With my two books and constant blogging about Social Emotional Learning/Character Education, it’s obvious that I’m a big believer on its importance for our students. It’s critical for our students to strengthen their appetite for learning, their self-control, their perseverance, etc.

At the same time, as Mike Rose writes in the Christian Science Monitor, Character education is not enough to help poor kids :

…it is difficult for enrichment programs alone to lead to educational mobility. Children from poor communities need social policy that involves schools and enrichment programs, but also need programs to address the conditions that devastate students’ lives: poor nutrition and healthcare, inadequate housing, parental unemployment, violent streets, and a dysfunctional immigration system. When we ignore these broader conditions, we turn an ungenerous scrutiny on the children themselves.

Coincidentally, new research has just been published that backs up this position.

The research paper, Poverty and Self Control, takes issue with a common belief that many low-income people are poor because they don’t have traits like self-control. Instead, it finds that that poverty causes a loss of self control:

…the chain of causality is circular, and poverty is itself responsible for the low self-control that perpetuates poverty….policies that help the poor begin to accumulate assets may be highly effective…

Even though a large portion of the paper is highly technical, and not particularly accessible to a layperson like myself (and its PowerPoint presentation is not that much better), here’s my understanding of what they found….

If you don’t have many assets, and you’re used to the environment of living on the edge, then self-control really doesn’t offer that many benefits — as Janis Joplin sang “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose” — you might as well give in to your whims because not giving into them doesn’t really pay off based on your experience (instead of Joplin, the researchers quote Bob Dylan, ” When you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose.”)

On the other hand, if you have some economic (or, I’d suggest, non-economic assets, too) assets, and you’ve experienced the benefits of them, you want to work to keep them.

It makes sense to me, but certainly doesn’t negate the importance of doing whatever we can to support our students to develop these traits (though let’s not grade them, please).

But it does reemphasize the value of teachers, schools and families working together to push for the types of changes Mike Rose suggests in his piece, and I suggest in my book on family engagement, to attack the root causes of the challenges faced by our students….

I’ll add this post to The Best Places To Learn What Impact A Teacher & Outside Factors Have On Student Achievement.