October 30, 2007
New report: Number of poor kids in public schools growing fast
The
next time someone tells you how bad the public schools are and how all we have to do is give parents "choice" and "unleash the power of the market" to solve all of the problems in education, show them this report from the Southern Educational Foundation.
Here's perhaps the most important finding:
For the last three years, low income students have constituted a majority of the South's public school children. In the 2004-2005 school year, 50 percent of the South's school children became eligible for free or reduced lunch in the public schools. In the 2005-2006 school year, the number increased to 53 percent, and, in the school year ending in the summer of 2007, 54 percent of the South's public school students were from low income households….Today, for the first time in more than 40 years, the South is the only region in the nation where low income children constitute a majority of public school students.
The number for North Carolina is 49%. In other words, half the kids coming to school are officially "poor." And that doesn't even count the large group whose families are barely making it, but who earn too much to get a free or reduced price lunch.
What are the implications of this hard reality? The report puts it this way:
As a group, low income students receive the least early childhood education. Too often these students start behind in school and never catch up. Low income students score significantly below wealthier students on every national test score at every age….Low income students also have higher rates for dropping out of high school and lower rates for college attendance and college graduation.
While the fight to fix what ails us in the day to day world of public education (racism, bureaucracy, inertia, standardized testing mania) is essential to our future as a state and nation, the new report highlights two hard and inescapable facts: the chief reason that kids fail in school is because they are poor and the number of poor kids is growing fast.
As long as our political leaders (with the apparent exception of John Edwards, who for all his screw ups, seems to be the only one talking about the issue) continue to delude themselves into believing that this problem can be addressed (much less solved) without the sustained application of new and large quantities of public resources and a broad-based, societal commitment to shrink our rapidly growing wealth and income gaps, things will continue to get worse.
(For more on this story, check out today's Fitzsimon File).
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19 Comments Add yours »
Interesting. This would suggest to me that some time of parental choice would be the answer. If poor parents are able to send their kids to any type of school (public, private, parochial) it would even out this imbalance..
Good to see you guys are finally on board with scholarships for low-income children to move them out of public schools.
Especially in light of data confirming the inextricable link between poverty and school performance and the most recent Bush administration data confirming the fact that poor kids fare no better in private schools, what it actually suggests, Chris, is the need for a broad societal recommitment to ending poverty.
Funny, Rob, that has been tried and tried to the tune of trillions — but the more money that has been spent, the more poverty there has been. When you create incentives to be dependent wards of the state, that’s what they’ll be. More money for entitlements or a continued commitment to the “war on poverty” with no exit strategy is exactly the nostrum we don’t need to help the poor.
This is a lie and you know it. Forty-nine percent are not “officially poor”. This is based on a faulty report and faulty media coverage. These numbers reflect the percent of children who qualify for free or reduced lunches which is calculated differently than the way you calculate poverty. The percent of children in poverty is much closer to 20%, not 50%.
How do you propose we pay for the “sustained application of new and large quantities of public resources?”
It seems we have already been down that road. Looking just at North Carolina, countless billions have been spent to “alleviate poverty” through your wealth redistribution schemes over the last several decades, and the poverty rate has remained pretty constant.
I would like to see any research showing a correlelation of nations with higher levels of government wealth redistribution experiencing higher wealth creation and lower poverty.
It also amazes me how “progressives” can look at the pleas of poor families for any option out of the public schools and say no.
You can cite your flawed studies all day, but how about we let parents decide if their children will be better off in a school different that the one their child is assigned to.
Brian – it is because they don’t want to get rid of poverty. They want to subsidize it so they can make voters dependent on them and their immoral, failed policies.
My, my, my — good to see that everyone’s up and at ‘em this morning.
First of all, Mr./Ms? Pirate — Accuse of me of lying again on this blog and you will removed. We’re all for free and open debate, but it appears that you need to learn some manners.
Now, Max and Brian — Here’s the deal guys:
American poverty has been rising or stagnant for several years –particularly among children. Not surprisingly, this phenomenon correlates quite nicely with the rise of a corporatist government that has de-empahsized social spending and and re-emphasized a regressive tax code that redistributes wealth from the bottom to the top.
We can get into the details of the studies and reports (and perhaps we should), but there’s no disputing the fact that American anti-poverty programs have had an enormous positive impact through the years. Ever hear of Social Security? Have any idea how dramatically the lives of our elderly and disabled have been improved by it over the past 70 years?
None of the American social programs is perfect — most have major flaws — but there’s no disputing the fact that when various recent administrations (Reagan, Clinton, Bush II) have ratcheted back on social program benefits that poverty has gone up. I sometimes think that old Dick Nixon had it right when he proposed junking all the bureaucracy and establishing a simple national income floor.
Anyway, that’s all for now. I’ll get you some poverty #’s from other countries shortly.
“there’s no disputing the fact that American anti-poverty programs have had an enormous positive impact through the years.”
…
“American poverty has been rising or stagnant for several years –particularly among children.”
Huh?
Over the long term, investments in social programs have produced positive impacts. Most famously, poverty rates among the elderly have dropped sharply, owing largely to Social Security and Medicare.
In the short term, however, a steady disinvestment in social programs has undercut their ability to help folks — a fact reflected in such problems as like declining health insurance coverage for children.
Past experience shows the impact that such investments can make. Contemporary experiences, meanwhile, show that inadequate investments yield inadequate results.
No “huh” there.
I am still trying to figure out the “enormous positive impact” of anti-poverty programs when “American poverty has been rising or stagnant for several years.”
If poverty rates among the elderly have dropped sharply, but overall poverty rates have remained stagnant, that means there may be fewer poor elderly but more poor working-age and children.
Do you have any data to back up your claims?
Nevermind the fact that Social Security and Medicare present untold billions in soon-to-be realized unfunded liabilities.
Furthermore, I am still curious to see any evidence of countries with larger wealth redistribution being correlated to greater prosperity. Past and current evidence points to the contrary.
No doubt Brian you feel that the best way to deal with poverty is to pass out Ayn Rand novellas.
Unfortunately for you, there’s a slightly more popular philosophy that Americans are digging these days. It’s found in the New Testament, usually summed up in these simple words: “Love thy neighbor, help the poor.”
There’s also this little parable about some sheep and a Shepard, and one of the sheep getting lost . . . well just check out the New Testament, you’ll see what I’m talking about.
Jerimee,
What about the seperation of church and state? Are you a part of the “religious right?”
Anyway, the best way to help the poor is to grow the economy. An expanding economy creates jobs – a stagnant economy always hurts those at the margins of employment dispraportionately. There is a reason the U.S. became the most prosperous nation in the history of the planet in less than 200 years of existence, and it’s not because of government largess.
Is it any wonder that the Middle Class is shrinking when the Left believes that any family that makes less than $80,000 a year is in poverty and in need of free healthcare and other government handouts yet anyone who makes more than $80,000 a year is not paying enough in taxes and are nothing but wealthy, greedy capitalists?
I must be missing something about the impacts of the expanding economy. From what I can tell, the economy has been generally expanding pretty steadily over the past 20 years – and so has the poverty rate. This article in the Washington Post in 2005 tells the tale pretty simply:
What’s clear is that an expanding economy has one reliable impact: the rich get richer. And they do so on the backs of a large and growing underclass. Indeed, the corporatists would appear to have a vested interest in keeping that underclass permanently in place.
I still would like to see a response to my two main questions:
“How do you propose we pay for the “sustained application of new and large quantities of public resources?†and “I would like to see any research showing a correlelation of nations with higher levels of government wealth redistribution experiencing higher wealth creation and lower poverty.”
Neither of these have been addressed.
As to this comment: “What’s clear is that an expanding economy has one reliable impact: the rich get richer. And they do so on the backs of a large and growing underclass.” It makes for a nice bumper-sticker slogan, but defies logic and evidence. Check out this article:
http://townhall.com/columnists/WalterEWilliams/2007/10/31/are_the_poor_getting_poorer
Some highlights:
“For the most part, long-term poverty today is self-inflicted. To see this, let’s examine some numbers from the Census Bureau’s 2004 Current Population Survey. There’s one segment of the black population that suffers only a 9.9 percent poverty rate, and only 13.7 percent of their under-5-year-olds are poor. There’s another segment of the black population that suffers a 39.5 percent poverty rate, and 58.1 percent of its under-5-year-olds are poor…..
What do you think distinguishes the high and low poverty populations? The only statistical distinction between both the black and white populations is marriage. There is far less poverty in married-couple families, where presumably at least one of the spouses is employed. Fully 85 percent of black children living in poverty reside in a female-headed household.”
and..
“Poverty is not static for people willing to work. A University of Michigan study shows that only 5 percent of those in the bottom fifth of the income distribution in 1975 remained there in 1991. What happened to them? They moved up to the top three-fifths of the income distribution — middle class or higher. Moreover, three out of 10 of the lowest income earners in 1975 moved all the way into the top fifth of income earners by 1991. Those who were poor in 1975 had an inflation-adjusted average income gain of $27,745 by 1991. Those workers who were in the top fifth of income earners in 1975 were better off in 1991 by an average of only $4,354. The bottom line is, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting richer.” (In other words, the “poor” have seen much greater gains than the “rich”)
Another point not yet addressed is that trillions of dollars in “anti-poverty” programs have failed to reduce the poverty rate.
This’ll be my last comment in this silly string, but I do urge folks to check our the following links for info about comparative poverty rates amongst wealthy industrialized countries and some ideas for how we might learn from our neighbors around the world:
http://www.epinet.org/books/swa2004/news/swafacts_international.pdf
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2007/04/poverty_report.html
What is “silly” is the inability to answer the primary questions mentioned in the first place. That is – how do you intend to pay for all this? How do you explain the trillions spent in the US to allegedly fight poverty resulting in stagnant or growing poverty rates? What evidence is there showing trends that nations with larger wealth redistribution experience higher rates of growth and lower poverty?
Your link to the EPI data fails to address any of these questions. First off, it is merely a snapshot and misses any trendlines or overarching causation. Second, it doesn’t specify as to whether the different nations use different standards for “poverty.” Third, it leaves out the majority of the earth’s population – much of which lives in third-world nations. Let’s look at the economic institutions in the poorest nations and I suspect we will not find many beacons of capitalism. Lastly, the report loses any credibility when it claims the living standards for the “poor” in the US is lower than the “poor” in other nations – a notion that has been discredited thoroughly.
Brian, If you think anybody believes you really want answers to your questions I’ve got some cousins in Nigeria you can correspond with. They found a trillion dollars in Iraq and need your help getting it back to the US.
If I didn’t want answers to the questions – I wouldn’t have asked them. So far, you’ve made no attempt to do so.