Schools Alone Cannot Save Children from Economic Inequality. Public Policy Must Assist Families in Deep Poverty
Public policy can ameliorate child poverty without being revolutionary. However, programs need to be redesigned and targeted to alleviate instability, privation and misery for the more than 2 million children living in America’s poorest families. Child poverty overall was reduced in the decade between 1995 and 2005, but during that same period, the number children living in the deepest poverty rose from 2.2 to 2.6 million children. These are the conclusions of a new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) defines deep poverty as families living below half of the federal poverty level—below $14,000 per year for a family of four. Who are these children? “Children living in deep poverty are a diverse group…. In 2016, 37 percent were white, 30 percent were Latino, 23 percent were Black, and 6 percent were Asian; 45 percent lived in suburban areas, 32 percent in urban areas, and 11 percent in rural areas; 51 percent lived in a single-mother family, 37 percent in a married-couple family, and 6 percent in a single-father family; 16 percent lived in a family where someone had a work-limiting disability; and 89 percent were U.S. citizens and 31 percent lived in a family with a non-citizen.”
This subject is rarely discussed in the education press, where the assumption for decades has been that, if teachers work hard and children study, public schools can, by themselves, provide enough opportunity to enable our society’s poorest children to surmount the obstacles posed by their families’ circumstances. But a mass of research (here, here and here) documents instead that schools serving concentrations of children living in the poorest communities are unable to accomplish this goal. Standardized test scores correlate in the aggregate with family and neighborhood income. The fact that 114,085 students enrolled in New York City’s public schools were homeless at some point during the 2018-2019 school year—10 percent of the district’s 1.1 million students—is an overwhelming challenge for the CONTINUE READING: Schools Alone Cannot Save Children from Economic Inequality. Public Policy Must Assist Families in Deep Poverty | janresseger