Q and A: Donna Beegle | Accountability

Q&A

Getting to “Why” to Solve for “How”: Kids in Poverty Now on Our Radar

Through the kindness of a stranger and the commitment of a teacher—and her own pluck—Donna Beegle broke through the barriers of generational poverty.

Q: Tell me about your family background.

I was born in West Phoenix. I was just back there and saw the house my Mom was living in when she was pregnant with me. Tiny little dump with boarded up windows in a neighborhood with graffiti and gangs. My mom picked cotton, that's how she survived. And my grandma picked cotton. That's how our family has always survived, working the land. No one's ever owned property. No one's ever been educated beyond eighth grade. So we were always workers of the land. My mom quit school, her dad died of cancer when she was 17, but she'd dropped out of school because she was taking care of her six siblings. She was the oldest girl, so that was her job.

I have five brothers. I'm the fifth child. We would leave Arizona and come to the Northwest—Oregon, Washington, California—to follow the fruit, pick the beans, the strawberries, the cherries. We would get here about April, so I would go to school for little bits of time in Oregon. And Oregon schools at that time were always better. I was always way behind and then in the winters we'd go back to Arizona and I would have already done the work that the other kids were doing in class, so the teacher would have me help her. To be picked to be the helper is a resiliency builder.

For your doctoral research, you studied the factors that enable adults who come from poverty to go on to college. How did you come, then, to work with K-12 schools?

I started at Marshall High School. That was my first job after getting my doctorate. I was the regional coordinator for a federal Endangered Urban Youth Grant through Portland State University. I spent five years on that project, doing intensive work with students and developing programs and activities to facilitate their getting a better understanding of why they're in school. Because a lot of kids come to school and they don't know why they're there. It's in the air that education is important, but they don't really have a frame of reference because they haven't connected with someone who's benefited from it. If you don't have a value for it, you're not going to learn. So we have to start there.

When you come from an environment of crisis and not having your basic needs met and you come into the school building where you're often made fun of for your clothing, the way you talk, you don't use the right words, your parents don't have the right job or the right clothes or the right car. So you're kind of set up in status as the bottom of the barrel. Not only do you not have all those things, but you don't quite know what people are talking about because people in your world don't use academic words and the same kinds of terminology. So there's a sense that you don't fit and that teachers don't know what to do with you because the way you want to interact is inconsistent with “sit down, be quiet.” In many instances the communication style of people in poverty is everybody talks at once. And the more people talking, the more information you get so it's a good thing. It's contradictory to the communication style of teachers and administrators, which is to remain distanced from the students. Students from generational poverty are not used to that. They aren't used to people keeping them at arm's length.

In my doctoral research I did interviews with people who experienced three generations of poverty who now have bachelor's degrees and went into their K-12 experiences. There's a whole section in my dissertation on teacher-student relationships, what school looked like, their early education experiences. We lost a lot of these kids, but they were able through mentoring to get back on track and achieve [a college education], most in a nontraditional way.

In public education today there is a focus on accountability, with an emphasis on testing. When you think of accountability in the context of your work with kids from generational poverty, what comes to mind?

The whole child, the whole family. Really taking that comprehensive approach. We have enough research showing that when there is a comprehensive approach to addressing issues of poverty you are able to alleviate some of the barriers created by poverty and help the students to become educated. If you focus solely on testing or academics, you're not going to capture kids from generational poverty because they're not in a context that supports or even allows for academic work. What No Child Left Behind has done for our nation, in my opinion, is get people talking about kids in poverty. Schools still don't quite know what to do with all of it because people get so skewed into the testing and the “highly qualified teacher” standards—they get all locked up in that—but it's on their radar screen now in ways that it wasn't before.

This is because NCLB requires schools to test all students and ensure that every child achieves at the “proficient” level—including students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds.

Yes. And so you've got principals, superintendents, teachers being a little more [aware] than they were before. In that way, it's a real good thing.

In one of your articles you wrote “teachers should acknowledge students' growth, wherever they start,” but for a student to make “adequate yearly progress” he or she has to achieve at the same “proficiency” level as everyone else. If this bar isn't reached, then the student, the school, the district has “failed.”

Right. You have to consider the student's context. No matter how much you punish the child for being late—a child who is taking care of her siblings until 11 a.m. and then shows up at noon—it's not going to change. So you have got to consider the context that the child is living in. A lot of people will interpret that as, “Well, you're saying we need to lower our expectations for students in poverty.” And I say, no, academic expectations for students in poverty are already too low. So you keep the high standards. You want them to be proficient, you want them to have the tools and skills to be successful. How you get them there is going to look different than how you get a middle class kid there. You may have to call a social service agency and get that family housing that is stable so that the kid can be there in school.

For example, a school counselor did home visits every day to the home of twin elementary kids who hadn't been in school for nine days. The counselor learned that the parent had gotten stopped driving home from her graveyard shift and, because she didn't have insurance, they towed her car, they suspended her license, she ended up losing her job because she couldn't get to work. They were evicted from their house, and ended up moving into a motel. The counselor came up to me at a break [in one of my training sessions] and said, “I cannot let you out of my sight until you help me with this family.”

So we sat down and we brainstormed. And I said, “Who do you know in this town?” She said, “Well, my husband is chief of police.” I said, “Do you know any judges?” “Well, he does.” “OK, you need to write a letter to the judge explaining her circumstances. She has no money to pay the fines. Explain the ramifications of her not being able to drive. Ask if he can reduce or dismiss her fines.” And by lunch she had written the letter to the judge.

Now that is not typically what we think of as what someone's going to have to do. The counselor's school also used No Child Left Behind money for several weeks to pick the kids up with a taxi because the reason the kids weren't in school was that there was a big “meth” problem at the motel and the mom didn't want the kids waiting at the bus stop. So once they started getting at the “why” behind what was going on, they were able to target some No Child Left Behind money, community resources, and got those kids back in school. At the same time, the school developed a relationship with the mother where she feels they're on her side, not like they're out to judge her and punish her for these conditions of poverty. Now that is accountability in my opinion.

In a large school, how possible is it for an individual teacher to respond to many students of poverty in that personal way? Or does it require a schoolwide infrastructure to support that?

It's both, no doubt. That's why I teach that you always have to have a full resource backpack. You need to know who in your community can be an asset. I'm working with [Ontario Middle School in Boise] and they're going to bring the high school students in to reduce class sizes and the high school students get a credit for helping out. They're going to do a two-week training to get the students ready for what the teachers need help with.

Another issue they had was that kids can't stay for after-school activities or homework help or whatever because they've got to get the bus home. I think it's $10,000 to make a second [bus] run and the school couldn't afford that. So they said, “OK, the kids can't go.” I said, “Let's think out of the box: Who in your community has a minivan? Who in your community has a shuttle? Would they be willing to donate it for an hour or two a day?” So they started thinking about, “How can we pull these assets out of our community to make it work for the kids who need this?” You have to be able to reach out into the community; no school can do it alone. [You have to be] connected to the social services in a real personal way to know what you can do for the family that's being evicted or what you can do for the student who doesn't have clothing, or the student who has head lice who's missing all these classes. Sending home a note that he can't come back is not being accountable.

A principal of a school in Oregon hired me to do some family involvement with parents who live in poverty. We had about 100 parents show up for this event, because I thought of getting them there from their perspective. Middle class people say, “They won't come.” Well, yeah, they will, but you have to tie it into what motivates them, what will allow them to be there in terms of transportation and day care. Because if you're out running around trying to get your lights turned back on, trying to get some groceries so your family can eat that night, you're not going to come. But if I say, “You get a $50 Wal-Mart gift certificate if you come and participate in this two-hour conversation and we've got high school kids to watch your kids to make that happen,” they will. I talked to the teachers and this principal at the school about opening up their networks to their student and families in poverty.

Their personal networks?

Yes. When you're in poverty you're so isolated. There's no one to call and the government resources are so inadequate. So brainstorm your own network: Who do you know? What can you do? What's in your hands? The principal stood up and said to this group of about 100 parents living in crisis and chaos, “I've lived in this town for 30 years. I know people at the utility company. I know people at the water bureau. I know ...” and he just listed off the powerful people he knew in this community. He said, “If you need help, let me know, and we'll work together.” And you could just see it on the parents' faces; it was like, wow, he cares!

That kind of involvement is a personal risk.

Sure it is. But what he did in that one meeting is going to increase kids coming to school because it's going to increase parents' feelings of trust. If a parent comes in and says, “I'm getting my utilities shut off and I don't know what to do,” and they feel safe enough to say that rather than not send their kids to school because they're all frantic ...

It takes personal responsibility. It's not just about following your state or district accountability plan.

Yes. There is a huge public perception that if you're in poverty and you really want help, it's there. Truth: It's not. For example, there's a federal program that helps people with their utilities once a year. Probably the first 200 people in line are the ones who get that help and the rest are turned away. We have public housing and you open it up in Portland with 200 vouchers and 2,000 people show up. We don't talk about who we turn away. Because if the public perception is that the help is there, the public don't have to do anything. If my perception is, as a teacher or a principal, that [parents in poverty are] just not trying, they're just not working hard enough—whatever stereotype—then I don't need to do anything. It's their problem. It doesn't involve me. Helping to build some resources into the lives of these families, in whatever way—and it's usually a small way for a middle class person, truthfully—doesn't take much. Sometimes it's a stamp and an envelope for something they need to mail.

You must be very resilient to get where you are today.

First of all, I don't believe resiliency comes from within. I believe that you develop resiliency if you get the right kinds of messages. That's the current theory. Initially, resiliency theory was: You are born with resiliency or you're not. That allows us to write people off by saying, “Oh, that person is just not motivated so we don't have to mess with him.” I say, OK, what are they motivated about? Because they're motivated about something, they're not just a write-off.

The number one privilege I had was being born female with five brothers, because I got strong messages from everybody in my family that I was special, I was a queen, I deserved to be treated wonderfully. I shouldn't have to pick raspberries because I'd get scars on my hands. (Now, I did have to pick other stuff. Everything we earned in migrant labor went for food that night. We were always making just enough to eat that night or to get a place to stay that night.) Those messages set me up to expect and to challenge somewhat, not to the degree a middle class person would challenge, but a little bit more than most people.

Enrolling in a Women in Transition program as a young adult was a turning point in your life. How did you find out about that program?

It was a fluke; my utilities got shut off. Multnomah [County, Oregon] Community Action Agency had a federal utilities assistance program and I went there to see if I could get help to get my lights turned on. There was a woman there who said, “Hey, I couldn't help but overhear your story. You should probably know that there's a new program going to start up. It's through the Mount Hood Community College and it's really designed for people in your situation.” The irony is that she didn't even work there. That's what I tell social service folks: Don't just give your clients a three-day box of food; know what else is out there. It's the same thing I tell teachers: Don't just give students the math to do, but know what else is out there to facilitate their doing the math.

I certainly didn't have any belief that a program was going to help me. I was very cynical. I was 26 years old, I had my kids, and I'd lived a life of homelessness and minimum wage jobs. But what drove me to make the phone call was passing by Pizza Hut on my way home. I'd worked there before and I thought, you know, with my six months in the ninth grade, I could get a job back there, but I still won't have enough to pay the rent and buy groceries even if I'm working 40 hours a week. And it takes me away from Jennifer and Daniel, my kids—that's what I'm here for on this planet, I don't want to be away from them. So I called the number.

When I went in for the interview the director was telling me very middle class reasons why I should go through the program, and I'm just rolling my eyes and thinking this has nothing to do with me, I'm out of here, and I'm not going to go through your stupid program. And then she said, “If you complete our program you'll become eligible for a Section 8 housing voucher.” Motivation! My attitude shifted from “I'm not going to go through your program” to “OK, I'll go, but you're not going to mess with me, you're not going to change me,” because change is so frightening. I went in there with exactly that attitude: I'm going to jump through your hoops. I'm going to get the voucher and my kids won't be evicted and they can go to one school and not have to be changing schools.

The first day of the program, they started out by sharing their own life stories, how they came to be where they are, and that was powerful to listen to. I'd never really heard a middle class person's life story. There were four women running the program and every one of them stood up and shared her life story. So it was like: Wow, you've never been evicted, you've never gone hungry—well, no wonder you're here! It's not that you're so much better than me—that's the perception, that the people who are making it are so much better. In the isolation of poverty, you just never come into contact with people who are making it in meaningful ways. The ones you do come into contact with—health care, courts, social service, educators—they've all been trained in our universities to keep their distance from you. So you never get to know them. The only people you know indepth are people living in poverty just like you.

Now that you've moved into the middle class, what do you observe when you move between economic classes?

I went to Arizona to do some work with the Arizona school board, and my second oldest brother lives there. He lives in a 1963 trailer in our old neighborhood, impoverished; he works 16-hour days, and he doesn't make enough money to get by although he works very, very hard. He's 48. I said, “I'm on an expense account here. Pick the nicest restaurant in town and I'll take you out to dinner.” So he tells me directions to get to this restaurant and I pull up and there's a drive-through window. This is the nicest restaurant that he knows of, and I go inside and it's like $4 tacos. I wanted to take him shopping. I said, “Come on, let's go get you some nice clothes. It's my treat, I haven't seen you for five years.” He chose Wal-Mart and said, “I don't really need that.” I said, “Well, what about shoes?' He said, “Mom got me these five years ago, these will do me.”

Does he feel awkward?

I don't think so. I'm his little sister. My brothers, I think, feel a part of everything I've done because I've used them in multiple ways to get where I am and I tell them. When I say, “I'm going to take you shopping,” I say, “Melvin, you know I talk about you and your life in my trainings and I use it as a way to help people understand poverty. So, this is not my money, it's yours.” I said to my brother Wayne, “I'm going to go talk to a couple of hundred administrators; what would you tell them that they could do better with kids like you when you were in school?” Wayne spent most of his life in prison. So he wrote this two-page letter about what administrators should do. I made copies of it and I handed it out and I paid him, as I would any researcher. I just see so much value in his perspective. We'll pay [a consultant] who's never even touched poverty $20,000 when you need to be paying the people who are in poverty for their advice and their wisdom.

It's very similar to the way researchers used to work with indigenous communities. They'd helicopter in, collect all the information, and fly out taking it all with them. The ethics of today is that you involve the people of the community in the research study and you leave something of what you learned behind.

Absolutely, it is very similar. When I sit with kids who are living in poverty and have conversations with them about school and academics, they will tell me what the problems are. You don't need to hire somebody! I keep saying, “Go to the people. You want to know, go to the people.” They know their context. They know how they see the world. They know what they're motivated by. They know what they have passion for and they know where the disconnect is—they can tell you what you're doing that makes them feel like you don't care.

So often we want to blame the parents.

I'll start right out with that when I'm working with teachers. I try to help them see from the parents' perspective. What would you do if you had all this going on? You wouldn't do anything different. Why should the parents value education? The education system failed them and their parents and grandparents. So having this sense that if the parents would just value education, everything would be OK. Well, why should they? How can they? They don't have any experiences that tell them this is a way out.

In my doctoral research, I asked the question, “Did your family support your education?” Eighty-seven percent said “no” on the surveys, but in the focus groups they said, “I couldn't have done it without my mom.” “I couldn't have done it without my dad.” “I couldn't have done it without my cousins, my brothers.” It kept coming up: family support. And what I learned as I teased out the data, “support” means something different. Parents want the best for their kids, but they may not see education as the best. They may believe that if they get a job at McDonald's that's the best thing because they're going to have some money tonight to buy some food for that day. They may believe that the best for their kids is to get into a vocational kind of thing because maybe they've met somebody who's benefited from something like that. But they'll come over and do their kids' laundry while they're in school. They may not understand why their kids are in school, but they watch their kids, they rake their yard, whatever.

Is your work taking you into new directions?

I'm developing some materials for educators. It's a nine-month packet. Each month there will be a 5" x 8" card with real practical advice: Here's some things that you can do and each one will have a particular theme. September is “Better beginnings for students living in poverty.” October is “Involving parents living in a poverty context.” The cards will go into the teachers' boxes every month because what I've heard over the years of doing this work is teachers saying, “I need injections. I get it and then I go back into it and start judging again, start not understanding, stop having the patience for some of the things that I need to have patience for, so I need an injection. I need to know what questions to ask because I don't even know what questions.” So I believe the shifts that we have to make educationwise. It's an ongoing process, it's not a one-shot you go into the school and you do a two-day training and change everything in that school. The pack will also have a DVD, a mini-presentation about that particular area. I'm hoping to have that ready by fall 2005.

The other area that I'm doing more and more in is: I developed a poverty competency template, an action-plan development tool. I've been going into schools and doing a comprehensive assessment of what is working for your kids in poverty and what are areas where you're losing them. Homework, attendance, and parent involvement are usually the areas that emerge. I'm doing two schools in Vancouver and the school in Ontario. But that's a yearlong commitment for me; I visit the school five times throughout the year, provide them with trainings as well as doing the focus groups and the surveys, and bring their data back. The real power in that tool is that it's not somebody coming in saying, “You need to do this with your kids who are living in poverty. Because people want ideas. They don't want somebody from somewhere else coming in saying, “Do this.” Because it doesn't necessarily make sense in their community. So you go in there and say, “OK, what do you like about what's happening? When does it feel right in your connection with the kid in poverty? How do we build on that? How do we do more than that? Obviously this is working, how do we build on that?”

In the areas where you know things aren't working, like homework, what do you do? This is just when I want to bang my head against the wall. You ask teachers, “Why do you give homework?” Three reasons: responsibility, practice the learning, communicate with parents. “Are you achieving your outcome goals with your students in poverty through that tool?” “No.” “Did it work last year? Five years ago?” I've yet to have somebody say, “Yeah! Homework's the way to get kids to be more responsible. It's the way to communicate with parents in poverty.” Everybody knows that it's ineffective as a tool for achieving those outcomes, so can we examine this sacred cow and say, “What could work to help kids get organizational skills or learn that when they start a project they need to finish it or to communicate with the parents?”

The parents at Ontario Middle School said, “I don't want to talk about school with teachers. I like to know them because they're with my kid, but I don't want to go in there because all they want to talk about is school.” So the teachers wanted fun, interactive opportunities to get to know their students' parents. One activity a school did was an assessment of the parents' skills. They asked the kids, “What does your mom like to do?” “Well, she crochets,” or “She knits,” or “He woodworks,” “He builds things,” “He sings, he plays the guitar.” And then they asked the parents to come in and teach the teachers. So they had a Parents Teach the Teachers Night. It was overwhelmingly successful. The parents were the experts and that was incredibly powerful. And they got those parents into the school just by validating them, meeting them where they are, recognizing they have assets and strengths.

Another tool I've seen be really effective is when the teachers talk to the parents about their kids, not about school. It's powerful for the teachers, because then when the teachers say, “Tell me about Cathy. What does she like to do at home? What does she care most about?”, you're learning about that kid's motivation. If you've got a kid who wants to be an athlete, you say, “Great! Cool! I want to come to your game. And what I want to do right now is to make sure that you'll be able to read your contract and compute all of that money you're going to make.” You know? You don't say, “You'll never be an athlete, you need to think practical and do your math.” You shut them down. Strengths-perspective theory says to treat every child as if their potential is unknown, you cannot know their potential. Because a lot of teachers believe that the conditions of poverty are not going to allow kids to learn.

One of the main concepts I teach is that the teacher must become the mentor. We know that mentoring is the way to help kids get through the educational system. Add-on mentoring programs are fine, but if we know that that is a key, why can't the teacher be the mentor? It's partially because we think of mentors as, Oh, they come pick the kids up and take them out to lunch. That's not the kind of mentoring they need to be successful in school. Arthur Levine and Jana Nidiffer, in their book Beating the Odds: How the Poor Get to College, identify three really specific characteristics of mentors. In my research I identified four. I teach those four characteristics and they're not add-ons to an educator's job. They are: You believe in your students. Most teachers say they do that. But you ask your kids in poverty, do you think I believe in you? I'll tell you what, I'm talking to kids weekly. At some point every week I talk with kids in poverty and they will tell you, I can't find one teacher who believes in me.

Southridge High School [in Beaverton, Oregon] brought me in to work with faculty and administrators, then they brought me in and I worked with 2,200 kids. Then I worked with their student leadership team. They took on the focus of poverty. They took a week out of their school year to study poverty. They brought in speakers, they had student-led discussions, they did reports and presented, they did skits. I had girls coming up to me in tears and talking about not being able to be on the dance team because it's 500 bucks. Stuff started emerging that were barriers to kids feeling like they belong. At Southridge as well they have pockets of poverty. In mixed-class schools you have even more opportunities to help kids gain the skills and the language they need because you can facilitate that dialogue.

The mentoring is key: Believe in the students, believe education is the way out of poverty—a lot of people don't, because people from poverty typically don't get educated so there's a disconnect there; be bicultural—not talking about race, talking about knowing the history of poverty in our country. Where do the labels come from? What labels do we use to describe people in poverty over the years? What programs have we had? What policies have we had? What has been our attitude as a country toward people living in poverty? Begin to get grounded in that. Read Herbert Gans's The War Against the Poor because he covers all of it in that one book. It's a great book.

Don't just know the history of poverty, know your community. How many people in your community get their water shut off every day? How many people get their lights shut off? What's the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in your community? What's the minimum wage in your state? I travel all over this country and it doesn't matter who I talk to, I'll say what's your minimum wage? Either they say nothing or they have little debates going, uh, $5.55, no. Nobody knows, but if you don't know that, how can you know what the families are facing? If you don't know how much they can get, you don't know how much they can buy. So it's real easy to continue to judge and stereotype. That's what I mean by, become aware of the structural causes of poverty.

I encourage schools to involve students in getting that data. There's a school in Atlanta where middle school kids have taken on interviewing department of human services people about foster care kids and what's happening to them. That's powerful. They're going to present it to legislators, this group of eighth-graders. How many foster kids end up homeless? How many foster kids drop out of school? Things like that. That's wonderful for kids to know because when I go into schools, I'll go into [private schools such as Portland's] Catlin Gabel or Oregon Episcopal School, and I'll say to the kids, “Why don't some people have money in America?” And they'll say, “Well, they're lazy, they're drug addicts, they're drunks, they're alcoholics, they're crazy.” Every stereotype. Who are these kids going to become?

All of the professionals and opinion leaders.

And if they should be in a position to make a decision about funding for people in poverty, if they should be in a position to make a decision about whether a program should exist, if they should be a doctor, or if they should be a dentist, or a teacher, or a health care provider, how might they interact with somebody in poverty? They have no grounding in it. That's what James Loewen talks about in The Lies My Teacher Told Me, that we're not educating our kids about poverty in the United States. In my research, one of the most powerful things for people is when they learned about poverty and its causes.

So believe in the students, believe that education is the way out of poverty, be bicultural. The last thing is, open your network to your students. When you ask kids in poverty, “What are you going to do for a job when you grow up?” They'll say the name of a job that somebody they know has had. Often it's truck driver, cosmetologist. They don't know anyone who's been a doctor or a lawyer. An example I use in my trainings is my son. When Daniel was 13, he watched [the movie] Happy Gilmore. Adam Sandler is a hockey player and plays golf to save his grandma's house—a lot of social class stuff in that movie, interestingly. My son says, “I want to try that golf thing.” I never knew a soul who played golf... I buy him some golf clubs and some balls at the Goodwill. He spends six months hitting balls into a pan. Then because of who I know—and I really make it clear that we live in a world where it's “who you know.” That's why I say that you have to open up your network, because your kids in poverty don't even have people with a phone number half the time to put down on their résumé. (I remember when I finally got an address book and I actually knew people [whose] names I could write in and they had an address and phone number and I didn't have to cross it out every week or so.) Daniel went to a very, very privileged high school. He couldn't have gotten there without my having connections. He played golf for Riverdale's golf team and scored 13th in the state, and then he says, “What I want to do is design golf courses.” And because I sit on the board of the American Leadership Forum of Oregon, I asked powerful people who know people, “Who do you know who does this?” And he gets hired as assistant to the City of Portland golf director. Who in the world would I have called if I didn't have a network? Families in poverty don't—if their kid has an interest, who are they going to call?