Alexandria, Va. – December 8, 2006 – Poverty is the common thread that ties together children at risk, along with other factors, including welfare dependency, absent parents, one-parent families, unwed mothers and a parent without a high school diploma, according to the cover story of the December issue of American School Board Journal .
Over the next several months, the Journal will examine the education of children at risk. December’s segment, “Children at Risk” by Journal senior editor Lawrence Hardy, examines the persistence of poverty in the United States.
“The way to be poor in this country is to be a young child, and to be the family of a young child,” says Deborah Frank, director of the Grow Clinic at Boston Medical Center, noting that the poverty rate for children under six is 20 percent. “The younger the child, the poorer the family.”
Hardy writes that rental costs have soared in big cities and throughout the nation. Housing programs have been cut. Wages remain flat even as the nation enters its fifth year of economic recovery. And, since 2000, another 1.3 million children have slipped into poverty, bringing the total to nearly 13 million.
“Poverty has lots of negative impacts that people have to overcome, but schools are one of the major institutions of social intervention that we have,” says Robert Balfanz, a research scientist at the Center for Social Organization of Schools at Johns Hopkins University. “It’s the one sort of public institution that’s everywhere. And so I think, ultimately, we still have to do it through the schools.”
Hardy asks how much schools can do to help the poor and notes that the answer is a matter of considerable debate. Some argue that schools alone can lift children out of poverty and others say the problems of the poor are so profound that reforming schools is not enough.
The Journal notes that the nation’s official poverty level has not changed significantly since the 1970s, and many experts say there is nothing on the horizon that suggests it will move significantly in the near future.
“Schools will need help. I am not saying they can do it alone,” Balfanz says. “But they have to be the fundamental driver for giving kids a chance to come from poverty and go on to success.”
The article, “Children at Risk ,” can be found on the American School Board Journal Web site at www.asbj.com .
Founded in 1891, the American School Board Journal is an award-winning, editorially independent education magazine published monthly by the National School Boards Association.