Making a mountain out of a molehill (and vice versa)
Yesterday's report about the growing number of poor kids in the public schools (see the blog post below) and the coverage it received in the Raleigh News & Observer has raised the hackles of that vigilant voice for definitional purity, John Hood of the Locke Foundation. According to Hood, the story was "great big, front page blooper" and "ludicrous" because the reporter had the temerity to be insufficiently precise to please him in her use of the terms "poor," "low income," and "poverty line."
This is a classic case of Hood making a mountain out of a molehill – or, as he is wont to do in the case of the poverty numbers, a molehill out of a mountain.
What the report said is that the number of poor kids in schools is growing dramatically. We know this because the number of kids whose families' incomes are low enough to qualify for the federal free and reduced price school meals program has grown. While it is true, as Hood claims, that there is a difference between the incomes at which someone qualifies for school meals assistance and the point at which one falls below the official federal poverty level (the meals threshold is higher), there is no doubt that the kids in the meals program are "poor" or "low income" or whatever you want to call them.
It is well-documented that the official federal poverty levels have been obsolete for decades — if they ever were relevant. That's why program after program (like the meals program) uses a multiplier when calculating eligibility (150%, 185%, 200%, etc…). According to this report, it takes 231% of the federal poverty level to have a "living income" in North Carolina.
If you have any doubts about whether or not the kids receiving free and reduced price meals are "poor" or "low income," check out the official eligibility numbers from the Wake County Public Schools. John Hood may think that families of four living on less than $38,203 a year are doing just swimmingly, but in the real world, such folks are clearly struggling and, regardless of the official federal poverty level, living below "a" poverty line, if not "the" poverty line.
That the number of such families is growing and making up a larger and larger percentage of our public schools is, of course, a scandal and, in large measure, the direct result of market fundamentalist policies championed by people like Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush, whose "virtues" Hood and his staff so regularly extol.
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