Skip to main content

Poverty and Education


Whenever I talk about poverty, my more progressive friends get annoyed because I think it is very difficult for children in poverty to be successful in schools and my more progressive friends think that we can educate every child, no matter how poor, to a high standard.





Let's look at poverty. The official poverty definition by the Census Bureau is family money income before taxes and does not include capital gains or noncash benefits (such as public housing, Medicaid, and food stamps)." The Census Bureau chooses poverty thresholds which are the dollar amounts that determine poverty status.  In 2017, the poverty thresholds ranged from $11,756 for one senior person age 65 and older living alone to $54,550 for a family of nine people or more. There is an annual cost of living adjustment but not a geographic adjustment.  Not a lot of money. America has one of the highest rates of poverty for children in the developed world. According to OECD, America ranks 17th out of the 19 OECD countries in poverty.
.

 I have always read that the poverty rate for children in the United States for the past decade has been about 21%. However, the Census Bureau has said that "For children under age 18, 18.0 percent in 2016....Children represented 23.0 percent of the total population and 32.6 percent of the people in poverty." Children under 18 totaled almost 74 million people which means we have almost 1 in 5 children in this country in poverty; these children live mostly in the inner cities and rural areas although some of the suburban areas outside of our largest cities have increased poverty levels.




The effects of poverty are devastating. Here is one summary, Eric Jensen's How Poverty Affects Classroom Engagement - Health - A study by two prominent neuroscientists suggested that intelligence is linked to health (Gray & Thompson, 2004). The poor have more untreated ear infections and hearing loss  issues (Menyuk, 1980); greater exposure to lead (Sargent et al., 1995); and a higher incidence of asthma (Gottlieb, Beiser, & O'Connor, 1995) than middleclass children. Each of these health related factors can affect attention, reasoning, learning, and memory.


Nutrition - Nutrition plays a crucial role as well. Children who grow up in poor families are exposed to food with lower nutritional value. This can adversely affect them even in the womb (AntonowSchlorke et al., 2011). Moreover, poor nutrition at breakfast affects gray matter mass in children's brains (Taki et al., 2010). Skipping breakfast is highly prevalent among urban minority youth, and it negatively affects students' academic achievement by adversely affecting cognition and raising absenteeism (Basch, 2011).




Stress - Low income parents' chronic stress affects their kids through chronic activation of their children's immune systems, which taxes available resources and has long reaching effects (Blair & Raver, 2012). Distress affects brain development, academic success, and social competence (Evans, Kim, Ting, Tesher, & Shannis, 2007). It also impairs behaviors; reduces attentional control (Liston, McEwen, & Casey, 2009); boosts impulsivity (Evans, 2003); and impairs working memory (Evans & Schamberg, 2009).


With all these issues that children in poverty face, we spend enormous amounts of time and energy and limited resources insisting that all children can learn rather than committing that time, energy and resources to improving our children's standard of living. If we truly want children in poverty to be better educated, improve their families' standard of living.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I LIke Mike Bloomberg by Lynne Weikart

Bloomberg took office two months after 9/11. The results of 9/11 - the city lost over 100,000 private sector jobs in one year. The city was devastated. Corporations were fleeing the city as were residents. Bloomberg created an economic development machine that roared through all five boroughs and brought over 400,000 new jobs.    Just about the time the city recovered from 9/11, there was a national recession and Bloomberg guided the recovery. That recovery was cushioned by the fact that Bloomberg had raised taxes twice and the city had surpluses to help navigate the recession. Very early in his mayoralty, Bloomberg made it very clear that he would not tolerate discrimination against Muslims. In 2002 shortly after Bloomberg became mayor, he announced he was against a city council bill that would ban the Palestine Authority from their offices in the city. A few years later in the hysteria surrounding the proposed building of an Islamic Community Center a few blocks from the deva
1 comment
Read more

Federal Abandonment of Public Housing

Public housing began during the Roosevelt years. In 1937 President Franklin Roosevelt signed the United States Housing Act, known as Wagner-Steagall, to support building low-rent public housing. In the wake of  President Truman‘s surprise reelection in 1948, Congress passed the bill now known as the Housing Act of 1949 and re-authorized the public housing program. The GI Bill after World War II supported veterans in securing low-interest loans to own their own homes. In the 1950s Congress passed a second Housing Act focused on conserving and rehabilitating low-income housing. All these laws favored white people. The 1950s were famous for "urban renewal" which meant that the federal government provided grants for slum clearance that often meant cities would choose the poorest section of town to abolish residences and build new construction.  In the 1960s, public housing became less discriminatory with Kennedy's Equal Opportunity in Housing Act. President Johnson eleva
3 comments
Read more

Federal Government and the Lack of Affordable Housing

The federal government hasn't built public housing since the 1960s. President Johnson pushed Congress to pass the 1968 Housing Act that became a major time of construction of public housing almost doubling such units across the country. In addition, Bobby Kennedy and Senator Jacob Javits pushed through a 1966 amendment to the Economic Development Act that provided private developers with incentives payments to invest in poverty areas.   Once the Reagan era began that was the end of public housing. Instead, Reagan signed the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which slowed building of low-income housing further. First, the act repealed accelerated depreciation and the use of depreciation deductions to offset other ordinary income, precipitating a sharp drop in multifamily housing production. Second, the law placed a cap, for the first time, on states’ authority to issue tax-exempt bonds for multifamily housing and imposed income limits on eligible households. Third, the act created the Low In
2 comments
Read more