Dear Michael,
I just recently wrote a blog column for my website (deborahmeier.com) about the problem I have with data—the "facts." Still, I'm not an atheist about data, just an agnostic, including data in the form of graphs.
Graphs can correlate, but they cannot tell us what poverty does to people. My interpretation of the data leads me to suggest that "my" reforms are better than "yours." (I've spent too many years in the schoolyard!) So, five "thoughts" on schooling and poverty, plus race:
I. You are right; it isn't money "alone" (it actually rarely comes alone) that damages the children of the poor. Still, we both agree that money helps. For example, the poor are more likely to be in school while suffering from pain (e.g. toothaches, nausea, or a fever or untreated wound.) Going to the doctor, finding someone to stay home with the baby, taking a day or two off work are advantages that money buys. Poverty means you are unlikely to belong to a network (via family and neighborhood) that introduces you to "useful" people, digs up letters of reference for you, or gets you a summertime job. All these have something to do with money. An advantage is an advantage.
It would be easier too if the "poor" haven't for centuries been perceived as members of a caste different than the non-poor. Long before we had genetic theories we believed in something akin to it. The poor didn't "feel" about death or disaster or being an outcast the way the better-off would. Their tastes were different—in food, art, music—because they were less "sensitive," less "discriminating." We still carry seeds of these views.
But, of course, not all poor have been seen as the same. Not surprisingly, we view a generational dip in status differently than generations of poverty. Becoming poor because we had to escape Hitler, the Communists, or some other catastrophe is very different than climbing out of a history of poverty and disrespect. Or whether we came to poverty in chains. There's a reason why it took so many generations for the Italian, Polish, and Irish poor to go to college, but only one for Jews fleeing Europe, Cubans fleeing Castro, or Chinese fleeing Communism. (Even, a la Dickens, if you were unbeknownst the child of an aristocrat gives you a better chance.)
II. Yes, it's also about race. There's a difference when you know, for sure, that your poverty is not a reflection of your racial inferiority. When we studied American history I was startled at first at the anger expressed toward their forebears for not escaping slavery even if it meant committing suicide. This morning I came across a photo of black teenagers being frisked. I shuddered—knowing how cruelly such powerlessness feels. How hard to escape. I know, as an old white lady, how to "win over" the traffic cop (sometimes). But these young people know that even to try is risky. Furthermore, they have witnessed their own parents being similarly helpless and sometimes imprisoned for making a mistake. For a small number such experiences may lead to a greater determination to get the best revenge of all—to be in a position someday to return the treatment. For most it just simmers inside over and over—and for some creates a numbness that is not an ideal state of mind for developing passions of the mind, or putting up with school.
As modern research confirms, we pay a price for stress—especially in our earliest years. There are obvious reasons to assume that children born into poverty and/or discrimination or both are likely to experience stress at an early age. All the more so if the father is unemployed or unavailable—which, reminder, once affected so many Irish, Polish, and Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Single-parenthood is not a modern invention.
III. "Unfairness" is comparative. Yes, the absence of what money can buy may hurts less if no one else has much either. ( Maybe old-fashioned segregation had one advantage; it created a separate world where one could occasionally forget race and unfairness.)
But today's discrepancies are "in your face." TV, movies, and advertising present a picture of the world in which wealth is the norm, success is just around the corner—over and over and over. None of the official answers are useful even if some are more and some less true! The schools weren't the salvation for most poor white immigrants. It took three-plus generations, and in the end success came to the Irish, Italians, and Poles largely because they were part of that "new middle class" that benefitted by the collective action of the labor movement, city political machines, World War II, GI mortgages, and a free college education. Not paths in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, and 50s that many poor people of color could use to climb out of poverty. And perhaps not the path today.
IV. Schools did not get worse, and we are not facing an economic crisis caused by schools. There were no "good old days." For today's poor—including special pockets of intense white poverty—schools are probably better than they were before World War II. But not good enough to wipe out poverty. The stunning reality I discovered in two years of subbing in Chicago's South Side schools in the late 1950s and 1960s was that the schools designed for the poor have probably always been places that smell of humiliation, fear, and boredom. I wrote about it in my early years of teaching. It has gotten better. More poor kids succeed in school—including kids of color. Just not enough better to influence the comparative data on those graphs, Michael.
The one thing alike about schools for the rich and poor is that they are BORING. (Try spending a day doing what kids do.) No one deserves or needs to be deliberately bored. The youngster who chooses to throw ball after ball at the same basketball rim for hours isn't bored. He's serious about what he has decided is important to him. If I were forced to practice throwing that ball for hours, I'd find ways to get out of it—by hiding, pretending, or creating distractions to help the time pass faster. That's what many kids are doing in school—but more so in schools that serve the poor.
V. I haven't a recipe for solving it. Just ideas—which I described last week. None of which can be imposed. In short, what the children need is to belong to a place that embraces them, their families, and their communities. They need schools in a position to acknowledge immediately, without question, that ALL kids are full of interesting ideas and questions, and enter the school "ready to learn." They've been doing so since birth. They need schools where they and their families are known well. No teacher should be responsible for knowing well 150 students at a time. They need schools that provide a world as interesting as the one they see outside the window—rather than eliminating windows to keep the kids from being distracted.
If from Day One we acknowledge their rich language (yes) and ideas and the experiences they are trying to understand we'll do better than imagining they come to us as blank slates. We also need space so that a group doing "x" can get excited without bothering Group Y. So that "projects" don't have to fit inside a notebook for lack of space to think bigger or get finished in an hour for lack of storage and display space.
We need quiet places and noisy places, places full of books and computers and others full of paint and clay. We need adults with the freedom to make spontaneous decisions—shifting the conversation in response to one of those "wonderful moments" and deviating from any designed curriculum. Teachers need the time to mull over what they have learned from student work (written as well as observed) and collegial time to expand their repertoires. We need feedback from trusted and competent colleagues. We need time for families and teachers to engage in serious conversations. We need settings where it seems reasonable that kids might see the school's adults as powerful and interesting people who are having a good time.
We need schools that define success in broader ways than test scores or college completion. I want ways that "allow" me to feel pride and pleasure about a former student who didn't shine at either. It took all our staffs combined ingenuity (and patience) to get her a well-earned high school diploma—in five-and-a-half, not four years. She got a full-time stable job working in a nursery school and soon hopes to get an AA degree. She tells me proudly that she is also taking care of the grandmother who took care of her during a very tough childhood. She also volunteers once a week at a local center for the aged. I'm impressed and tell her so.
Scaling up means developing "systems" that improve the odds that we can create and sustain schools seeking ways to make even such successes possible. It means that we stop closing schools in poor neighborhoods because they are under-utilized (or have low scores). Underutilization offers a golden opportunity to create the space needed for true community education centers. And, while I'm dreaming, we might even, possibly, someday live up to the much-celebrated 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.
Yes, it sounds unrealistic. It is. Which is why we need to also tackle poverty directly.
Best, Deb
P.S. Michael, read My Life in School, by my hero, Tom Sobol. Tom's experience as New York state commissioner in the late 1980s and early 1990s is very instructive.
- Deborah Meier
What We Talk About When We Talk About Poverty
I just recently wrote a blog column for my website (deborahmeier.com) about the problem I have with data—the "facts." Still, I'm not an atheist about data, just an agnostic, including data in the form of graphs.
Graphs can correlate, but they cannot tell us what poverty does to people. My interpretation of the data leads me to suggest that "my" reforms are better than "yours." (I've spent too many years in the schoolyard!) So, five "thoughts" on schooling and poverty, plus race:
I. You are right; it isn't money "alone" (it actually rarely comes alone) that damages the children of the poor. Still, we both agree that money helps. For example, the poor are more likely to be in school while suffering from pain (e.g. toothaches, nausea, or a fever or untreated wound.) Going to the doctor, finding someone to stay home with the baby, taking a day or two off work are advantages that money buys. Poverty means you are unlikely to belong to a network (via family and neighborhood) that introduces you to "useful" people, digs up letters of reference for you, or gets you a summertime job. All these have something to do with money. An advantage is an advantage.
It would be easier too if the "poor" haven't for centuries been perceived as members of a caste different than the non-poor. Long before we had genetic theories we believed in something akin to it. The poor didn't "feel" about death or disaster or being an outcast the way the better-off would. Their tastes were different—in food, art, music—because they were less "sensitive," less "discriminating." We still carry seeds of these views.
But, of course, not all poor have been seen as the same. Not surprisingly, we view a generational dip in status differently than generations of poverty. Becoming poor because we had to escape Hitler, the Communists, or some other catastrophe is very different than climbing out of a history of poverty and disrespect. Or whether we came to poverty in chains. There's a reason why it took so many generations for the Italian, Polish, and Irish poor to go to college, but only one for Jews fleeing Europe, Cubans fleeing Castro, or Chinese fleeing Communism. (Even, a la Dickens, if you were unbeknownst the child of an aristocrat gives you a better chance.)
II. Yes, it's also about race. There's a difference when you know, for sure, that your poverty is not a reflection of your racial inferiority. When we studied American history I was startled at first at the anger expressed toward their forebears for not escaping slavery even if it meant committing suicide. This morning I came across a photo of black teenagers being frisked. I shuddered—knowing how cruelly such powerlessness feels. How hard to escape. I know, as an old white lady, how to "win over" the traffic cop (sometimes). But these young people know that even to try is risky. Furthermore, they have witnessed their own parents being similarly helpless and sometimes imprisoned for making a mistake. For a small number such experiences may lead to a greater determination to get the best revenge of all—to be in a position someday to return the treatment. For most it just simmers inside over and over—and for some creates a numbness that is not an ideal state of mind for developing passions of the mind, or putting up with school.
As modern research confirms, we pay a price for stress—especially in our earliest years. There are obvious reasons to assume that children born into poverty and/or discrimination or both are likely to experience stress at an early age. All the more so if the father is unemployed or unavailable—which, reminder, once affected so many Irish, Polish, and Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Single-parenthood is not a modern invention.
III. "Unfairness" is comparative. Yes, the absence of what money can buy may hurts less if no one else has much either. ( Maybe old-fashioned segregation had one advantage; it created a separate world where one could occasionally forget race and unfairness.)
But today's discrepancies are "in your face." TV, movies, and advertising present a picture of the world in which wealth is the norm, success is just around the corner—over and over and over. None of the official answers are useful even if some are more and some less true! The schools weren't the salvation for most poor white immigrants. It took three-plus generations, and in the end success came to the Irish, Italians, and Poles largely because they were part of that "new middle class" that benefitted by the collective action of the labor movement, city political machines, World War II, GI mortgages, and a free college education. Not paths in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, and 50s that many poor people of color could use to climb out of poverty. And perhaps not the path today.
IV. Schools did not get worse, and we are not facing an economic crisis caused by schools. There were no "good old days." For today's poor—including special pockets of intense white poverty—schools are probably better than they were before World War II. But not good enough to wipe out poverty. The stunning reality I discovered in two years of subbing in Chicago's South Side schools in the late 1950s and 1960s was that the schools designed for the poor have probably always been places that smell of humiliation, fear, and boredom. I wrote about it in my early years of teaching. It has gotten better. More poor kids succeed in school—including kids of color. Just not enough better to influence the comparative data on those graphs, Michael.
The one thing alike about schools for the rich and poor is that they are BORING. (Try spending a day doing what kids do.) No one deserves or needs to be deliberately bored. The youngster who chooses to throw ball after ball at the same basketball rim for hours isn't bored. He's serious about what he has decided is important to him. If I were forced to practice throwing that ball for hours, I'd find ways to get out of it—by hiding, pretending, or creating distractions to help the time pass faster. That's what many kids are doing in school—but more so in schools that serve the poor.
V. I haven't a recipe for solving it. Just ideas—which I described last week. None of which can be imposed. In short, what the children need is to belong to a place that embraces them, their families, and their communities. They need schools in a position to acknowledge immediately, without question, that ALL kids are full of interesting ideas and questions, and enter the school "ready to learn." They've been doing so since birth. They need schools where they and their families are known well. No teacher should be responsible for knowing well 150 students at a time. They need schools that provide a world as interesting as the one they see outside the window—rather than eliminating windows to keep the kids from being distracted.
If from Day One we acknowledge their rich language (yes) and ideas and the experiences they are trying to understand we'll do better than imagining they come to us as blank slates. We also need space so that a group doing "x" can get excited without bothering Group Y. So that "projects" don't have to fit inside a notebook for lack of space to think bigger or get finished in an hour for lack of storage and display space.
We need quiet places and noisy places, places full of books and computers and others full of paint and clay. We need adults with the freedom to make spontaneous decisions—shifting the conversation in response to one of those "wonderful moments" and deviating from any designed curriculum. Teachers need the time to mull over what they have learned from student work (written as well as observed) and collegial time to expand their repertoires. We need feedback from trusted and competent colleagues. We need time for families and teachers to engage in serious conversations. We need settings where it seems reasonable that kids might see the school's adults as powerful and interesting people who are having a good time.
We need schools that define success in broader ways than test scores or college completion. I want ways that "allow" me to feel pride and pleasure about a former student who didn't shine at either. It took all our staffs combined ingenuity (and patience) to get her a well-earned high school diploma—in five-and-a-half, not four years. She got a full-time stable job working in a nursery school and soon hopes to get an AA degree. She tells me proudly that she is also taking care of the grandmother who took care of her during a very tough childhood. She also volunteers once a week at a local center for the aged. I'm impressed and tell her so.
Scaling up means developing "systems" that improve the odds that we can create and sustain schools seeking ways to make even such successes possible. It means that we stop closing schools in poor neighborhoods because they are under-utilized (or have low scores). Underutilization offers a golden opportunity to create the space needed for true community education centers. And, while I'm dreaming, we might even, possibly, someday live up to the much-celebrated 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.
Yes, it sounds unrealistic. It is. Which is why we need to also tackle poverty directly.
Best, Deb
P.S. Michael, read My Life in School, by my hero, Tom Sobol. Tom's experience as New York state commissioner in the late 1980s and early 1990s is very instructive.
- Deborah Meier
What We Talk About When We Talk About Poverty
Michael J. Petrilli continues his conversation with Deborah Meier today.
Dear Deborah,
I want to return to the perennial question of poverty as it relates to educational outcomes. One of the main arguments against education reform is that it misdiagnoses the problem. We have big "achievement gaps" in terms of test scores, graduation rates, college-going, and much else, but that's primarily because of inequities in our society, not because of the failings of our schools—so goes the thinking.
As I indicated in my first post for Bridging Differences, I'm not opposed to tackling these larger issues of poverty and inequality. (Neither are most reformers.) But we'd better have a good understanding of what we're tackling. I would argue that clarity is sorely lacking.
Is the issue really poverty, per se? The fact that many families in the U.S. don't have enough income to provide the advantages that other children enjoy? If so, are we satisfied with delineating the problem with the poverty line (currently about $20,000 for a family of three)? That qualifies 23 percent of all children (as of 2011), up from 18 percent before the Great Recession.
Or should we include children a little bit above the poverty line—from families that are "near-poor" or "working-poor," too? Say, up to 185 percent of poverty, the cut-off for eligibility for a reduced-price lunch? That captures 48 percent of all U.S. children (as of 2011).
Then again, standard poverty measures are imperfect. They don't take into account certain services or benefits that low-income families receive, such as food stamps, Medicaid, or the Earned Income Tax Credit. (Poverty counts just look at income from work or from transfer payments.) If you consider those factors, poverty rates drop a few points.
And are we talking about kids who are born into poverty, or spend most of their lives in poverty, or are in poverty for just a few years? The "child poverty rate" is for any given point in time, but it masks these important differences. Several studies looked at children born way back in the late 1960s and early 1970s (my generation!). They found that about 25 percent of white children, and an astounding 79 percent of black children, were poor for at least a year during their childhoods. But long-term poverty was much rarer: One percent of white children and 30 percent of black children were poor for at least two-thirds of their childhoods. These children in "long-term poverty" were also more likely to be in "deep poverty," meaning their families' incomes were below half the poverty line. (If you do the math, those kids accounted for about 5 percent of the total.)
Not surprisingly, other studies have found that it's the children in long-term and deep poverty who fare the worst on a variety of indicators, while those in poverty for a relatively short amount of time tend to do better.
So when you and your colleagues say that "poverty is the problem," which kind of poverty are you talking about? Long-term poverty? Short-term poverty? Deep poverty? Near poverty? Fifty percent of the kids? Five percent?
Even more importantly, is it really poverty that's the problem? Are we sure poverty's not a proxy for other issues?
If it's just poverty—not enough money—then it's fairly easy to solve: We could just give poor families extra cash in order to make them not poor. We could do this by bringing back traditional welfare, or enlarging the Earned Income Tax Credit, or raising the minimum wage.
However, research and experience indicate that those sorts of "income supports" might help children at the margins, but they won't make much of a dent in achievement gaps or the real inequities in our society. That's because the most disadvantaged children—especially those who are born poor, and stay poor, for most of their childhoods—have the following, more deep-seated challenges in common:
If we give these families more money, it would ease their hardships a bit, and the lower levels of stress might help the moms do a better job parenting. They might also be able to afford some educational goods they otherwise couldn't—marginally better childcare or preschool, or books, or educational games.
But will it erase the huge gaps in early vocabulary development, non-cognitive skill-building, and other essential school readiness tasks between these disadvantaged children and their more advantaged peers? Between these kids and their age-mates born into two-parent families? With highly-educated mothers and fathers? With parents who were in their 30s when they started families, instead of their teens?
To believe so, you'd have to put as much faith in cash transfers and social services as some reformers put in schools. You'd have to believe in miracles.
But, you might say, what about the international data? The conventional wisdom says that European countries with more generous social welfare systems don't have the gaping inequalities we do, and their poor kids, as a result, do much better in school. The reason the U.S. trails internationally is because we don't do enough to curb poverty, right?
Let's look at that a bit. It's true that the standard measures show the U.S. to be an outlier among rich countries in terms of childhood poverty. But these poverty measures are problematic, because they use a relative definition of poverty. They consider families to be poor if they make less than half the median national income. By definition, then, countries with greater inequality will have more poverty. Such measures look at how the pie is divided, but they don't look at the size of the pie itself.
Absolute measures, on the other hand, take the U.S. poverty threshold, convert it into other currencies, make some adjustments for costs of living, and determine how many people in other countries fall below that line. Here's what that looks like (at 125 percent the U.S. poverty rate):
Source: "Poor People in Rich Nations: The United States in Comparative Perspective," Timothy Smeeding, 2006
Suddenly America's child poverty rate looks almost normal, and certainly can't explain our lackluster international performance on exams. (Note that our poverty rates are almost indistinguishable from Finland's, everyone's favorite star performer.)
But if we don't look so bad when it comes to absolute "income poverty," we do look very bad when it comes to fatherless families:
Source: http://worldfamilymap.org/2013/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/WFM-Table1.pdf.
And also teenage pregnancy:
Source:http://www.oecd.org/els/family/SF2.4_Births%20outside%20marriage%20and%20teenage%20births%20-%20updated%20240212.pdf
###
In conclusion, Deborah, our issue isn't just poverty, but parenting. We have a whole class of children growing up without fathers, and they are doing terribly. (Black boys in particular.) Traditional "anti-poverty" measures are unlikely to make much of a dent in solving this one.
So what's left? What we need are "transformational" interventions that interrupt the insidious cycle that turns disadvantaged kids into disadvantaged parents, by giving them the hope, confidence, and skills to find a different path. I can't think of institutions better positioned to do that than schools. Can you?
Mike
Dear Deborah,
I want to return to the perennial question of poverty as it relates to educational outcomes. One of the main arguments against education reform is that it misdiagnoses the problem. We have big "achievement gaps" in terms of test scores, graduation rates, college-going, and much else, but that's primarily because of inequities in our society, not because of the failings of our schools—so goes the thinking.
As I indicated in my first post for Bridging Differences, I'm not opposed to tackling these larger issues of poverty and inequality. (Neither are most reformers.) But we'd better have a good understanding of what we're tackling. I would argue that clarity is sorely lacking.
Is the issue really poverty, per se? The fact that many families in the U.S. don't have enough income to provide the advantages that other children enjoy? If so, are we satisfied with delineating the problem with the poverty line (currently about $20,000 for a family of three)? That qualifies 23 percent of all children (as of 2011), up from 18 percent before the Great Recession.
Or should we include children a little bit above the poverty line—from families that are "near-poor" or "working-poor," too? Say, up to 185 percent of poverty, the cut-off for eligibility for a reduced-price lunch? That captures 48 percent of all U.S. children (as of 2011).
Then again, standard poverty measures are imperfect. They don't take into account certain services or benefits that low-income families receive, such as food stamps, Medicaid, or the Earned Income Tax Credit. (Poverty counts just look at income from work or from transfer payments.) If you consider those factors, poverty rates drop a few points.
And are we talking about kids who are born into poverty, or spend most of their lives in poverty, or are in poverty for just a few years? The "child poverty rate" is for any given point in time, but it masks these important differences. Several studies looked at children born way back in the late 1960s and early 1970s (my generation!). They found that about 25 percent of white children, and an astounding 79 percent of black children, were poor for at least a year during their childhoods. But long-term poverty was much rarer: One percent of white children and 30 percent of black children were poor for at least two-thirds of their childhoods. These children in "long-term poverty" were also more likely to be in "deep poverty," meaning their families' incomes were below half the poverty line. (If you do the math, those kids accounted for about 5 percent of the total.)
Not surprisingly, other studies have found that it's the children in long-term and deep poverty who fare the worst on a variety of indicators, while those in poverty for a relatively short amount of time tend to do better.
So when you and your colleagues say that "poverty is the problem," which kind of poverty are you talking about? Long-term poverty? Short-term poverty? Deep poverty? Near poverty? Fifty percent of the kids? Five percent?
Even more importantly, is it really poverty that's the problem? Are we sure poverty's not a proxy for other issues?
If it's just poverty—not enough money—then it's fairly easy to solve: We could just give poor families extra cash in order to make them not poor. We could do this by bringing back traditional welfare, or enlarging the Earned Income Tax Credit, or raising the minimum wage.
However, research and experience indicate that those sorts of "income supports" might help children at the margins, but they won't make much of a dent in achievement gaps or the real inequities in our society. That's because the most disadvantaged children—especially those who are born poor, and stay poor, for most of their childhoods—have the following, more deep-seated challenges in common:
- Most were born to single mothers, and their fathers have been absent from the start, or by the time they turn two or three;
- Most of their mothers were teenagers or in their early 20s when they gave birth;
- Most of their mothers have very little education—a high school diploma or less--and thus few marketable skills;
- Many of their mothers suffer from mental illness or addiction or both;
If we give these families more money, it would ease their hardships a bit, and the lower levels of stress might help the moms do a better job parenting. They might also be able to afford some educational goods they otherwise couldn't—marginally better childcare or preschool, or books, or educational games.
But will it erase the huge gaps in early vocabulary development, non-cognitive skill-building, and other essential school readiness tasks between these disadvantaged children and their more advantaged peers? Between these kids and their age-mates born into two-parent families? With highly-educated mothers and fathers? With parents who were in their 30s when they started families, instead of their teens?
To believe so, you'd have to put as much faith in cash transfers and social services as some reformers put in schools. You'd have to believe in miracles.
But, you might say, what about the international data? The conventional wisdom says that European countries with more generous social welfare systems don't have the gaping inequalities we do, and their poor kids, as a result, do much better in school. The reason the U.S. trails internationally is because we don't do enough to curb poverty, right?
Let's look at that a bit. It's true that the standard measures show the U.S. to be an outlier among rich countries in terms of childhood poverty. But these poverty measures are problematic, because they use a relative definition of poverty. They consider families to be poor if they make less than half the median national income. By definition, then, countries with greater inequality will have more poverty. Such measures look at how the pie is divided, but they don't look at the size of the pie itself.
Absolute measures, on the other hand, take the U.S. poverty threshold, convert it into other currencies, make some adjustments for costs of living, and determine how many people in other countries fall below that line. Here's what that looks like (at 125 percent the U.S. poverty rate):
Source: "Poor People in Rich Nations: The United States in Comparative Perspective," Timothy Smeeding, 2006
Suddenly America's child poverty rate looks almost normal, and certainly can't explain our lackluster international performance on exams. (Note that our poverty rates are almost indistinguishable from Finland's, everyone's favorite star performer.)
But if we don't look so bad when it comes to absolute "income poverty," we do look very bad when it comes to fatherless families:
Source: http://worldfamilymap.org/2013/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/WFM-Table1.pdf.
And also teenage pregnancy:
Source:http://www.oecd.org/els/family/SF2.4_Births%20outside%20marriage%20and%20teenage%20births%20-%20updated%20240212.pdf
###
In conclusion, Deborah, our issue isn't just poverty, but parenting. We have a whole class of children growing up without fathers, and they are doing terribly. (Black boys in particular.) Traditional "anti-poverty" measures are unlikely to make much of a dent in solving this one.
So what's left? What we need are "transformational" interventions that interrupt the insidious cycle that turns disadvantaged kids into disadvantaged parents, by giving them the hope, confidence, and skills to find a different path. I can't think of institutions better positioned to do that than schools. Can you?
Mike
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