Nikhil Goyal has written an alarming book about the effects of poverty on young people. His book Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty documents the lives of three teenagers in Philadelphia, all of whom live in poverty.
The book is an implicit rebuke of the “reformers” who insisted that schools were the root cause of inequality, not poverty. They liked to say, “fix schools, and that will fix poverty.”
Goyal describes the obstacles in these young people’s lives, and it’s clear that the “reformers” had it backwards.
A recent review by Julia Craven in The Washington Post raves about the book.
Each of the three protagonists in sociologist Nikhil Goyal’s new book, “Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty,” is navigating a pivotal juncture: adolescence, that unique and universally exhausting stage of human development when one moment can sometimes change the trajectory of life. For Ryan Rivera, that moment is being among a group of preteen boys who set fire to a trash can near their middle school’s atrium, a childish mistake that cast him into the school-to-prison pipeline. Corem Coreano, who came out as queer, and then changed their name and pronouns, ultimately made the difficult choice to leave home because of their mother’s refusal to leave an abusive relationship. And Giancarlos Rodriguez was — puzzlingly — thrown out of Philadelphia’s education system after fighting to protect his and his peers’ future by leading student walkouts to protest school closures and educational budget cuts.
Rooted in almost a decade of reporting, “Live to See the Day” is a sweeping indictment of poverty, America’s educational system, and how comfortably they both interact with the criminal justice system to upend the lives of young people and underprivileged families of color. All three protagonists hail from Kensington, an impoverished neighborhood in North Philadelphia.
According to Goyal, babies born with an address in Kensington aren’t expected to live beyond their 71st birthday — a staggering 17 years less than children born to families in Society Hill, less than four miles away.
A chunk of the book is spent world-building so readers can grasp the muddy terrain these children navigate, and Goyal does so by layering social systems atop one another so readers can draw connections. As Goyal explains it, underfunded public schools are at the heart of the issue. Schools are governed by racist educational policies that push students into the criminal system through the use of metal detectors, zero-tolerance rules and temperamental resource officers. Children leave the schoolyard and return home to families drowning because of crippling poverty, food insecurity, chronic joblessness, inequitable access to physical and mental health care, domestic violence, evictions, and addiction. In their social interactions, anything perceived as “soft” — whether it be snitching or queerness — doesn’t align with survival.
Goyal, who is on the staff of Senator Bernie Sanders, makes clear why programs like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top were destined to fail. They ignored the conditions in which young people live. Evaluating their teachers by test scores, firing them, closing their schools, turning their schools over to entrepreneurs and corporate chains do nothing to change their lives.
“Schools are governed by racist educational policies that push students into the criminal system through the use of metal detectors, zero-tolerance rules and temperamental resource officers.”
“In their social interactions, anything perceived as “soft” — whether it be snitching or queerness — doesn’t align with survival.”
My son attended a fairly high-poverty middle school for one year. The bullying was done by a small minority of students, but it was rampant and shocking, included physical assaults on two of my son’s friends—a boy with an untreated stutter (which is a really depressing thing to see), and a boy perceived to be effeminate. The principal consistently minimized the violence. This is the sh!t kids in high-poverty schools endure daily while the more fortunate of us opine about the “school-to-prison pipeline.”
I wish it had been a “zero tolerance” school, instead of a restorative justice school. But thank god for the metal detectors—weapons were routinely confiscated. Many (most?) of those weapons were probably for self-defense.
Then it seems like Democrats would want to continue their signature achievement of “lifting 50% of children out of poverty” by continuing the child tax credits. Since those credits expired those children have fallen back into poverty and according to some studies they are now worse off.
I agree with you about the child tax credits, but it was the Republicans who got the final say in getting rid of those credits.
LisaM, the Child Tax Credit was a huge success in reducing child poverty. The Biden administration fought to keep it, but Republicans blocked it. As I recall, they were joined by Senator Joe Manchin, who represents a state with high levels of poverty.
Philadelphia is now the poorest major city in America. The feckless Democratic leadership has done little to address poverty in the city or attract new businesses.
I grew up in Kensington when it was a mostly white, working class neighborhood. While it was never a posh area, it was largely safe, clean and the schools were well funded and supported by the city. Kensington used to be an industrial hub. More than fifty years ago the area shifted when the textile mills closed, and nothing took their place to provide residents with economic stability. My brother, myself and a few others attended a public magnet school where students were prepared to attend college or nursing school. For those that remained in Kensington, it has been a downward spiral of drugs and violence. Kensington Avenue, which used to be a vibrant shopping area lined with local businesses, is now an open air drug market that attracts hardcore drug addicts from all over. The latest drug is some type of veterinary drug, Xylazine, that turns people into ‘zombies’ and damages the skin. Other than destroying the temporary, squatters’ encampments, the city has largely ignored the problem.
It is estimated that it would cost more than a billion dollars to seriously deal with the drug addicts and the clean up of the area. Lot of people stop to film the area like filming animals in the zoo, but few have offered any relief or real solutions to the problem. Kensington is a tragic environment for those that remain there. What has happened there is heart breaking. You can find numerous videos like this on-line. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzEG2-kemJg
If you took maybe 1/3 of what you see in that video, it would be like the block I live on. But it’s trending worse.
I don’t know if it’s from tranq or just untreated infections (because I’ve seen stuff like this for years before tranq showed up), but many of the people out there have what looks like rotting flesh. Some are street homeless, but interestingly most aren’t. Most come early in the morning, probably from shelters in other neighborhoods—it’s like a drug commute—and they stay all day until around 9:30 pm, as the shelter curfews approach.
All day, every day, you have what I call the “benders” (people bent over at the waist for long periods of time, hands almost but not quite touching the ground), people passed out, people smoking and injecting in the open, people defecating, addicts arguing or screaming (there’s a lot of overlap with severe mental illness). You’ve also got the dead-eyed dealers, who hang out further down the block with their friends and girlfriends—super brazen stuff that I don’t remember being so visible anywhere in the city in the 25 years I’ve lived here.
This is all mind-bending to anyone who visits me. And it’s just a fraction of the nightmare that you see in those videos of Kensington.
!!!!!
Also, you can buy fentanyl in injectable form (the dealers sell loaded syringes) for $10. Fentanyl pills go for a few bucks.
There are also working families that cannot afford to move, and they are raising children in this awful environment, which I am sure, is what the book examines.
Poverty is also a school to military pipeline. The military offers an escape from poverty. All they have to do, if they qualify, is give up their freedom to the military for 20 years or more and be willing to die, gambling they will survive with at least their physical body intact if not their mental health.
Fewer young people are eligible for the military because of drugs, arrest records and obesity.
It doesn’t take genius to figure out that poverty matters and that kids can’t always overcome it by studying. That Education Deformers never understood this says a lot about them: first, they are either too stupid to figure out why or willfully ignorant because they don’t want to entertain ideas contrary to their classical liberal or neoliberal or libertarian ideologies. The second case is particularly egregious because it is so smug, so self-righteous, so disgustingly from a place of privilege. Throw a stick at CPAC, at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, at the Hoover Institute, at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation–at almost any “conservative” organization.
It is a curiosity that “reformers” like Klein, Rhee, Kopp, etc. never thought about root causes. It was much cheaper to blame schools and teachers than to do anything about poverty. When the results are negative, they never admit failure.
Exactly
Ed-reformers pander to TP/MAGA anti-govt zealots [which now have a stranglehold on the Republican party]. Blaming public schools for social failures is just the latest flavor of blaming govt for social failures.
The Ed/reformers are facitating the work of MAGA, Koch, DeVos, ALEC, etc in privatizing what belongs to the public.
I grew up in the ’50s and ’60s when education could actually change the trajectory of lives, and it still can to a lesser degree. A college degree, particularly for women in those days, wasn’t common. It was valued, and it didn’t cost what it does for young people today. It did allow me to have a stable, meaningful career that I otherwise never would have had. Had I attended the local technical high school, I most likely would have become a secretary or hairdresser, and neither was what I wanted. This was particularly true for those coming from a blue collar family.
Totally agree. This is why education through college should be free to all.
However, what I am talking about is the failure of the Education Deform crowd to understand Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. If a kid’s Mom is a crack-addicted prostitute, and she and the kid are both regularly beaten by her boyfriend/pimp, and if he takes almost everything she makes, leaving barely enough food in the house to sustain the child’s life, then that kids is not going to make learning how to multiply fractions or reading A Bridge to Terabithia a huge priority. It’s breathtaking that the Deformers do not understand this.
Students that do not have primary needs met have a hard time focusing on a secondary need like education. It is part of the rationale for free and reduced priced lunches.
exactly
“They ignored the conditions in which young people live.”
Yup. This, the invalidity of the state standardized tests, and the tendency to distort curricula and pedagogy to make it test preppy are the three cardinal sins of the Education “Reform” movement.
And Bill Gates, the freaking clueless moron, will never become self reflective or open enough to figure this out.
What has all the disruption and dramatic charter school expansion done for the young people in Kensington and elsewhere in Philly? They have improved education very little except for a few students, and the diversion of funds has hurt the city schools tremendously.
amen
I frequent the msn news platform, which has a host of mostly-conservative commenters [for the same reason I often watch CSPAN’s a.m. call-in show “Washington Journal” – to try to understand how JQPublic-conservative “thinks.”] Can’t tell you how many report that xyz big [poor] urban district near them spends a lot more per-pupil than other districts, yet students are “still failing.” They never look at NEAP TUDA results, and know zilch about % graduating, what % go on to college etc. Just go by whatever their news source tells them about annual state-stdzd test scores.
Looking wouldn’t help much. Those NAEP urban district results were basically flat over the fourteen-year period from 2005 to 2019. But yeah, these “journalists” don’t look very deeply, do they?