Analysis

Concentrated Poverty and The Case for Promise Zones

In his post, “The Ghetto Is Public Policy,” Ta-Nehisi Coates, national correspondent at The Atlantic states, “The wealth gap is not a mistake. It is the logical outcome of policy and democratic will.” For decades, federal leaders invested in the stability of affluent, predominantly white communities, while giving localities the autonomy to neglect and exclude low-income communities and communities of color. Such practices included redlining, beginning in the 1930s, where banks were allowed to exclude African American communities from receiving home loans. Or following World War II, when many metropolitan regions saw highways rammed through many low-income, mostly African American communities, displacing thousands of residents and small businesses and ripping apart the fabric of long established neighborhoods. And then there was the federal government’s “Urban Renewal” effort of the 1950s and 1960s, which gave local governments and private developers free rein to develop downtowns and displace residents with no clear policy for relocation.  At best, residents were moved to public housing located in already segregated, poor neighborhoods with few resources.

Today, concentrated poverty persists, with many communities facing inferior housing, poor health outcomes, failing schools, inadequate public infrastructure, and few employment opportunities. A growing body of research shows that being raised in such high-poverty communities undermines the long-term life chances of children. For example, poverty has been shown to genetically age children, and living in communities exposed to violence impairs cognitive ability. Even when income is held constant, families living in areas of concentrated poverty are more likely to struggle to meet basic needs than their counterparts living in more affluent areas.

However, it is important to note that low-income people are not the only residents of high-poverty neighborhoods. According to research by Professor Patrick Sharkey of New York University, the average African American family making $100,000 a year lives in a more disadvantaged neighborhood than the average white family making $30,000 a year, revealing how past social policies continue to affect neighborhood choice. Sharkey explains that the same, mostly African American families have lived in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods over long periods of time and over multiple generations, limiting access to better opportunities. “Neighborhood poverty experienced a generation ago doesn’t disappear. It doesn’t become inconsequential. It lingers on to affect the next generation,” he explained.

The enduring effects of concentrated poverty require long-term, comprehensive strategies that will be experienced across generations.

It is clear that the federal government has a role to play in undoing the effects of past policies that contributed to these outcomes. Further, as research shows that income inequality and social mobility place a downward drag on national prosperity, the federal government has a vested interest in ensuring that all communities connect people with the opportunities critical to helping them succeed.

Federal and local efforts must move away from short-term investments, such as relocating a fraction of families to more prosperous communities, towards transforming communities in order to alter their trajectories. “When I’m asking for durable urban policy, I’m not asking for a unique commitment to low-income, nonwhite communities. I’m proposing that we extend the commitment and the massive investments that have been made in affluent, predominantly white communities and extend them to…communities across the country,” Sharkey explained.

This is why place-based strategies, such as the Promise Zones initiative, are so important. Such strategies involve policies and practices that take into account how a community—both the built environment and the social and economic opportunities available—impacts its residents. The intersection of place with poverty comes with unique challenges that require place-based strategies to complement our national investments to cut poverty and create greater economic opportunity.

The Promise Zones initiative is designed to revitalize high-poverty communities through comprehensive, evidence-based strategies and help local leaders navigate federal funding. Promise Zones designees receive priority access to federal resources to support job creation, increase economic security, expand educational opportunities, increase access to quality, affordable housing, and improve public safety. Equally important, the initiative pulls together lessons from the administration’s previous efforts to improve struggling communities and is serving as an opportunity to rethink how the federal government can be a more effective partner to communities facing barriers to upward mobility.

The enduring effects of concentrated poverty require long-term, comprehensive strategies that will be experienced across generations. The Promise Zones initiative has the potential to serve this role and finally extend the benefits of stable communities to all people.

 

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Analysis

We Have Blown a Huge Hole in the Safety Net

You can count on your fingers, and maybe a toe or two, the number of otherwise progressive public officials and policy experts inside the Beltway who want to talk about the gaping hole in our safety net for mothers and children.  Up to and including President Obama, the mainstream Democratic position on cash assistance for families with children is that we reformed welfare in 1996 and that the ensuing policy regime is a roaring success.

This is just plain wrong.

Lest I be immediately dismissed in what I am about to say (and the usual suspects will do so anyway), let me be clear that the main way to end poverty is jobs that result in a livable income, and the education necessary to get and keep those jobs.  The totality of strategies to reduce poverty also includes healthy communities and necessary services—including health and mental health services—child care, legal services, and more.  A discussion of welfare is not the same as a discussion of how to end poverty.

Whatever the facts were about the success of TANF in the flush times of the late 1990s...the recession exposed the utter bankruptcy of TANF as a public policy.

But one part of an antipoverty strategy is indeed a safety net.  And this is where people who should know better (or actually do) are averting their eyes.

Short history:  The old welfare system—Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC, which existed from 1935-1996—needed to be reformed.  It did not work hard enough at helping people get jobs and become self-sufficient.  There were 14.3 million people receiving it when President Clinton was elected and that’s too many.

In 1996, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) was enacted.  Just then, and quite unforeseen, the economy heated up and jobs became plentiful.   The welfare rolls plummeted and the number of never-employed single mothers obtaining jobs increased substantially.  But even then, because states had no legal obligation to grant benefits, about 2 out of 5 people who left welfare did not obtain jobs, and large numbers were turned away at the front door.

Beginning in 2001, the impressive numbers of single mothers at work began to go down, and now is nearly back to where it was before the 1996 law was passed.  But that didn’t mean that the TANF rolls went back up, because states did not extend benefits to those who were losing their jobs.  By the time the recession started, the TANF rolls were at 3.9 million.

TANF was absolutely useless as an antirecessionary tool.  Food stamps went up from reaching 26.3 million people to 48 million people, because there is a legal right to receive them.  TANF went from helping 3.9 million people to 4.4.million—and even reached fewer people during the recession in some states—because there is no legal right to assistance.

Here’s the bottom line: TANF is basically defunct in more than half the states and the percentage of children in poor families receiving cash assistance nationally has dropped from 68 percent to 27 percent.  In more than half the states, fewer than 20 percent of children living in poor families are receiving TANF.  Wyoming is the poster state.  About 600 people—4 percent of children living in poor families—receive cash aid in Wyoming.   Before 1996, with all of the faults in AFDC, the safety net at the bottom consisted of AFDC and food stamps combined.  The median income from welfare and food stamps combined was only half the poverty line, but there was a legal right to both.  No longer.

So, now 6 million people have incomes composed only of food stamps.  Stunning?  Who knew?  These are government figures and they have appeared on the front page of the New York Times.  A lot of people are averting their eyes.  Whatever the facts were about the success of TANF in the flush times of the late 1990s—and I think they weren’t so fact-based even then—the recession exposed the utter bankruptcy of TANF as a public policy.

This is enormously frustrating.  The minute the government gives someone a nickel we hear a chorus of aversion to handouts, a cacophony of complaints that these are people who do not want to work, a concert of disapproval of the character of anyone who would accept cash help (and now the disapproval extends to anyone receiving food stamps).

Of course we want to have a minimum number of people receiving cash assistance.  Of course we want to help mothers receiving TANF find work—and that help has to include child care assistance and health care coverage.  And we not only want to do those things well, which is not the case now, but we also need a safety net that is responsive to the individual problems and needs of the families it serves.  A properly designed cash assistance program for families with children would take into account the availability of work as well as the fact that recipients vary in their capacity to work.

It’s past time to acknowledge that we have blown a huge hole in our national safety net for the very most needy among us.  Shame on us.

 

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Analysis

Does Head Start Work? Wrong Question

It’s a tired debate born of selective reading and contrarian sound bites: Does Head Start work?

The research shows that it clearly does.  Decades of studies, including the most recent Head Start Impact Study, have found that at the end of Head Start, prior to kindergarten, the program shows wide-ranging positive effects on children and families from language and pre-reading abilities to parenting skills.  And even though Head Start dates back to 1965, the latest research has proven its creators right about many basic principles.

Since its inception, Head Start’s core has been a comprehensive approach to high-quality early education and a focus on the whole child—recognizing the importance of social, emotional, physical and cognitive development. Head Start children receive medical and developmental screenings and subsequent treatment for identified concerns. They receive regular medical and dental care. And their families receive parenting education, health education and support services connecting them to education and jobs. Current research tells us that this full array of services is what early education programs should offer to have a positive effect on vulnerable children.

Whether Head Start works isn’t close to the right question. Instead, we should ask why only a fraction of eligible children are being served.

But it’s not just the comprehensive approach that makes Head Start a leader.  Head Start’s rigorous quality standards and monitoring processes, commitment to serving children with disabilities, and leadership in serving children from diverse backgrounds all make it a model of a high-quality program and a foundational component of our early learning system.

Head Start’s history of evaluation, innovation, and self-improvement is just as extraordinary. It has been the subject of intensive research for five decades and much of what has been learned has been incorporated into the program through quality improvement.

Head Start has evolved over time in various ways to meet families’ needs for full-day or year-round programs or to respond to local community needs with innovative models. Program standards, monitoring, and professional development have all been revised based on research and evaluation. Most notably, the 2007 Congressional reauthorization of Head Start increased the focus on school readiness for children and established higher educational requirements for teachers. New assessment procedures require a review of teacher-child interactions, a critical component of any early education experience.

Drawing on this history, researchers have taken a careful look at what about Head Start works and what can be improved based on the findings of the recent national impact study and the broader Head Start research.

So why is there any debate at all regarding the effectiveness of Head Start?

The answer is simple—the impact study has been selectively mined for talking points.  The study found that right after leaving Head Start, children did better than their peers. It also found cognitive gains disappeared during the early elementary years. There are many possible reasons, including uneven quality in Head Start programs, uneven quality in elementary schools that poor children enter after Head Start, and the need for higher-intensity interventions than the 9-month Head Start program tested in the study. There is also much more to learn about how to sustain immediate gains for poor children over time.

Importantly, the study results do not necessarily mean that children won’t benefit later from Head Start. A robust body of research finds that while children in Head Start and other high-quality early education programs may lose immediate gains, they still experience improved outcomes later in life.  This is important:  the large payoffs to early education that researchers have found for high-quality programs in the form of increased education, employment, and earnings can happen even when there is no immediate evidence that children are doing better in school. Here too, we have more to learn.

As we deepen our understanding of the complexities of high-quality early education and its impacts, Head Start should continue its legacy of continuous quality improvement to respond to the needs of poor children. As with any program intended to advance outcomes for our children, we should learn and adapt as new research expands our knowledge base. But labeling the intervention a failure based on one study is neither sensible nor advantageous to preparing poor children for school, a goal that benefits everyone in the country.

But the biggest problem with the simplistic talking points framing the Head Start debate isn’t a selective reading of the research.  It is the distraction from what matters most:  the persistence of child poverty, which affects a quarter of our youngest children. The immediate impacts of Head Start are clear. We shouldn’t ignore or reject decades of reputable research.  Whether Head Start works isn’t close to the right question.  Instead, we should ask why only a fraction of eligible children are being served. Why, when we know what works, can we not make a significant investment to put a generation of young children in poverty on a better and brighter path?

It is our public will that we must question.

 

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Analysis

Reinvesting in Children 60 Years After Brown

On May 17, we celebrated the anniversary of a turning point in American education – a commemoration of the end – or so we hoped – of “separate but equal.” But even 60 years after the landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, disparities in educational opportunities throughout our country continue to result in vast economic inequalities.

On nearly every indicator that we use in the United States to measure progress, people of color are falling further behind. And it starts early.

A recent report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, “Race for Results: Building a Path to Opportunity for All Children,” provides a national and state scorecard for how we are providing opportunities for children of color, using 12 indicators, such as percentage of children enrolled in preschool, high-schoolers who graduate on time, and number of children who live in low-poverty areas. There isn’t one minority group that’s meeting all of these benchmarks, and even middle-class families of color have a very tenuous hold on their economic status.

In addition, the recent data from the Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection show that we are exacerbating these disparities by essentially sending our children of color to schools that are not providing them with a high-quality education. For many of our children, schools become a pipeline into the criminal justice system. According to the data, Black students are suspended at much higher rates than White students, and the problem has become so pervasive and insidious that it extends to preschool. Despite representing just 18 percent of preschool children, Black children make up nearly half of all out-of-school suspensions in preschool.

This school-to-prison pipeline – one in which African Americans and Latinos are grossly over-represented – is in stark contrast to their under-representation in the higher education system, where the non-Hispanic White population is well ahead of other groups in ultimately attaining a college degree or more.

The economic inequalities we see resulting from these educational inequalities are frightening. The unemployment data released earlier this month by the Department of Labor – revealing continued job growth but stagnant wages – still show that Black and Brown people are having the hardest time riding out this lengthy economic recovery. The official unemployment rate for African Americans is more than double the unemployment rate for non-Hispanic Whites. The rate for Hispanics is lagging behind, too.

When the numbers of under-employed and discouraged workers are factored in, the crisis is even more severe for workers from every background.

With the foreclosure crisis, the financial crash, and the great recession, the inequalities of wealth have actually increased. As the Urban Institute reports, Non-Hispanic White families before the recession had about four times the wealth as non-White families, a figure that jumped to six times by 2010. Hispanic families lost 44 percent of their wealth – and Black families lost 31 percent of theirs – between 2007 and 2010. By contrast, White families lost just 11 percent of their wealth over the same period.

This broadening racial wealth gap is scary, as is the school-to-prison pipeline, and it won’t be solved overnight. But we can start by reinvesting in our nation’s children, who all deserve equal access to a quality education – one that doesn’t leave their economic future imperiled. The federal government has a number of options that it can pursue to address this crisis, including taking on a more robust role in guaranteeing the right to education; greater and more equitable investment of resources in the public school system; and tougher enforcement of existing civil rights laws. Taken together, such actions would do much to improve the lives of our children, both now and in the future.

Sixty years after Brown, it’s the least we can do.

 

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Analysis

‘Ain’t Got No Wiggle Room’

Poverty is everywhere. More than one in three Americans—106 million people—live below or perilously close to the federal poverty line. If you pick up a newspaper or magazine, turn on the radio or flip on the television, there are countless stories about poverty and income inequality. Politicians on both sides of the aisle are staking their claims to a national anti-poverty agenda. Republican presidential hopefuls like Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio have suddenly taken up the issue. And six long years after the Great Recession, Democrats have finally embraced raising the minimum wage. The conversation about poverty is pervasive.

Yet, poverty is nowhere. The men, women and children who are part of the 106 million striving and struggling Americans are invisible and voiceless. They are invisible because the debate about poverty is swirling around them but does not actually include them. They are invisible because they are not recognized as people but rather as a condition or a problem. They are blamed rather than empowered. They are voiceless because they are locked out of the corridors of power where conversations about poverty are happening. At best, their stories serve as useful anecdotes that add color to the harrowing statistics.

It’s past time for people who are poor to tell their own stories so that we can then have a real conversation about what actually contributes to economic success or failure in America.

Pina Orsillo Belgrano has one of these low wage jobs that keeps her struggling. Pina, 58, is a single mother in Seattle who worked as a restaurateur, travel agent and a real estate agent in 2008 until the economy tanked and she lost those jobs. The only job Pina could find was a $12 an hour job in the hotel industry. Pina does not earn enough money to protect her home from being foreclosed.

Pina is unfortunately among the millions of people living in a society where the economy no longer allows them to afford the basics. We have the answers to solve these problems but there is a deep misalignment of power in our society that is preventing us from seeing it and getting there. That must be our north star; building power among people who don’t have it.

And that’s why the Center for Community Change Action (CCCA) is rooting our economic justice campaign in conversations with people who are living on the brink so we can hear how they define their situation and how we can make our economy fairer for everyone.

There are positive signs.  The WASH New York campaign clearly demonstrated the effectiveness of building a movement. After more than a decade of grassroots organizing, the New York carwash campaign helped carwash workers, who are paid less than minimum wage with no additional pay for overtime, fight their way out of poverty. These workers, with the strong support of community organizations, joined together to demand better pay and working conditions.

No one thought they had a chance. The owners are too big, too spread out, and there are too many of them, the workers were told.

These “carwasheros” didn’t let the naysayers stand in their way. Because of their efforts, they now have higher wages, increased job security, posted job schedules and paid leave. They built a movement and they won.

Luis Rosales, who worked at one of the big car washes in Queens for more than five years said, “This is going to be a great change for our car wash. More importantly, we were able to show other workers that it makes sense to fight and win what seemed impossible.”

And now that the city of Seattle has a compromise deal to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, the highest minimum wage in the nation, people like Pina will earn more. With the extra money, Pina will be able to meet the income requirements to receive a loan modification so she can stay in her home.

CCCA is working with local partner organizations to raise the quality of jobs (including wages, benefits, and working conditions); ensure that low-income workers and job seekers have a fair shot at those jobs; and reduce barriers to employment that currently deny opportunities for people who have been incarcerated.

Sounds too lofty? Look at what people in America have accomplished when they banded together: equal rights for women, civil rights, child labor laws, voting rights.

In Youngstown, Ohio—a city that was hard hit by the recession and has been battling to come back ever since—I heard one of the best summaries of why we need this movement for good jobs right now. An African American man, Willis, said, “That’s poverty to me…where you ain’t got no wiggle room to enjoy life.”

The rich shouldn’t be the only ones with wiggle room. That’s why we’re building a movement with Willis, with Luis, with Pina. This is the only way we will create an economy that is just and fair for all Americans—especially for those who are paid less than what it takes to get by. And it’s the only way poverty will truly be nowhere.

 

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