How can we distinguish people who can do it and don’t because they make bad choices and people without the ability to really make it, who have struggled to the level of working poor through good choices? If we had a magic meter which could say “you work really hard but don’t have a lot of natural intelligence so you will always be poor - money for you” or “you’re a lazy putz, no money for you!” I could see it.
I dispute that I did well through good choices. I didn’t choose my intelligence. I didn’t choose a family who could send me to a great college, and I didn’t choose a family and a culture where learning was important. I didn’t really choose to major in computer science - certainly not for career prospects. I happened to love it like art history majors love art history. I lucked out in loving something that paid.
So much of how we do depends on our inherent capabilities. Some people work really, really hard to get where they are, and some people glide there. Works going up as well as going down.
That’s an example of a different type of problem. In this case, work is available, the person is willing to work, but responsibilities at home make that difficult. I’d be interested in what your solution to that kind of problem is.
When we have discussions on chronic poverty, a lot of well-meaning people like to point out these exceptions, but the exceptions have no lessons for us on what the public response to chronic poverty should be. We don’t have 50 million people at home taking care of sick relatives.
I mean, yeah, I worked my ass off to get a physics degree, and teaching credentials, and then to transition into the private sector and work hard at that. There’s a lot of hard work. I went into a lot of debt because my parents were lower-middle class and hadn’t saved for college tuition for me or my sister.
But I won the lottery as far as it comes to what motivates me intrinsically (I love math and science, even when it’s hard I still love to push myself to do more, and that’s a skill that people are willing to pay a lot of money for in a variety of jobs).
I feel bad for children born into poverty, and I feel genuine anger towards those who bring children into the world in an impoverished environment. I tell myself that at the end of the day it’s none of my business, and everyone has the right to have children if they want to, but it does upset me.
It really is a mix of being poor is really never your fault. Sure, someone who blows all their money on alcohol, drugs, gambling, etc is at fault… but being someone who has never been addicted to that, I can say, if those people had been born with my brain and life experiences, they wouldn’t have wasted all their money.
I don’t think it’s an exception. I think poor people taking care of needy families is the norm.
When I was a kid, I didn’t have anyone I had to take care of but myself. I didn’t have any little sisters or brothers. No little cousins under foot–“play play” or real. My parents were self-sufficient as well. I had my house chores to do. But I wasn’t required to get home by 4:00 to get dinner on before Daddy got home. My time was my own with few major responsibilities, like most kids in most two-parent households have.
It was only when I got older that I realized that not all families are like mine. When I reached 18, there was no expectation that I would stay home and help take care of anyone. Whenever my parents had money problems, they didn’t look to any of their children to pick up the slack. We didn’t even know about it. There was never any discussion about which one of us were going to drop out of school and get a job. None of my siblings were teenaged parents, so I was not conscripted to provide free babysitting. Every single penny I earned from my minimum wage gigs was mine to keep and save.
I was able to finish my higher education without having to drop out of school to deal with dysfunctional family mess–like a parent getting sent to prison, leaving younger siblings in need of care. I had the luxury of putting family out of my mind almost completely so I could focus just on making myself smart and marketable.
When people say it’s a cycle, they aren’t lying. You can blame the parents for being lazy deadbeats who intentionally birth a slew of dirty-faced kids they can’t feed. But the dirty-faced kids aren’t to blame for being in this family. They inherit the troubles and burdens of their family’s “neediness” for the rest of their lives.
It’s a luxury to move thousands of miles away from poverty and dysfunction and never look back. That’s the only “solution” to breaking the cycle. But it’s not realistic.
Yeah, there have been experiments where they found moving low-income families into higher-income areas can break some of these cycles. But that’s not going to help the people left behind at all.
I know that in my experience, the poorest people are usually the most generous with what they have. I think because it feels like if you don’t hang together, you’ll all hang separately. And I think that is a positive cultural attitude. It happens to be backfiring, but that doesn’t mean that we should instead want people to be out for themselves only.
If you want equal educational outcomes, then schools that serve poorer areas probably are going to need more funding per student. Equal funding isn’t going to cut it.
The funding isn’t even the issue. Our schools are the best funded in the world, yet underperform compared to foreign competition. DC schools are especially well funded, and some of the worst performing.
DC spends more per student than any states other than NY and NJ, yet are the worst performing on the SAT. NY and NJ aren’t doing that great either. Utah, which spends the least, by contrast, has a very respectable showing.
The American teacher’s union has persuaded the public that the solution to bad teaching is more money and smaller class sizes. It’s a lie.
The secret is competent teachers and a non-disruptive, disciplined classroom and long class sessions without dozens of interruptions for this and that.
Teacher competency of course requires the ability to fire a teacher and fire a principle if the school or class is under par without good reason.
A poverty trap is “any self-reinforcing mechanism which causes poverty to persist.”[1] If it persists from generation to generation, the trap begins to reinforce itself if steps are not taken to break the cycle. See also Welfare trap.
Okay:
The ‘American welfare trap’ or British unemployment trap or poverty trap, theory asserts that taxation and welfare systems can jointly contribute to keep people on social insurance because the withdrawal of means tested benefits that comes with entering low-paid work causes there to be no significant increase in total income. An individual sees that the opportunity cost of returning to work is too great for too little a financial return, and this can create a perverse incentive to not work.
No. We resist this because the poor simply do not care that much about their children, and it will be a waste. As I pointed out in the linked thread way above, in aggregate they don’t care enough to even show up, much less get involved in the school.
I know it sends people into conniptions that we spend $60 million on a high school stadium, or provide the band with customized 18-wheelers, or build multi-story gyms for cheer squad and teams, or send the student leaders to Europe in the summers, or fund the salaries of additional coaches and directors to give the band/team an edge… but that is because the parents are involved. Yes, it might be better to spend it differently (and a little less for sports) but main thing is that the parents are interested, and they are there.
Just for funsies, try attending parent-teacher night at the rich school, and then at the poor school. I have. The difference isn’t small, it’s astonishing. At my kid’s school, parent night will have literally thousands of adults. You can barely move through the halls. We’re there in force - meeting the teachers, finding out their schedules, looking over the curricula and making sure our kiddos are in good hands. Now go to the inner-city school on the same night, and it will be nearly deserted. Nothing but crickets. I’ve seen it (helping relatives who teach there).
Diverting all those millions to the poor schools will likely accomplish nothing. We can’t force parents to get involved, so at least in Texas, we elect to lavish it on our own. Yes, there should be a basic minimum for every school so an education is available no matter what the family income, but forcing equal funding for all isn’t going to help. I’ll note that we had a Democratic governor here who tried that with her Robin Hood funding plan. If my memory is correct, it’s also going on 20 years since a Dem sat in the governor’s seat.
Is there any actual evidence that this is true? From my understanding, even a minimum wage job earns significantly more than welfare, which refutes this ‘welfare trap’ idea.
US schools are squarely in the middle of similar countries. Doesn’t do much for our ego, but it’s not horrible. Our good schools are well above average, it’s out bad schools that are very bad. That’s likely a reflection of how complex our society is, and how half assed our social safety bet is.
DC schools are also dealing with one of the most uniquely impoverished student populations in the US, as the vast majority of professionals with kids in the area live in neighboring states or send their kids to private schools.
DC schools have a 76% free or reduced lunch rate, and in a deeply segregated city where race and class are intimately tied, DC public schools are about 10% white. 15% of kids have special needs, and another. 10% are English language learned.
It doesn’t make sense to compare DC schools without equalizing for those factors.
Not to mention that there is no welfare that you can stay on forever. “Welfare” in the US-- in the sense of cash benefits-- has been capped at two years (with a five year lifetime limit) since 1997.
You may be surprised to learn that this change has not led the poor to escape from the so-called poverty trap (which actually means something completely different, but that’s for another day). While employment rates have gone up among those formerly receiving welfare, poverty levels have held steady. That’s because the people being kicked off welfare are largely working low wage jobs with little training or advancement.