Poverty and Education

 

(This is a picture of my wonderful in-laws, one of my sons and my "partner in crime," Daniel)

(Some of this post is in all caps, and it's not because I'm trying to add emphasis.  I just can't figure out how to change that!!)  
 
One of my best friends is a Kindergarten teacher, she’s been teaching for nine years and she’s on the brink of quitting.  At this point, the only thing keeping her in the classroom is that there’s nothing else she wants to do.  I can relate.  I would be in the same boat if I decided not to have children. 

So we talk about how to make it better, our ideas go around and around in circles as if they were right in front of us, and we try to see them clearly, try to see what connects them all, what would actually have an impact on the lives of the children in her care and on her life spent caring for them.  What we inevitably (and with increasing anger) circle back to is poverty.  There is only so much a teacher can do in the walls of their classroom, and with all the testing mandates and lack of support for teachers within her school she feels trapped, useless in helping her kindergartners grow.  This isn’t an issue of a few children that have passed through her classroom, this is widespread. 

            Some “education” issues that can be attributed mostly to poverty are low attendance, tardiness, inattention, low test scores, low grades, hard to reach parents and violence within the school.   So far, policy makers have been dealing with these issues as if they were the “meat and bones” in and of themselves, when they are really symptoms of other problems with deep roots.  It is too much to expect school alone to solve these problems at this scale.  It’s a lot like trying to make your fruit tree yield more fruit, but only addressing the part of the tree that you can see above the soil.

When people decide that these issues don’t reflect a deeper problem and are the whole of the problem, they also must take the view that it is entirely the fault of the families allowing low attendance, tardiness, inattention, low test scores, low grades, being hard to reach and simply being “bad” influences on their children.  So these people become “less than.”  I used to be one of those people who thought it was a poor person’s fault for coming to be that way.  Now that I have children, and we live below the poverty line, I realize how difficult it is.  But we have help, a lot of help from both his parents and mine, who were able to retire comfortably, meaning they have time to babysit our kids when we need it.  We also know, in the back of our minds, if we ever need help financially our parents are able to help.  If we had grown up in poverty we wouldn’t have that help.  We wouldn’t have been able to buy our home, and I might not even consider homeschooling, knowing how important that second income would be for us. 

Minimum wage is not a livable wage, especially because the whole system seems geared to keep the poor where they are.  If the minimum wage was raised to reflect the needs of the people working for that money, then maybe a household could be supported by one earner.  This potentially frees up the other parent or head of household to do things like cook meals at home – almost always cheaper than eating prepared food, and almost always healthier.  The people who think education can be “fixed” by implementing new curriculum and tests, are blind to the effects of poverty.  The disadvantages of growing up in poverty can seem small when looked at individually, but they stack tall and circle around so there seems to be a never ending vortex keeping the poor from being anything else. 

We can only seem to come up with the same impossible seeming solutions to these issues: Raise the minimum wage to something livable, make health care a right afforded to everyone, and hire more teachers to allow for smaller class sizes.  These are just the basics, but they still seem unimaginable right now.  In a perfect world teachers would be seen as professionals on the same level as doctors and lawyers, and it would be just as difficult to become a teacher as it is to become a doctor.  And why not?  Teachers are caring for the future doctors of the world. 

Why should we worry about poverty in general?  Desperate people do desperate things.  I’ve wondered so many times why this doesn’t bother the people who would like to keep minimum wage at a “minimum” and keep health care as a privilege for a select few.  If people can’t take care of themselves legally, a lot of them (especially the more industrious, entrepreneurial, “go getter” types) will disregard the law and take matters into their own hands.