The costs of poverty are not only high, but they’re often hidden from the larger public, something the Washington Post tried to tackle in a lengthy feature earlier this week:

The poorer you are, the more things cost. More in money, time, hassle, exhaustion, menace … The poor know these facts of life. These facts become their lives.

The benefits of everyone, not just the poor, knowing these facts, is twofold. First, it pushes back against false stereotypes about the poor (that they are lazy or have bad habits or make bad choices). Second, it lets us think strategically about ways to improve conditions and make things better.  In this vein, Ed Sector’s Erin Dillon has a new report detailing how to create “functioning, well-designed markets” that “improve higher-quality supply and higher-quality demand.” In the report’s introduction, she writes:

The neighborhoods of Southeast Washington, D.C., are among the poorest in the city. There, the grocery stores, banks, restaurants, and other institutions that suburbanites take for granted have long been in short supply.

This cuts to the chase: things cost “more in money, time, hassle, exhaustion, menace” because those who live in poverty lack options, or have to choose between unappealing options. For instance, Dillon’s colleague Kevin Carey has noted that the only two sit-down restaurants east of the Anacostia River are a Denny’s and an IHOP:

But there’s another business thriving in the various run-down strip malls east of the river: dialysis centers. Wards 7 & 8 appear to have been struck by the diabetes epidemic that is afflicting communities nationwide. And the only two sit-down restaurants east of the river, parking lots full because these are the only options the free market provides, are in the business of selling their customers liquid sugar.

None of this is particular to DC; it’s endemic. PolicyLink found that in New York City, areas with poor supermarket access have higher levels of diabetes and obesity:

In Chicago, those who live in food deserts (areas with little or no access to healthy foods, seen in red in the map on the left) have higher body-mass-indexes:

The Post described the practical effect of living in a food desert:

You don’t have a car to get to a supermarket, much less to Costco or Trader Joe’s, where the middle class goes to save money. You don’t have three hours to take the bus. So you buy groceries at the corner store, where a gallon of milk costs an extra dollar.

A loaf of bread there costs you $2.99 for white. For wheat, it’s $3.79. The clerk behind the counter tells you the gallon of leaking milk in the bottom of the back cooler is $4.99. She holds up four fingers to clarify. The milk is beneath the shelf that holds beef bologna for $3.79. A pound of butter sells for $4.49. In the back of the store are fruits and vegetables. The green peppers are shriveled, the bananas are more brown than yellow, the oranges are picked over.

(At a Safeway on Bradley Boulevard in Bethesda, the wheat bread costs $1.19, and white bread is on sale for $1. A gallon of milk costs $3.49 — $2.99 if you buy two gallons. A pound of butter is $2.49. Beef bologna is on sale, two packages for $5.)

In addition, regardless of neighborhood, there’s a growing financial disparity between healthy and unhealthy foods:

Needless to say, our most impoverished neighborhoods are often the ones with the most health concerns (and we haven’t even mentioned other factors like crime, environmental racism, and lack of health care). Unfortunately, taking sick leave from work is another area where the poor are forced to choose between two unappealing options: going to work sick, or losing pay and risking being fired by staying home. Unlike in other nations, workers in the U.S. aren’t guaranteed paid sick leave:

And those who live in poverty are the least likely to receive such leave benefits - and the least likely to be able to afford taking unpaid leave. They depend on their paycheck to get them through the month. Unfortunately, as the Post details, those who live in poverty are often forced to waste a portion of their check at check-cashing establishments. As you can see, there’s only 1 check-cashing business west of Rock Creek Park in Ward 3, which is largely white and affluent:

In contrast there are almost no banks in Wards 5, 7, and 8. (This list, from 2007, is slightly outdated - there’s a Wachovia in southeast now, and also one at Georgia and T NW.)

As Joel Klein has said:

Schools matter and they matter big time in America. Sure, poverty matters, families matter, but schools can be the game changer…We’re never going to fix poverty in America if we don’t fix education.

Schools can be the game changer. But it’s undeniable that poverty and education are intertwined. This means that fixing education is all the more imperative. But there are strategic steps we can take to alleviate conditions of poverty outside of what we do in schools, and we need to do those things, too.

As swine flu continues to spread, the Post’s “On Parenting” columnist Stacey Garfinkle highlights a relevant issue in schools:

Handwashing properly … is one way to try to curb the spread of unwanted viruses. So, what’s the problem? Why is that so hard? Well, for one thing, elementary and middle schools are hit and miss when it comes to providing soap and regularly having children wash hands before eating. Preschool parents, on the other hand, nearly universally report that their schools perform lots of handwashing — sometimes on arrival and before meals and snacks.

Good to hear that almost all preschools are soaping up. But the phrase “hit and miss” suggests an element of randomness - i.e. one Montgomery County middle school has soap and another one doesn’t - that I’m guessing doesn’t actually play a role here. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that schools in high-poverty areas are more likely to consistently lack soap or paper towels than those in affluent areas. The school I taught at, where over 80% of students qualify for free or reduced lunch, often lacked both. Given that students who live in poverty face increased health risks, the least we could do is make sure they have the opportunity for basic sanitation when they’re in school. I’d love to hear from others who teach or have taught in low-income - or, conversely - affluent areas on this issue.

Update: Stacey Garfinkle emails:

Thanks for pointing to my blog on Soap in Schools. I saw that you were theorizing about poverty, and while what you say may or may not have truth to it, I just thought I’d clarify the  “hit and miss.” phrasing.  I do indeed mean that one school in, say Montgomery County, has soap while another a mile away does not. If you look at readers’ response in the survey I put on the blog, only about 1/4th of just more than 200 readers say that their school definitely follows good hygiene standards.

Obviously, no children, regardless of where they go to school, should have to go to a school without soap.

Speaking at the National Press Club last week, NYC School Chancellor Joel Klein declared:

Schools matter and they matter big time in America. Sure, poverty matters, families matter, but schools can be the game changer…We’re never going to fix poverty in America if we don’t fix education.

Klein is absolutely correct. But sometimes our insistence that schools alone can play the role of superhero means we don’t even talk about how high poverty and crime and poor health care and nutrition impact children trying to learn. And we talk even less about the role of culture in education, even though it can play a huge role. Reihan Salam has some spot-on thoughts on crime and despair in low-income neighborhoods:

A new and dangerous equilibrium emerges in these neighborhoods, where children turn to a tough demeanor to protect themselves against victimization. The tough demeanor, of course, has to be defended when challenged. Gang membership is another way to protect yourself.

What’s worse is that above a certain level, and we appear to have long since passed that level, higher incarceration rates are themselves criminogenic. When the proportion of young men who wind up incarcerated passes a certain point, the stigma associated with doing a bid starts to go away. And because most crime happens in a handful of neighborhoods, those same neighborhoods are overwhelmed by a huge number of ex-offenders every year.

Not surprisingly, these men have a hard time finding and holding jobs. Habits formed in prison cut against the habits necessary to flourish in the world of work. The crime-fighting regime starts to lose its legitimacy. Far from a fair and reasonable system designed to protect law-abiding citizens, it looks like a racist plot to a lot of inner-city residents, not least those with brothers and fathers and spouses in the system.

Having taught in an impoverished neighborhood, I’ve found all of the above to be distressingly true. Schools can create their own culture - lots of successful schools do - but it’s not easy and it means not only modeling expected behavior but being incredibly explicit about expectations because the rules in school are different than the rules outside of school. A teacher can say to students, “you have to earn respect to get respect,” and students are smart so they understand that concept. But earning respect in school is markedly different than earning respect in the street. When you’re a 70-pound 7th grader who’s being bullied on the way home from school, you earn respect by punching someone in the mouth the first time they come at you. Then hopefully no one messes with you the next time. Unfortunately, I really can’t even tell a 70-pound 7th grader that that was the wrong thing to do in that situation. But that’s obviously not what he should do if someone is bullying him in the classroom.

It’s clear, also, that more progressive criminal justice laws and job placement programs would help improve the environments in which some children live and learn. The Obama administration’s plan to close the sentencing disparity for those dealing crack versus powder cocaine would be a good start.

The NFL draft recalls one of the most fantastic articles ever printed in the NY Times, The Ballad of Big Mike:

In his first nine years of school, Michael Oher was enrolled in 11 different institutions, and that included a gap of 18 months, around age 10, when he apparently did not attend school at all. Either that or the public schools were so indifferent to his presence that they neglected to register it formally. Not that Oher actually showed up at the schools where he was enrolled. Even when he received credit for attending, he was sensationally absent: 46 days of a single term of his first-grade year, for instance. His first first-grade year, that is; Michael Oher repeated first grade. He repeated second grade, too. And yet the school system presented these early years as the most accomplished of his academic career. They claimed that right through the fourth grade he was performing at “grade level.” How could they know when, according to these transcripts, he hadn’t even attended the third grade?

[The Memphis public schools] passed kids up to the next grade because they found it too much trouble to flunk them. They functioned as an assembly line churning out products never meant to be market-tested. At several schools, Michael Oher had been given F’s in reading his first term and C’s the second term, which allowed him to finish the school year with D’s — they were giving him grades just to get rid of him. And get rid of him they did: seldom did the child return to the school that passed him. The year before Simpson got his file, Michael Oher passed ninth grade at a high school called Westwood. According to his transcripts, he missed 50 days of school that year. Fifty days! At Briarcrest, the rule was that if a student misses 15 days of any class, he has to repeat the class no matter his grade. And yet Westwood had given Michael Oher just enough D’s to move him along. Even when you threw in the B in world geography, clearly a gift from the Westwood basketball coach who taught the class, the grade-point average the student would bring with him to Briarcrest began with a zero: 0.6.

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“Charles Murray is wrong” might as well be the subtitle of Nicholas Kristof’s excellent article on IQ in today’s NYT:

But Eric Turkheimer of the University of Virginia has conducted further research demonstrating that in poor and chaotic households, I.Q. is minimally the result of genetics — because everybody is held back.

“Bad environments suppress children’s I.Q.’s,” Professor Turkheimer said.

[snip]

Good schooling correlates particularly closely to higher I.Q.’s. One indication of the importance of school is that children’s I.Q.’s drop or stagnate over the summer months when they are on vacation (particularly for kids whose parents don’t inflict books or summer programs on them).

Kristof cites two crucial - and mostly untapped - ways to improve life outcomes: high-quality early childhood education and teaching delayed gratification . Too often, we focus on Head Start programs. But Head Start quality varies widely. The goal should be high-quality universal Pre-K. As for delayed gratification, it deserves a blog post of its own at a future date. It’s hugely important, it’s something a lot of us take for granted, and it’s not developed in many children who live in poverty.

A new study indicates that the stress of poverty impairs adolescents’ working memory. Catherine considers a policy implication I haven’t seen anyone else suggest:

I wonder how the cumulative affects of stress compare and/or relate to short term, occasional spikes - i.e. a week in a shelter or a day of hunger. If those spikes are major factors, then schools should consider ramping up targeted, immediate interventions for kids at those specific times instead of the slow process of social support that we often rely on.

She’s right. Unless the study turns out to be bogus, in which case … we should still do that. Because kids in America shouldn’t have to go hungry. When they do, it’s our nation’s moral failing.

It is appalling that “some 691,000 children went hungry in America sometime in 2007,” according to Agriculture Department.

I don’t know about everyone else, but I can always tell when I am hungry: I get a little irritable, easily distracted, and if I’m in a meeting or presentation, I  incessantly watch the clock counting down the minutes until lunch, and I’m an adult. Fortunately for most of us, this is not a regular occurrence (usually just poor planning) and more importantly, there is relief: we go home and make dinner or grab a mid-morning snack.

But, for nearly 700,000 children that is not the case; for many, their only meals are the ones they get at school if their parents filled out the free and reduced lunch program forms.

In his Presidential Campaign, President-elect Obama made ending domestic hunger a top priority, and the aim is by 2015.  If his administration succeeds in this endeavor, I believe it will have a major influence on academic achievement for children from poverty. How can we expect them to focus on learning when they are starving?

Last week I attended the Center for American Progress’ event showcasing Paul Tough’s book, Whatever it Takes about Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ). In attendance were Canada, Tough, and Roland Fryer, economist and professor at Harvard University (who is a big Canada fan, but referred himself “grumpy economist” when he discussed program results).

Canada began work in Harlem about 25 years ago, operating after-school programs and anti-violence training for urban youth.  He soon realized that these programs weren’t making enough of a difference for youth. Canada believed something radically different needed to be done, and from that belief, the Harlem Children’s Zone was born. At its inception, the Zone was targeted to a single block; ten years later, it serves more than 8,000 kids.  According to the HCZ website:

The HCZ pipeline begins with The Baby College, a series of workshops for parents of children ages 0-3. The pipeline goes on to include best-practice programs for children of every age through college. The network includes in-school, after-school, social-service, health and community-building programs.

Canada measures program success with the number of children that graduate from college. But, to appease funders and other stakeholders, there are regular evaluations of academic success. The most significant results reported are those in elementary school math, with children in the 3^rd grade and attending Promise Academy Charter School on par with other 3^rd graders in New York State, effectively closing the achievement gap in math for children in Harlem. Canada is confident that if participation begins with parents and their children from the time of birth, they can start school on grade level and stay on grade level.  To do this, the program and teaching staff must do whatever it takes to address student needs - both academic and those arising from external factors - so that HCZ students will graduate from high school and enroll in college. It will be interesting to follow HCZ as children progress through the pipeline toward success.

HCZ is an intensive program that intertwines education, social services, community rebuilding, and attitude shifts about success. Many community leaders have been to visit the Harlem Children’s Zone to see how it could be replicated. When thinking about replication, there is a lot to consider. In his remarks, Roland Fryer Jr. discussed two types of replication by either focusing on supply or on demand. The former refers to what HCZ has done, creating its own network of programs that accomplish the goals set forth. The latter refers to leveraging existing community services and resources.

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I stated in a previous post that community schools make sense. In this post, I want to delve deeper into the link between improving outcomes for children and community schools.

Most of us would agree that poverty poses great challenges for our country’s children and families. One in five children living in poverty is too many for a wealthy country like the United States. The Question is: What can be done to address the obstacles that children living in poverty face?

There are all manner of programs both in and out of the school setting that aim to accomplish this feat. From Head Start, and free and reduced lunch programs to mentoring, out-of-school time programs, and tutoring, every community has their own version of what these look like and every community has programs that make a difference as well as ones that don’t. But, national model programs like Big Brothers Big Sisters, Boys & Girls Club, and other local versions are making a difference in the lives of children.

Studies have indicated a positive impact on academic achievement and child well-being indicators. For example, in a study of Big Brothers/Big Sisters, researchers found that long-term mentoring relationships mentees were:

• 46% less likely to begin using illegal drugs
• 27% less likely to begin using alcohol
• 52% less likely to skip school
• 37% less likely to skip a class

Beyond standalone programs, there are also numerous one-stop programs like the comprehensive Harlem Children’s Zone and The Door in New York City that seek to coordinate services and programs and improve outcomes for families and children.

These programs are effective and benefit children; so why not leave things as they are and let organizations continue providing services outside of the school building? Paul Tough puts the need for collaboration into context when he says:

If we try to fix the schools in a low-income neighborhood without addressing the other needs of students there, it’s not a real solution to the neighborhood’s problems. And it isn’t enough to provide social services to poor children if their neighborhood schools are still giving them a lousy education. A true solution to the problem of underachievement in inner-city public schools is going to require more nurturing families and safer neighborhoods as well as better teachers and more accountable schools.

The community schools model makes sense because it brings two pieces of the puzzle together: quality, effective schools and programs and services that address external factors.

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A key theme in the Education Equality Project manifesto is this:

If you are an African American or Latino child in this country, the probability is high that our public education system will fail you, that you will not graduate from high school, that your ability to function successfully in the twenty-first century economy will be limited, and that you will have no real prospect of achieving the American dream.

This is a distressing, but accurate statement. The Education Equality Project statement of principles goes on to outline what must be done, but there is still something missing. This is where the Broader, Bolder Approach steps up to the plate. For all students to be successful in school and in life, barriers to their success must be addressed. The Broader, Bolder Approach discusses the importance of both making school improvements and addressing external factors that students face.

Barriers like poverty are not excuses that schools make to get out of being held accountable. Instead, these barriers such as missing dinner most nights, lacking positive role models, and being on the wrong side of the digital divide are realities for too many students.

Providing additional tools in the school facility like out-of-school-time programming, high quality early childhood programs, and parent support programs (coupled with quality teachers and rigorous curriculum) will go along way toward leveling the playing field for more students.