The Heritage Foundation has released a study showing that the poor are really pretty well-off in America. Lots of them own their own home, have a car and air-conditioning.
Message: Stop whining about the poor. They should thank their lucky stars they are living in America! They should not expect a handout as they are doing just fine. Forget about the vast income inequality that exists in our society. Who cares?
Are the kids homeless and hungry? Blame their parents or their absent father. Are they sick because the parents don’t have health insurance and can’t afford a doctor? Their fault.
What would you call this report? “Compassion is for the weak”? “The poor will always be with us”? “Poverty is your problem, not mine?”?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This Republican party is not the one my Dad and Grandfather supported… and I can no longer support them. The Heritage Foundation used to be a group that defended the Constitution. Now their views are almost inhuman.
The Democrats are not much of an alternative, but at least they ” talk nice”.
Both Dumbocrats and Republorats are devastating Public Education, so …take a barf bag to the voting booth, and vote for one of the “devils”.. Then take a long hot shower.
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No need for a barf bag and shower. Vote your conscience.
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I look forward to seeing someone take this report apart.
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Part of the same strategy I guess. If we are saying that poverty is the main cause of kids not doing well in school, then they will discount what it means to be in poverty, and claim that not many kids are in poverty. Thus, in their minds, it gets back to poor teaching.
The good news, if there is any in this report, is they are hearing what we’ve been saying.
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It’s called social Darwinism or Ayn Randism with a happy face but not really that happy at all. Are there not prisons, poorhouses, the gutter? These corporate funded right wing libertarian so called think tanks like Heritage, Cato and American Enterprise Institute are just shills and propagandists for the top 1%. C-Span (also 2 & 3) give a tremendous amount of air time to these propaganda mills and I don’t think it’s fair or balanced of C-Span at all. These people are not like objective actual scholars from the major universities such as Harvard, Yale, MIT or Princeton, etc. These libertarian think tanks have their corporate agenda and to gloss over the plight of the poor in this country is criminal. On a side note, the question for C-Span callers this morning was ….drum roll……should teachers have the right to strike. Now there’s a lovely slanted question right there.
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How about, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”? (Apologies to a revisionist historian who studies the American west.) This is, indeed, what underlies much of the current “reform” thinking, though it is covered up well.
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That quote sounds like the GOP platform.
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Because we measure poverty using annual before tax income, there can be large differences in consumption between households classified as poor. I suspect some of the households counted as poor are ones that have had recent drops in income, but retain many of the assets from previous years when the household had higher income. As the Heritage Foundation paper itself says,
“…..the living conditions of the average poor household should not be taken to represent all poor households. There is a wide range of living conditions among the poor: a third of poor households have both cell phones and landline phones; a third also have telephone answering machines. But, at the other extreme, a tenth of the poor have no telephone at all. Similarly, most of America’s poor live in accommodations with two or more rooms per person, but around 7 percent of the poor are crowded, with less than one room per person.”
I believe it is good news that poor households do not often have children going hungry or without medical care, but still a tragedy that some do go hungry and are without medical care. As a society we are making progress, though not as quickly as those deprived children deserve.
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The question is, how does poverty differ based on how it is measured within OECD countries. Obviously the poor here, or the poor in Finland, will by markedly different than the poor in a developing nation.
The poor in industrialized nations tend NOT to care about education, although they may have cell phones and a new pair of Michael Jordan’s. This is the key element educators must contend with, although there are other issues such as kids literally having no food in their house. The latter is probably rare in some schools, but the problem is the effects of poverty on test scores as manifested by EVERY standardized test I’ve ever seen.
If politicians want high test scores, its simple – make available middle-class jobs. That’s what the data says.
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Where is your “evidence” the poor “tend not to care about education”? Of course you have none.
It’s the POLITICIANS who do not care about poor people.
People are poor because they have little money. BTW, what makes you think they are blowing money on goodies like cell phones and shoes? BTW, one-time purchases are not an indication of wealth and poverty, but INCOME is.
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Those Jordans were probably a gift from Grandma or from some aunts and uncles who put their money together so the kid could have at least one decent Christmas present. Hopefully they weren’t bought with money earned as the lookout for the dope dealer.
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@susannunes – the poor perform badly on standardized tests.
Do you think they are faking it?
And not only do they score low, they don’t care. They come to school for the free breakfast and lunch. Have you ever worked in a school?
I agree the politicians could hardly care about poor people. Listen to them talk – all they talk about is the middle class, hardly ever the rich or poor.
I think you read my post wrong. I believe poverty strongly inhibits student achievement and growth. I was not belittling our poor, just highlighting the fact that although this study has found that poor people have “things”, that doesn’t change their mindset. Education is NOT an asset to the poor.
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Income, not “consumption” is what constitutes wealth and poverty. Good grief.
Who CARES what the Heritage Foundation says? It is a propaganda outfit. Diane Ravitch knows its a faker as well as anybody. Too bad some posters around here don’t know that.
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Income is a slippery thing to measure, and might not tell you that much about the standard of living for individuals.
Because we use an income based measure for poverty, we have a distorted view of how government policy impacts poor households. For example, the earned income tax credit, food stamp program, subsidized school lunch program and housing assistance programs have no impact on measured poverty because they have no impact on pretax income. I think we would all agree that the beneficiaries of these programs would be much worse off if these programs disappeared despite the fact that it would not change their “official” poverty status.
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You can get a cell phone free with 250 free minutes per month. A landline can be had for about $19 a month without a lot of frills. You need caller ID to dodge the bill collectors, however.
Apparently many poor households are going hungry because last Saturday there were about 2000 people standing in the hot sun at an open air food bank in North Baton Rouge waiting for free produce. That area is a “food desert” with no supermarkets but many small convenience stores that don’t carry much in terms of fresh foods and that over charge for things like bread and milk. Food banks that operate near the end of the month do a lot of business. As for medical care, a poor family might wait two months for a regular appointment. The alternative is the public hospital emergency room where they might easily wait 10 hours to be seen. And then they have to pay for their medications. Americans might not have to walk 50 miles with a sick child in their arms, but getting to the hospital can involve long bus rides or paying someone to take you. And then a dutiful parent will also have to take the healthy children along. The children try to sit quietly with nothing to do and often nothing to eat. If there is one thing poor mothers do, it is make their children behave.
Many teachers in inner city schools will tell you about the snacks they buy themselves and keep in their desk for their students who have not eaten since lunch the previous day. I did it too. If you want your students to learn you feed them. My paraprofessional used to get extra free lunches registered to absent students which had already been paid for and give a couple to a student who was homeless so he could get enough to eat. He is now an Atlanta Police Officer. When I worked at an elementary school next to a public housing project many children were lucky to get grits for dinner the last week of the month. And actually they were fortunate. Mama was not having to hustle market rate rent for a room in a nasty rooming house next to a drug addict or stay in a shelter where they put you out 2 hours before the school bus came even in 30 degree weather. And if that bus got you to school too late for your free breakfast, that was just tough.
In the summer and during school holidays, in Atlanta I used to see children standing in the soup lines for lunch, accompanied only by an older sibling. They also went to the Grits Line ,which served breakfast. Both services were intended for the homeless population. A church downtown also served lunch for the homeless on Sunday since the other lines were closed. Two mentally retarded brothers and an autistic man who would were young adults and friends of mine and all of whom received SSI often volunteered (and ate there themselves). They said that many children came. Our food bank, Grant Park Cooperative Ministries, operated on the 4th Saturday. We served about 150 low income households per month.
Yes there are degrees of poverty. Some people might have some assets that they are quickly draining. Often, because they were once middle class they cannot get food stamps or housing subsidies. They are the most likely ones to be sleeping in the their cars because they don’t know the system. The ones who know how to get what they need are often generationally poor and also have a poverty of spirit. They don’t know anything but what they have experienced which is what their mama and grandma also experienced. These are the kids who lose hope and become drug dealers or pregnant because of their poverty.
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The Heritage Foundation is a hate group related to the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, and The American Family Association. Concerned Women for America and 1 Million Moms. They support everything conservative from opposition to gay rights to abortion. The agenda of these groups includes opposition to public schools because, as I once heard an AFA spokesperson say that public school teachers are not Christians since they don’t read the Bible or lead prayer in schools—-like we were the ones who “banned” prayer. One even suggested that parents either home school or put their kids in “Christian academies”—-the precursor to the religious charters. When we get a hater we need to consider the source.
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The Heritage Foundation is a fraud, just like all of the other right-wing-backed “foundations” whose sole reason for existing is to create propaganda in trying to buy public opinion.
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We do not live in Dickensian England. Not yet, anyway. But government programs intended to “help” the “poor” (not the same definitions you and I have in our heads) will get us there soon enough.
In the same year that Dickens published A Christmas Carol, Herbert Spencer published an essay, “The Proper Sphere of Government.” Spencer wrote that one of the most under-looked and most harmful effects of the Poor Laws of Britain – their welfare system – was that the wealthy would lose their sense of charity and feeling towards the less fortunate.
More here: http://therightofthepeople.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/are-we-more-selfish-under-capitalism-or-socialism/
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The attitude of the Republican Party used to be, “I’ve got mine, you get yours.” Now, in our duopolistic kleptocracy, both captive parties are in effect saying, “I’ve got mine, and I’m taking yours!”
Wherever you look – the hostile takeover of the public schools, attacks on Social Security and Medicare, foreclosure fraud, water theft and pollution of aquifers for fracking, etc., – one sees a bipartisan effort to enable the extraction of wealth from the public and the nation’s patrimony, rather than produce it from labor earning a living wage.
These people seem to honestly think they will be able avoid reaping the whirlwind they are creating, hiding either in their gated communities, stop-and-frisk gentrified neighborhoods, private islands or space pods.
There’s no pleasure in saying they’re in for a nasty surprise.
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But my problem is, ignoring many of the problems that cause poverty.
Addictions, the cycle of dependency, illiteracy, etc.
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I just noticed that the Heritage Foundation report was released August 27, 2007. Is there a more recent version out there?
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The Heritage Foundation sent me this report today.
Diane
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Wow. Did you ever think to actually READ the report and not just have a knee-jerk reaction that it’s just hate-filled rhetoric? As Teaching Economist noted–it was written 5 years ago. I think some Critical Thinking skills would be helpful–but you need to have some KNOWLEDGE. 😉
Has LBJ’s War on Poverty made poverty disappear? No, but it has gotten better. First, look at the data in the Heritage report and then look at your own family’s history. For example, I recently found out that my grandmother had only one dress as a child. Both sides of my families were very poor and they often went without dinners, shoes and basic necessities, and yet they still were able to learn and they valued their schooling. One of my grandmothers had to quit school after eighth grade so that she could work to help support the family yet she was a brilliant, wonderful, insightful, compassionate woman and we all adored her. She taught herself what she had missed in her formal education.
Other nations that are MUCH poorer than we are somehow manage to educate their children to a much higher level than we do. We should set aside our political biases and be willing to honestly debate and discuss these issues without accusing each other of being selfish and hard-hearted.
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The study was dated 2007! I think the world has changed a little bit since then… many more people now realize we are living in a plutocracy..
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