In yesterday's New York Times, Helen F. Ladd and Edward B. Fiske write that NCLB's efforts to improve schools for low income students were noble, but misguided. It is impossible to improve education for those kids without dealing with the larger problems outside the school building. They say those kids need access to good nutrion, summer experiences, mentoring and tutoring.
Harry B at Crooked Timber has a great graph showing the increasing correlation between education and educational incomes. (I think that there's more than just growing income inequality behind that particular graph, but that's slightly off topic.)
While I totally support the programs that Ladd and Fiske suggest, I sincerely doubt whether a mentoring program would really put a dent in the depressing school/income correlation.
The people in low income community need jobs. If you have a job, then you're not depressed and can interact with your kids, follow up with teachers, and vote at school board elections. You will vote to approve the school budget, because you can afford to pay the extra $50 in taxes. If you have a job, you can afford to move to the next town where they have better schools. Maybe jobs are the silver bullet.
Apt. 11d 
Having a job is great*, but I don’t think it precludes depression. Based on local election turnout and employment statistics, having a job might well correlate with voting in a school board election, but the great majority of employed people don’t vote in school board elections.
*Kind of.
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Also, there’s a big difference between finding a job and keeping a job, and that’s where mentoring can come in, to help learn workplace skills and conventions, as well as make important connections and move into careers, instead of just “jobs.”
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…there’s a big difference between finding a job and keeping a job
Step 1: Make sure nobody else can see your monitor.
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Also, having a job that pays a living wage and where you are treated as a human probably helps. I imagine working 16 hours a day and still not being able to pay rent doesn’t really do much for morale.
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The children in low-income communities need fathers. I don’t understand yhy liberals are so enthusiastic about forcing children to grown up in “chaotic families” (see econlog, 12/8/11). It seems to me at least as bad as having parents who smoke, but the Democrats spend millions denouncing the latter, while valorizing the former.
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Yup – if the families and kids are fed and watered and have decent jobs where they are treated with respect and paid a living wage, the whole world changes.
I think that so much of this debate flows out of our own personal beliefs about “poor people”. One extreme is the “they made their bed, they can lie in it. Darned if I am going to shell out any tax dollars to help them – I did it all on my own”.
The only problem with that is that old saying about George W – “born on third and thought he hit a triple”. We each enjoy a lot of privilege to varying degrees that has given us a leg up or at least got us to the table where we could compete/go to good schools/know how to “be” in middle/upper class situations.
There a lot to success that has little to do with hard work and book smarts.
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We could have a ham and cheese sandwich, if only we had ham and cheese and bread.
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“Step 1: Make sure nobody else can see your monitor.”
Step 2: Learn the difference between “Reply” and “Reply All.”
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Step 3: Make sure your Facebook page is consistent with your flu story.
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Nobody on my Facebook page lives within a hundred miles of me.
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It always strikes me that a lot of solutions to the problem conflate correlation and causation (including the insight that having a job might make a person a better school parent). I think people who have jobs are probably different from people who don’t have jobs, given the same background (or degree of privilege if you will). So, it’s not necessarily the job the poor mother has, but the person who manages to keep that job that makes the difference in the child’s school life.
What privilege brings us is the ability to be the kind of person who looses/can’t keep the job, at times, and not bottom out of life and the economy.
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While I don’t know a lot of people in the gov’t definition of poverty, I do know many people who skirt just above that line. The Near-Poverty income group. There was an article in the TImes, I believe, about this demographic a few weeks ago.
There are a lot of families out there, with 2 parents, who mean well, don’t have drug addictions, own a home, have a high school education. This group got hit really, really hard in this recession. I’ve seen quite a number of families where the guy can’t find work as a contractor, electrician, carpenter. The wife has to run out and get a secretarial job, and then come home and make dinner. The dad, even though he’s home is too depressed to do supervise the kids or do the laundry. (Also, traditional conceptions of women’s work.) The stress over paying bills in those situations is horrendous. It has a huge impact on the kids’ education. The depression is contagious and brings down a whole town.
If I was looking for an academic publication (not), I think it would be interesting to look at test scores over time in towns that were hit especially hard by the recession.
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“If I was looking for an academic publication (not), I think it would be interesting to look at test scores over time in towns that were hit especially hard by the recession.”
I don’t know about that. Wouldn’t you expect there to be a lot of mobility, lots of families leaving for greener pastures, and perhaps some lower income people moving in for cheap housing? You would probably not be comparing the same group of people over time.
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Laura’s scenario is what everybody says happened in Pittsburgh in the 80s. Of the older men who lost jobs and couldn’t move, a very high number seem to have died young. That couldn’t have helped the kids.
It did hurt the schools, but I think the population drop did most of the damage. It’s hard for any organization to deal with losing 40% of their business and nearly impossible when you consider who actually runs for school boards.
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Laura’s description is apt in that it defines what much/most of poverty really is. The welfare mom taking advantage of the system or the drug addict, etc. are dramatic but not pervasive stereotypes of working poor.
The latter group has a varying array of programs available for support. The working poor do not yet need a lot of support as well. Their needs are often invisible because they look like they should be doing fine.
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Laura,
Aren’t you conflating two groups?
1. People who have always been poor and are not qualified for a “good” job.
2. People who have seen better times, have qualifications (perhaps in defunct fields), and have been well-employed in the past.
In today’s economy, they may be applying for the same jobs, but I would argue that they have entirely different needs. My cousin the engineer who was laid off soon after getting his first job and was unemployed or underemployed for two years is a totally different critter from somebody with shaky academic skills and no experience beyond the first rung of the job ladder.
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I forgot the icing on the cake–my cousin had gotten two master’s degrees (one in architecture, one in structural engineering). He graduated exactly at the wrong time, was quickly hired and then laid off in short order as the construction industry contracted. He’s back employed with his industry (after a detour to trucking school and hauling wheat), but from what I hear through the family grapevine, he has taken a substantial pay cut.
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The difference between the two groups brings up a possible chicken-and-egg problem. My cousin (as a member of group #2) just needed a good job. However, members of group #1 need not just a good job, but to be qualified for a good job, which brings us back to education. We can’t say that good jobs in the community will fix the schools if members of the community lack the education and skills that would qualify them for good jobs.
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But isn’t part of the problem the disappearance of “good” jobs for working class workers who don’t have a university education? And a lack of living wages for restaurant work (insert entry level job)?
I think that there is often an assumption that it is character/personal issues that prevent people from being gainfully employed. What I hear Laura arguing is that there are serious structural issues in the economy that are having a having a huge impact on education and civic participation. Working poor and probably many middle class families are run ragged cobbling together a few income streams to make ends meet.
I live in a province that used to have a huge forestry industry. High school educated workers could earn in the late 5 figures in small towns. Those jobs have disappeared. One proposed solution is these workers moving into tourism- an unlikely solution for most.
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“But isn’t part of the problem the disappearance of “good” jobs for working class workers who don’t have a university education? And a lack of living wages for restaurant work (insert entry level job)?”
Yes. The “good jobs” that exist and that we can realistically expect to appear in the near future are ones that require education and skills. So stating that poor communities need “good jobs” to fix the schools (when getting those “good jobs” requires education and skills) really doesn’t move you forward any, unless somebody has a time machine that will zap us all back to 1960 or we’re planning on nuking the Chinese industrial base.
Also, the experiments of the past three years have demonstrated the difficulty of making “good jobs” appear and persist. My feeling is that the Keynesian “jumpstart” metaphor has been very unhelpful and has led to a lot of federal spending (Cash for Clunkers, the $8k homebuyers’ credit, etc.) that turned out to be a dead end, with no lasting benefit, and causing a lot of real harm (the destruction of affordable used cars and luring naive homebuyers into houses they shouldn’t buy). The word “stimulus” should be one that makes people point and laugh at whoever suggests it, because I think we’re discovering that even if stimulus used to work (and I have my doubts), it doesn’t work anymore.
“One proposed solution is these workers moving into tourism- an unlikely solution for most.”
In Washington, we went through a very similar trauma when I was in high school and tourism was also a popular answer, and that did happen to some extent (my family is very big into the tourism industry). The prison industry also boomed. And eventually a lady named Stephanie Meyer started writing books about sparkly vampires. The sparkly vampires have single-handedly stopped the recession, at least in that particular area of Washington. Not every depressed place can be a tourist hot spot though, and tourism is normally one of the first economic sectors affected during a downturn, so it is a risky thing to suggest to depressed areas that they put their eggs in that basket.
(I should mention that there is much less human labor required in the contemporary forestry industry. I was hearing somebody recently talking about how in the modern lumber mill, the wood travels through the entire building without being once touched by human hands. That saves a lot of fingers that used to be crushed or sliced off in the course of a day’s work, but there is also less need for workers.)
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I was distinguishing between the unemployed and the unemployable. With that in mind and building on your stimulus comment, I can see one choice being that old pay now/pay later. Perhaps a WPA type project to get us over the hump of those still of working age but unlikely to retrain due to geography or age.
Perhaps we have “lost” a generation of blue collar workers and it may be cheaper in the long term to fund a legitimate works project rather than have towns “die” and schools/education/kids suffer as well.
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Perhaps a WPA type project to get us over the hump of those still of working age but unlikely to retrain due to geography or age.
It has to be that type of project, so that it isn’t exportable. That said, I expect by the end of this recession there will be greater attempts to protect domestic jobs even at the expense of free trade.
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MH – I agree with the protection of domestic jobs. I mentioned in response to another post the impact of unfettered foreign investment in Vancouver real estate. It’s just another version of jobs going offshore. Both end up decimating communities.
Jobs go offshore and you have systemic unemployment in certain/many towns & cities. Kids grow up and move away. Vibrancy is lost. Same with the real estate investment. Kids are priced out of the market and leave. Neighbourhoods have streets with many empty houses. Those that are owner-occupied are often not that interested in planting deep roots and doing those community enhancing things – being on the school board, taking part in civic life, etc.
Man, I sound like I should be in the five points in NYC in the 1800’s and joining up with the nativists!
Seriously, though, I have started to evaluate strategies for all sorts of social issues through the lens of “does this build community or take away from community” as just as important as any financial considerations.
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The people in low-income communities primarily need the government to stop incarcerating them. Surprised that isn’t a larger part of this conversation. Thanks for having it though.
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“The people in low-income communities primarily need the government to stop incarcerating them.”
Then how are my hometown peeps supposed to make a living?
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All the money spent unnecessarily on prisons could fund a public works project.
AmyP -you sure that your home town peeps couldn’t leaded guided tours? Greeters at Walmart? All those “living wage” jobs…
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“AmyP -you sure that your home town peeps couldn’t leaded guided tours? Greeters at Walmart?”
There are already lots of guided tours (also, the high tourist season is only about 2 months long) and the place is way too small for a Walmart. If you’ve got a Walmart, you’re practically in Gay Paree.
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“If you’ve got a Walmart, you’re practically in Gay Paree”. Unless of course you are one of the many Chinese prisoners making all those cheap goods….
On the topic of living wages, when we were in Disneyworld last fall I couldn’t believe how many elderly were working as greeters. Some obviously were enjoying it but you could tell that many were way way too old to be doing paid work (think late 70’s).
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Of course, the next step will be that Walmart outsources being a greeter to Chinese prisoners for 1/10th the cost of current greeters.
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