Top of the Class

In chapter 4 of Poor Economics, Banerjee and Duflo bring up the problem of increasing absentee numbers in schools among poverty stricken areas in the developing countries. There are two sides of the problem though, the demand side (where parents decide whether their children will attend school) and the supply side (the role governments play to provide a promising and efficient educational system). In terms of the demand side of attending school, the parents of children have the final say whether their children will attend, most parents don't see value in education and they would rather have their children at home working for them bringing in income. On the other side of the spectrum, the supply side is controlled by the governments of these respective countries, these educational systems rely on many different factors such as providing teachers that actually "want" to teach, resources (books and informational technology). Although, Banerjee and Duflo have seen improvements in attendance through certain practices involving the supply and demand sides of the educational systems, there is still a lot more that governments and families can do to make sure all children are receiving a proper education.

I googled "poverty and education" and came a across an article in the New York Times titled "Class Matters. Why Don't We Admit It?" There were many similarities between this article and the chapter we read in Poor Economics. Basically, the article brings up that children in the United States from lower level income families do substantially worse in school compared to their high level income counterparts. Also, policy makers are trying to fix this by implementing George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind, which strives to make schools more efficient by analyzing the performance of teachers through test scores their students receive.

Although there are many similarities between the article and the chapter, Banerjee and Duflo analyze many more different aspects of poverty stricken educational systems. They believe that parents have a big decision of whether or not their children go to school, while the article does not take into effect the component of attendance and parental supervision. A similarity was the government intervention that is occurring in both developing countries and the United States to make education systems more efficient. At least the leaders of this country sense there is a problem here... Something I found interesting that the article brought forth was the nutrition and health of students and how it may affect their performance in the classroom.

Overall, the message that is being presented is that children who's families are of the lower class or in poverty are either not performing well in school or they are not attending school, and there are many reasons for why this is true. Do you think that attendance in the United States among children who in live in poverty is as low as the attendance of children in developing countries?