A Fair Minimum Wage As a School Achievement Strategy?
When advocates for justice and equity in public education suggest that our nation will have to address America’s outrageous 22 percent child poverty rate as one step to improve school achievement, critics of such strategies point out that schools and teachers alone will have to build achievement levels, because there is little society can do to eliminate child poverty.
Two articles posted over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend suggest that there are steps we can take to ameliorate poverty, with a first step rather obvious: increase the minimum wage and automatically index it to inflation. If parents can earn a fair wage for the work they do, their children will be more secure.
Writing for the NY Times, Massachusetts economist Arindrajit Dube describes minimum wage reform as The Minimum We Can Do. According to Dube, “inflation-adjusted minimum wages in the United States have declined in both absolute and relative terms for most of the past four decades. The high-water mark for the minimum wage was 1968, when it stood at $10.60 an hour in today’s dollars, or 55 percent of the median full-time wage. In contrast, the current federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, constituting 37 percent of the median full-time wage.” Ideally Dube would suggest raising the federal minimum wage to $10.78 an hour, though he would settle for the $10.10 per hour that is part of legislation already proposed by Iowa Senator Tom Harkin and California Representative George Miller.
Writing for the New Yorker in Higher Calling, Steve Call presents a less technical but equally