American Parents and Children Living on $2-a-Day—With Food Stamps but No Cash
In the conclusion of their 2013, Public Education Under Siege, historian Michael B. Katz and education professor Mike Rose advocate for a new and honest narrative about the challenges for public schools: “A new narrative need not be entirely positive; it need not cast a false glow over the past or rehash outworn myths… Inequality is the spine of the new narrative…. Throughout American history, inequality—refracted most notably through poverty and race—has impinged on the ability of children to learn and of teachers to do their jobs.” (p. 228)
The problem for most of us is that, although we are rapidly learning the statistics about growing inequality in our society, we view life through the lens of our personal experience. Even the sociologists who researched and wrote $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America were surprised when their data confirmed that, “In early 2011, 1.5 million households with roughly 3 million children were surviving on cash incomes of no more than $2 per person, per day in any given month. That’s about one out of every twenty-five families with children in America. What’s more… the phenomenon of $2-a-day poverty among households with children had been on the rise since the nation’s landmark welfare reform legislation was passed in 1996—and at a distressingly fast pace. As of 2011, the number of families in $2-a-day poverty had more than doubled in just a decade and a half.” (p.xvii) “The number of children experiencing a spell of $2-a-day poverty is about the same as the number of kids lifted above the poverty line by the tax credits now extended to the working poor—a program federal taxpayers spend roughly $66 billion on.” (p. 126).
Kathryn Edin (a professor of sociology and public health at Johns Hopkins University), an ethnographer who has for 20 years spent time with very poor families to learn about their lives, returned to the field in the summer of 2010, “to update her work on the very poor. She was struck by how markedly different things appeared from just fifteen years before… (S)he began to encounter many families… with no visible means of cash income from any source. These families weren’t just poor by American standards. They were the poorest of the poor. Some claimed food stamps, now called SNAP, for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance American Parents and Children Living on $2-a-Day—With Food Stamps but No Cash | janresseger:
