seeking kids would most likely do
better in small classes that emphasize hands-on-learning, self-paced
computer assignments and tasks that build specific skills.
This
will not eliminate the need for many kids with A.D.H.D. to take
psychostimulants. But let’s not rush to medicalize their curiosity,
energy and novelty-seeking; in the right environment, these traits are
not a disability, and can be a real asset.
Correction: November 16, 2014
An opinion essay on Nov. 2 about the treatment of attention
deficit hyperactivity disorder omitted an attribution for part of the
description of an M.I.T. study comparing patterns of brain activity in
adults who had recovered from childhood A.D.H.D. and adults who had not.
The description of one finding — about the similarity of the two groups
on one measure of brain synchrony — came from a news release from the
McGovern Institute for Brain Research at M.I.T.
Richard A. Friedman is a professor of clinical psychiatry and the director of the psychopharmacology clinic at the Weill Cornell Medical College.
Finnish educator and scholar Pasi Sahlberg is one of the world’s leading experts on school reform and educational practices. The author of the best-selling “Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn About Educational Change in Finland?”and
a former director general of Finland’s Center for International
Mobility and Cooperation, Sahlberg is now a visiting professor of
practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He has written a
number of important posts for this blog, including “What if Finland’s great teachers taught in U.S. schools,” and “What the U.S. can’t learn from Finland about ed reform.”
In
this post Sahlberg writes about what constitutes real education
innovation, a topic that was the subject of a recent eport by the
Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, about which I wrote and questioned here. Sahlberg
notes how U.S. innovation has helped many successful education systems
around the world even as Americans ignore those very same reforms. This
is important reading.
By Pasi Sahlberg
An intriguing
question whether innovation in education can be measured has an answer
now. The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development in its
recent report “Measuring Innovation in Education: A New Perspective,
Educational Research and Innovation” measures Innovation in Education in
22 countries and 6 jurisdictions, among them the U.S. states Indiana,
Massachusetts and Minnesota.
One conclusion of the OECD’s
measurement of innovation between 2003 and 2011 is that “there have been
large increases in innovative pedagogic practices across all countries …
in areas such as relating lessons to real life, higher order skills,
data and text interpretation and personalization of teaching.” The
United States did not do very well when compared to other participating
countries overall. “Not surprising,” some commented, pointing to tougher
accountability measures and an obsession with standardized testing in
most parts of the country.
It was surprising, however, to see the
OECD’s list of the top five U.S. “innovations in pedagogic practice”:
1) more observation and description in secondary school science lessons;
2) more individualized reading instruction in primary school
classrooms; 3) more use of answer explanation in primary mathematics;
4) more relating of primary school lessons to everyday life; and 5)
more text interpretation in primary lessons. “Innovation in
organizational policy and practice” included mostly different aspects of
student assessment and testing. Good innovation sometimes means doing
less of something in order to make time for experimentation with new
pedagogical strategies.
An
interesting observation that anyone interested in what current
high-performing school systems have in common is that they all, some
more than the others, have derived critical lessons from abroad.
Singapore, one of the most successful reformers and highest performers
in global education, has been sending students to study education in
U.S. universities and encouraged university professors to collaborate in
teaching and research with their American colleagues. Japan, Hong Kong
and South Korea have done the same. More recently China has also
benefited from education innovation from the United States and other
Western education systems. Even those running school systems above the
49th parallel in North America admit that U.S. research and
innovation have been instrumental in making education in Canada
world-class.
Finland is no exception. If you want to discover the
origins of the most successful practices in pedagogy, student
assessment, school leadership, and school improvement in Finland, you
only need to visit some schools there and have a conversation with
teachers and principals. Most of them have studied psychology, teaching
methods, curriculum theories, assessment models, and classroom
management researched and designed in the United States in their initial
teacher education programs. Primary school teacher education syllabi in
Finnish universities include scores of books and research articles
written by U.S. scholars. Professional development and school
improvement courses and programs often include visitors from the U.S.
universities to teach and work with Finnish teachers and leaders. So
common is the reliance on U.S. ideas in Finland that some have come to
call the Finnish school system a large-scale laboratory of American
education innovation.
The relatively low overall rating of
“innovation in education” in the United States raises an interesting
question: Where are all those great ideas in the United States that
other countries have been able to utilize to improve the performance of
their school systems during the last century? It is interesting that,
according to the OECD, the United States exhibits only modest innovation
in its education system but, at the same time, it is the world leader
in producing research, practical models and innovation to other
countries.
Five significant American educational ideas have been instrumental in accelerating Finland’s success in teaching and learning: John Dewey’s Philosophy of Education
The
roots of Finland’s pedagogical ideas date back to the 1860s when Uno
Cygnaeus, who is sometimes referred as the father of basic education in
Finland, said that in an ideal classroom, pupils speak more than the
teacher. He was also a fan of practical aspects of education and
insisted that both boys and girls must learn all the practical skills
that people need in everyday lives. It is understandable that the
pragmatic, child-centered educational thinking of John Dewey has been
widely accepted among Finnish educators. Dewey’s philosophy of education
forms a foundation for academic, research-based teacher education in
Finland and influenced also the work of the most influential Finnish
scholar professor Matti Koskenniemi in the 1940s. All primary school
teachers read and explore Dewey’s and Koskenniemi’s ideas as part of
their courses leading to the master’s degree. Many Finnish schools have
adopted Dewey’s view of education for democracy by enhancing students’
access to decision-making regarding their own lives and studying in
school. Some visitors to Finland, among them the late Seymour Sarason,
have observed that the entire Finnish school system looks like John
Dewey’s laboratory school in the U.S.
2. Cooperative Learning
Unlike
in most other countries, cooperative learning has become a pedagogical
approach that is widely practiced throughout Finnish education system.
Finland’s new 9-year comprehensive launched in early 1970s was built on
an idea of regular small-group learning of students coming from
different family backgrounds. But it was the national curriculum reform
in 1994 that brought cooperative learning as it is known now to most
Finnish schools. Before that, all the main researchers and trainers of
cooperative learning, including David Johnson, Roger Johnson and
Elizabeth Cohen, had visited Finland to train trainers and teachers on
their methods of teaching. Their books and articles were translated into
Finnish and shared openly with all schools. The 1994 National
Curriculum included a requirement that all schools design their own
curricula in a way that would enhance teaching and learning according to
constructivist educational ideas. Although cooperative learning was not
mentioned as an obligatory pedagogical practice in schools, there were
several recommendations for teachers to include elements of cooperative
learning into their regular teaching. Ever since, cooperative learning
has become an integral part of initial teacher education in Finland and
one of the most popular themes in professional development of teachers
and school leaders in Finland.
3. Multiple Intelligences
The
spirit of 1970s school reform in Finland included another idea that
derives from U.S. universities and scholars: development of the whole
child. The overall goal of schooling in Finland was to support child’s
holistic development and growth by focusing on different aspects of
talent and intelligence. After abolishing all streaming and tracking of
students in the mid-1980s, both education policies and school practices
adopted the principle that all children have different kinds of
intelligences and that schools must find ways how to cultivate these
different individual aspects in balanced ways. Howard Gardner’s Theory
of Multiple Intelligences became a leading idea in transferring these
policy principles to school practice. Again, the 1994 National
Curriculum emphasizes that school education must provide all students
with opportunities to develop all aspects of their minds. As a
consequence, that curriculum framework required that all schools have a
balanced program, blending academic subjects with art, music, crafts,
and physical education. This framework moreover mandated that all
schools provide students with sufficient time for their self-directive
activities. Gardner’s influence has also been notable in the Finnish
system by conferring a broader definition of “talent.”. Today, Finnish
teachers believe that over 90 percent of students can learn successfully
in their own classrooms if given the opportunity to evolve in a
holistic manner.
4. Alternative Classroom Assessments
Without
frequent standardized and census-based testing, the Finnish education
system relies on local monitoring and teacher-made student assessments. A
child-centered, interaction-rich whole-child approach in the national
curriculum requires that different student assessment models are used in
schools. Furthermore, primary school pupils don’t get any grades in
their assessments before they are in fifth grade. It was natural that
Finnish teachers found alternative student assessment methods
attractive. And it is ironic that many of these methods were developed
at U.S. universities and are yet far more popular in Finland than in the
United States. These include portfolio assessment, performance
assessment, self-assessment and self-reflection, and assessment for
learning methods. Teacher education programs in Finland include elements
of study of educational assessment and evaluation theories and also
provide all students with practical knowledge and skill of how to use
alternative student assessment methods in the classroom. 5. Peer Coaching
Another
surprising aspect of Finnish education is that it lacks much of that
change knowledge that is normally expected to guide policy-makers and
education authorities in planning and implementing desired reforms in
education. Research and development of system-wide educational reform
and change hasn’t belonged to the academic repertoire of Finnish
academia. The number of research papers related to that field has
therefore remained minimal. Instead, Finnish education experts have
relied on foreign sources of expertise and knowledge. A good example of
an innovation designed in the U.S. is peer coaching that evolved in the
1980s and 1990s as a result of research and development work of Bruce
Joyce and his colleagues. He also visited Finland to train trainers and
education leaders on how the impact of professional development of
teacher can be enhanced. Peer coaching—that is, a confidential process
through which teachers work together to reflect on current practices,
expand, improve, and learn new skills, exchange ideas, conduct classroom
research and solve problems together in school—became normal practice
in school improvement programs and professional development in Finland
since the mid-1990s.
For
me, just like for many of my Finnish colleagues, the United States is
home to a great deal of educational research and innovation. Why doesn’t
this show in international comparisons, like the recent review of
innovation in education by the OECD? We visitors to the United States
often wonder why innovations that have brought improvement to all
successful education systems have not been embedded in the U.S. school
system. One reason may be that the work of the school in the United
States is so much steered by bureaucracies, test-based accountability
and competition that schools are simply doing what they must do in this
situation. Many visitors from the United States to Finland conclude
their observations by saying that Finnish education looks like the U.S.
education in the 1970s and 1980s.
My message to my colleagues in
the United States is: This is the only education system in the world
that is self-sufficient in terms of ideas, knowledge, research and
innovation—and financial resources. All others, more or less, depend on
knowledge and ideas generated in the United States. It is hard to accept
the conclusion of the OECD’s measurement that the greatest American
innovation in organizational policy and practice is student assessment,
including standardized testing.
The question should not be: “How
to have more innovation in education?” The real question is: “How to
make the best use of all existing educational ideas that are somewhere
in American schools and universities?” The answer is not to have more
charter schools or private ownership of public schools to boost
innovation.
The lesson from the most successful education systems
is this: Education policies should not be determined by mythology and
ideology but guided by research and evidence from home and abroad.
