Nicholas Kristof wrote an important article in the New York Times about our national indifference to the well being of our children. Kristof knows that nothing we do is more important than reducing the child poverty rate, which is scandalously high. We have hundreds of billionaires, but millions of children who live in extreme poverty. Instead of spending billions of dollars on standardized testing, what if we directed that money to helping children have a safe and healthy childhood and helped their families achieve a decent standard of living?
Kristof begins:
Imagine you have some neighbors in a mansion down the road who pamper one child with a credit card, the best private school and a Tesla.
The parents treat most of their other kids decently but not lavishly — and then you discover that the family consigns one child to an unheated, vermin-infested room in the basement, denying her dental care and often leaving her without food.
You’d call 911 to report child abuse. You’d say those responsible should be locked up. You’d steam about how vile adults must be to allow a child to suffer like that.
But that’s us. That household, writ large, is America and our moral stain of child poverty.
Some American children attend $70,000-a-year nursery schools, but 12 million kids live in households that lack food. The United States has long had one of the highest rates of child poverty in the advanced world — and then the coronavirus pandemic aggravated the suffering.
Now we could have a thrilling breakthrough: President Biden included a proposal in his $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan that one studysays would cut child poverty by half. We in the news media have focused on direct payments to individuals, but the historic element of Biden’s plan is its effort to slash child poverty.
“The American Rescue Plan is the most ambitious proposal to reduce child poverty ever proposed by an American president,” Jason Furman, a Harvard economist, told me.
A couple of decades from now, America will be pretty much the same whether direct payments end up being $1,000 or $1,400. But this will be a transformed nation if we’re able to shrink child poverty on our watch.
So the most distressing part of 10 Republican senators’ counterproposal to Biden was their decision to drop the plan to curb child poverty. Please, Mr. President, don’t budge on this.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Priorities
Poor are cogs
To work the mill
Just like hogs
You give them swill
Give a test
To gauge the worth
Cull the best
At point of birth
You said it. You and Nick.
Children are being abused, as well as their parents who live in poverty and have a very slim chance of ever rising to a better economic level.
Those who get sick in this country are being abused…millions have no health insurance or can’t afford the deductibles or co-pays.
There is age discrimination even though it is ‘officially’ against the law.
Women make less than men while doing the same job.
Racism and hatred are at an all-time high.
There is never enough money to provide the social services that are necessary for those who need it.
Why aren’t slum lords responsible for upgrading their property?
The U.S is not the best country to live in unless you are one of the wealthy.
…………………….
Published Mar. 20, 2019
Updated Mar. 20, 2019
The 5.5 million residents of Finland sure have a lot to be happy about.
At least, they do according to the World Happiness Report, which was released Wednesday by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network for the United Nations.
The 136-page report ranks countries on six key variables that support well-being: income, freedom, trust, healthy life expectancy, social support and generosity. It then analyzes those rankings over time and, in some cases, raises potential causes for spikes and decreases in happiness.
The report named Finland the world’s happiest country, followed by Denmark, Norway, Iceland and the Netherlands. The U.S. came in 19th, a one-place drop from 2018′s report and a five-spot drop since 2017′s.
We’re Number 1
Nuttiest place on earth
Is what the US is
Work till death from birth
But after death , it’s bliss
“But after death , it’s bliss”
SDP, I think you got infected by Hollywood so you squeezed in a happy ending of sorts.
Yeah, but we have freedoms and opportunities which are great alternatives to happiness. For example,
We are given the opportunity to provide the entire cost of childcare.
The average cost of full-time care for young children in care centers in the US is about $9,589 a year, higher than the average cost of in-state college tuition, which runs about $9,410, according to a 2016 report from the think tank New America.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/25/health/child-care-parenting-explainer-intl/index.html
US employers have the freedom not to give any maternity leave. In Finland, people get 4 months paid maternity leave but they plan to extended this to over a year.
In December 2019, the US passed a measure providing federal workers with 12 weeks of paid parental leave. However, the country is still the only industrialized nation with no nationwide laws regarding paid parental leave.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/05/world/finland-parental-leave-policy-trnd/index.html
Employers have the freedom not to give any vacation since there is no federal mandatory minimum vacation time. (Is there a state which has a mandatory min vacation?) In Finland, it’s mandated that people get 4 weeks in the summer and 2 weeks in the winter.
In the long list of countries, apart from a few island nations in Oceania and the Pacific, the US is the only country with 0 vacation days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_by_country
We need to help families out of intergenerational poverty. If adopted, the Green New Deal provides opportunity to create good paying jobs. It can create a way for families to lift themselves out of poverty. The right wing has vilified the poor instead of looking for ways to help them. Low paying jobs are not helpful. Even working full-time most people cannot earn enough money to support their families. We also need to provide ways for people to buy homes. Eliminating student debt would help young people become home owners. For people of color we need to enact stiff penalties for realtors that red line their customers of color. One of the inequities in our society is a tremendous wealth gap between white people and people of color.
Will Ferrell made a silly commercial for the Super Bowl about how envious Americans are of Norway which leads the world in the number of electric vehicles per capita. The Norwegians made a video to respond to Ferrell’s ad. It is very brief and funny, but it highlights how much social support the government provides to its people. It is no accident that the happiest countries are those that provide strong social safety nets to their people. In our country we believe people should pull “themselves up by their bootstraps.” This is very hard to do when wages are low, opportunities are few and families can barely afford to pay for a pair of boots.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi3JQa1ynDw&feature=share
If only a Democratic candidate who supports the Green New Deal had been nominated….
oh, such a sad reminder
Hint: the candidate is the one who wins the most delegates. That was Joe Biden.
Hint: That does not prove that his politics will be so great. Still, better to get Trump out.
I tend to think that if a president pushes hard to make $15/hr a reality and takes care of the environment, the rest will fall in place.
Most boots don’t even have straps these days, so even if it were possible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, it’s impossible to pull yourself up by something that does not exist.
“Will Ferrell made a silly commercial ”
I think, it’s very funny.
“This is very hard to do when wages are low,”
Let’s make this quantitative: the current min wage means a $20K income. Full time childcare is $10K per year per child.
I am glad to know this about Biden’s American Rescue Plan. Good for him, and shame on the Repugnicans targeting its deletion from the Plan.
There are other ways to reduce child poverty. Free universal quality child care for all would be a major step. And so many others. Any one step always looks to me like a bandaid on the open wound that is 1% holding more wealth than “bottom” 80%, loss of manufacturing base, offshoring of jobs and profits, etc. This one looks to me like a “strike while the iron is hot” plan: as long as we’re dishing out $$ for covid relief, get something done now that might stick in the long run. Bill the 1%.
other ways to reduce child poverty. ”
Lock them in cages and throw them some bones to pick. I heard somewhere that that works.
Oh, yeah, now I remember. From the Republicans.
Mr. Kristof is quite right, of course. Poverty has been a particular professional concern of mine almost from the moment I began teaching. (In fact, I have bloviated on “Poverty and Cognition” in a couple of posts on my own blog.) But try to bring up poverty and its deleterious effects on cognition and learning in a professional development session, let alone addressing it primarily and substantially in dedicated professional development session for educators and you are likely to encounter a lot of resistance from colleagues, administrators, and anyone, really, who doesn’t want to think about the deep and abiding social problem of poverty.
In the eyes of many educators, poverty is an “excuse” that just doesn’t wash. Kids should be able to use “grit” to transcend their impoverished circumstances and, you know, pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
A few years back I read Sendal Mullanaithan and Eldar Shafir’s excellent book “Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much.” The authors, who are, respectively, a behavioral economist and a psychologist, demonstrate in thought experiments how straitened economic circumstances restrict full and rational cognition in people of all ages. Since reading this book, I have followed the issue of poverty and cognition closely. In our schools there are few challenges more serious, more difficult to surmount educationally, and yet so easily remedied as childhood poverty.
So I’m glad to see we now have thoughtful adults making policy around this issue. As a society, we really do need to fix this once and for all.
Mark,
Jonathan Chait of New York magazine, a true believer in charter schools, recently criticized me for emphasizing that poverty is the root cause of poor academic performance. Richard Rothstein nailed this issue in his book “Class and Schools,” where he conclusively demonstrates the impact of poverty—not having food,shelter, medical care—on academic performance.
Thanks, Diane. This is an issue that is also personal for me: I’ve been poor (e.g. I was a migrant farm worker for the first few years I was out of high school), and I’ve been relatively comfortably middle class, and you already know which of those economic conditions was more conducive to clear thought and the ability to reason effectively. I’m tired of people like Jonathan Chait–who apparently came of age in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, a tony suburb of Detroit–who know nothing of what poor people deal with but nonetheless appoint themselves experts on the subject. Time for him and his ilk to sit back and listen for a change.
“and then you discover that the family consigns one child to an unheated, vermin-infested room in the basement, denying her dental care and often leaving her without food.”
I immediately thought of the great Ursula Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”.