U.S. Poverty Rates Hit 50-Year high

Obama promised change, and boy did he deliver. Change we haven't seen in nearly fifty years.

At LAT, "U.S. poverty totals hit a 50-year high":

Census Bureau's grim statistics show recession's lingering effects, as young adults move back home and 1 million more Americans go without health insurance.

Reporting from Washington — In a grim portrait of a nation in economic turmoil, the government reported that the number of people living in poverty last year surged to 46.2 million — the most in at least half a century — as 1 million more Americans went without health insurance and household incomes fell sharply.

The poverty rate for all Americans rose in 2010 for the third consecutive year, matching the 15.1% figure in 1993 and pushing many more young adults to double up or return to their parents' home to avoid joining the ranks of the poor.

Taken together, the annual income and poverty snapshot released Tuesday by the U.S. Census Bureau underscored how the recession is casting a long shadow well after its official end in June 2009.

Continue reading.

Obama 'Black Mascot' of Wall Street

I saw this earlier, but William Jacobson's covered it for the Saturday night race card, "Progressives Devouring Their Own Tail":

More at West's interview with Truthdig:

“We have got to attempt to tell the truth, and that truth is painful” ... “It is a truth that is against the thick lies of the mainstream. In telling that truth we become so maladjusted to the prevailing injustice that the Democratic Party, more and more, is not just milquetoast and spineless, as it was before, but thoroughly complicitous with some of the worst things in the American empire. I don’t think in good conscience I could tell anybody to vote for Obama. If it turns out in the end that we have a crypto-fascist movement and the only thing standing between us and fascism is Barack Obama, then we have to put our foot on the brake. But we’ve got to think seriously of third-party candidates, third formations, third parties.”

I'm just laughing at how Obama suckered these idiots. I don't care about the empire bull, but I've long hoped that Obama would genuinely work to help the disadvantaged, and he's done jack as far as I'm concerned, especially on the school choice issue. What a waste of opportunity.

RELATED: At Saberpoint, "My Impression of CORNEL WEST (Photoshop)."

'Fix the Schools' @ Reason.tv

Nick Gillespie and Co. are putting on some really good programs. Note the comments of Lyman Millard of the Citizens' Academy, at about 7:05 minutes: "We're trying to save children's lives here."

I've been thinking so much about this, as I see more and more kids with deep, even crushing, educational needs at my college. Things have not been getting better, and I've been teaching at LBCC for ten years. Robert Stacy McCain, in response to my recent piece on school reform, wrote an essay at Hot Air: "The Failure of School Reform." It's powerful. The happy medium for me is somewhere (somehow) between the kind of caring and autonomy at the charter schools and the fundamental attention to students (that only parents can give) discussed at Stacy's essay. Not all families can homeschool their kids. But we as a society have to find a way to break the organized labor/ big union indifference to the needs of today's youth. Remember my entry on Providence St. Mel as well, "'The Providence Effect': Astonishing Educational Achievement, 'The Way It Should Be Done'.'

Seeing. Feeling. 'Precious'

I saw 'Precious' today. I don't want to give the story away, because I hope all of my readers take time to see this film. This is the kind of social commentary that's needed, even though the movie's set in 1987. Here's a portion from the Los Angeles Times' review, from Betsy Sharkey:

In a no-child-left-behind world, Precious was lost long before she could be left. No self-esteem to speak of, she tries for invisibility. At school it's easier, no one is really interested. At home, she's got a soul-destroying nightmare of a mother who has made Precious her project. Played to fearless and godless perfection by Mo'Nique, Mary spends her days in front of the TV while hurling a steady stream of invective -- along with the occasional frying pan -- in her daughter's direction.

Hope should not exist in all that despair, but Precious turns out to be an odds-defying storm that batters the emotions, shakes the soul and still manages to put a silver lining on the blackest of clouds in ways you might not have thought possible.

When the school counselor discovers Precious is pregnant, the story begins its painful descent into the world of America's underclass. There is no safety net for Precious -- her family, social services and the educational system have all failed her.

You better RTWT to get the full details, but I can say this movie tugged at me personally. (I can say ...) Precious is raped and it's graphic at the film. But it's the film's pain that comes closest to where I'm coming from. My father was abusive in the way Precious' mom is abusive. It's an inexplicable soul-grind of a life, and if you feel trapped, it's either those flights of fantasy that save you (Precious daydreams to take her away) or it's thoughts of an early demise by one's own hand. My dad beat me with a belt when I was a small child (for small things, like not finishing my chores). But it was when I was grown that he nearly beat me down, berating me for my inadequacies, for not being the "man" he was, and for being my mother's favorite (and hence the cause of my parents' divorce). But what really tugged at me was the pigs feet. Yep, Precious cooks. In fact, when she starts at the alternative school her teacher goes around the room asking for introductions, and each girl is asked to say something positive about themselves. "What do you do well?", the teacher asks Precious. She shakes her head, nothing. Then pressed, she says, "I can cook." And boy can she. And that's the thing. Boy could my dad cook. Dinner time was like heaven around that house (my dad's), and when I see Precious cooking up that soul food it takes me back to family's heritage. That's a black thing that I no longer have. I never could cook that well (and I prefer hamhocks to pig's feet anyway). But I suspect there's something special about abuse in the black family. (There's always abuse, but culture matters, and I think inner-city black poverty is distinctive.) We weren't poor growing up in my house, but my dad was basically orphaned at 12 years-old. He bore that pain his entire life, ultimately taking it out on me - the only male child - and driving my mother away in divorce after about 20 years of marriage.

But there's something else. It's the poverty, which I've never experienced. Precious' mom is a welfare queen. She's dishonest and milking the system. And when you watch the film's conclusion you'll be devastated, practically assaulted by the fact that such truly demonic indifference to the welfare of a child is possible.

If folks have thought about my writing, and my interests, a lot of the things I write about and rehash are things that have intrigued me all my life, things that I've needed to explain. Never growing up in the inner city itself, but being raised with cultural blackness, is something that's forever a shaper of identity. But I suppose my dad had assets the truly poor and disadvantaged have never had (he was educated at NYU), and so I've had benefits that don't often end up making it downtown. If more Americans really understood what was happening, if they had a clue to these pathologies, then perhaps we'd spend more time focusing on what works (education and networks of private support, not welfare). If folks remember my report on 'The Providence Effect,' you'll know what I'm saying. We've got to do something in this country. As bad as Precious had it, she's gonna make it out. But see the film to know exactly what I'm saying.

*******

ADDENDUM: Since I noted my abusive dad, I should probably indicate that if you've seen 'Affliction', well, that's my story without the poverty and pig's feet. I'm lucky I didn't kill my old man.

'The Providence Effect': Astonishing Educational Achievement, 'The Way It Should Be Done'

I took my oldest son to Santa Monica last night to see The Providence Effect. The movie is playing this week at Laemmle's Monica 4-Plex (the next block down from the 3rd Street Promenade). Kenneth Turan's review is here. And note this:

The person behind this heartening achievement is the school's president, Paul Adams III, a formidably charismatic individual who is determined to change the culture of American education, to break the cycle of poverty and give poor children the same opportunities as wealthy ones.

A veteran of the civil rights movement, Adams started at Providence St. Mel as a guidance counselor.

When the Chicago Archdiocese threatened to close the institution, he began a fundraising movement that enabled him to buy the building, take the school private, and run it so successfully that President Reagan came to visit. Twice.

Adams says he runs the school the old-fashioned way. Discipline is key for him; he and his staff enforce zero tolerance for drugs. Without discipline, he says, you can't get a student's attention.

Once that attention is assured, Adams counts on his inspired faculty to excite the kids about learning, and judging by the interviews with current and former students and glimpses inside selected classrooms, the method seems to work.

President Reagan's at 1:45 at the trailer above. He praises the students with open arms, exhorting them in triumph, "This is the way it should be done." To see him there, speaking to that school -- an all black school during the 1980s when the social welfare state had reached epic proportion, and when poverty and crime had destroyed the inner-cities -- is incredibly uplifting.

And what struck me, from the perspective of a teacher, was the no BS approach to instruction. There's no sign of progressive education throughout the entire film (and thus no mind-crushing leftist indocrtination). It's straight learning, with in-your-face instructors and administrators who spend time with the kids and in the classroom. Things go so well it seemed almost antiseptic. But as the early minutes of the film show, Chicago had been overrun by gang violence and much of the Westside had been razed in a far-from-finished scheme of urban redevelopment. Interviews with graduates -- kids who grew up to be doctors and bankers, etc. -- illustrated that the school was truly a life-saving institution, and education became the central focus of the child and the child's family.

The Providence Effect website is here. The Providence St. Mel school website is here. The school boasts a 100 percent college entrance acceptance rate, and the homepage states that "The School That Refused to Die -- Now a Model for Urban Education."

And I was thinking exactly that after learning of the death of Derrion Albert in Chicago this week. The Los Angeles Times has a report, "Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan Attend Chicago Teen's Funeral." And from the Chicago Tribune, "Derrion Albert Funeral: There Is No Simple Fix For Problems, Pastor Says; Parents Urged to Reclaim Their Children, City Urged to Educate Kids Closer to Home":

In death, the 16-year-old became the latest high-profile name on the long list of young Chicagoans who have died violently. The teen's brutal beating with two-by-fours was recorded Sept. 24. The attack captured the nation's attention and elicited a response from the White House.

President Barack Obama is sending Attorney General Eric Holder and Education Secretary Arne Duncan to Chicago this week in the wake of the fatal beating. Obama's spokesman has indicated the administration is preparing an initiative to address the national issues of youth crime and violence.

It's almost tragic that the president's not spending time on these issues -- the crisis in American education -- rather than the year-long ObamaCare fiasco. This is the modern equivalent of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. And while I'm tempted to say something like "I can't see how the president has ignored these issues," that's not true. I know exactly how. The corrupt Cook County Democratic Party machine, thoroughly infiltrated with crooked cronies, all the way down to union hacks, progressive education activists, and community organizing thugs, has consigned to city's poor to perpetual poverty. Michelle Malkin's book, Culture of Corruption, discusses how Michelle Obama milked her connections to lucrative jobs while crying racism all the way to the top. These people are a joke, and the Democratic political establishment is the last entity that's going to solve the crisis of the city's -- and America's -- urban poor.

That's why seeing Reagan in the film was so riveting for me last night. President Reagan was excoriated by the black community in the 1980s for cutting welfare programs, but it's going to be conservatives with the vision to match Reagan's who will lift the hope for America's youth again. And it's going to be the traditional educational methods found at Providence St. Mel that will be the vehicle for greater advancement for those now held back by institutional malfeasance and progressive political corruption.

See also, WitnessLA "The Providence Effect: A Murder & An Answer." There's an interview there with Paul Allen, and this part illustrates my point:

WLA: With all your success, you must have a lot of people coming to you from the Chicago Public School system wanting advice as to how what you’ve done can be replicated in a public school setting.

PA: Actually no one has come

WLA: What do you mean no one? Like not one person from the Chicago School District has come to visit St. Mel’s?

PA: Never. Not one.

WLA: You’re kidding. I’m sorry to press this, but not one as in zero people?

PA: Zero.

WLA: Wow. That is completely nuts.

PA: I think so.

See what I mean?

Escaping Concentrated Poverty

William Julius Wilson, a sociologist at Harvard University, and one of the nation's premier experts on black poverty, has a new lead article at Political Science Quartery, "The Political and Economic Forces Shaping Concentrated Poverty." Here's a snippet from the introduction:

If television cameras had focused on the urban poor in New Orleans, or in any inner-city ghetto, before Katrina, I believe that the initial reaction to descriptions of poverty and poverty concentration would have been unsympathetic. Public opinion polls in the United States routinely reflect the notion that people are poor and jobless because of their own shortcomings or inadequacies. In other words, few people would have reflected on how the larger forces in society adversely affect the inner-city poor: segregation, discrimination, a lack of economic opportunity, failing public schools. However, because Katrina was clearly a natural disaster that was beyond the control of the inner-city poor, Americans were much more sympathetic. In a sense, Katrina turned out to be something of a cruel natural experiment, wherein better-off Americans could readily see the effects of racial isolation and chronic economic subordination.

Despite the lack of national public awareness of the problems of the urban poor prior to Katrina, social scientists have rightly devoted considerable attention to concentrated poverty, because it magnifies the problems associated with poverty in general: joblessness, crime, delinquency, drug trafficking, broken families, and dysfunctional schools. Neighborhoods of highly concentrated poverty are seen as dangerous, and therefore they become isolated, socially and economically, as people go out of their way to avoid them.

In this article, I provide a framework for understanding the emergence and persistence of concentrated urban poverty. I pay particular attention to poor inner-city black neighborhoods, which have the highest levels of concentrated poverty.

The article is brief for a research manuscript, so readers ought not feel overwhelmed. There's little academic jargon, and no big overarching theory.

Unfortunately, while Wilson's analysis of the structural causes of concentrated poverty are reasonably hypothesized, his recommendations for public policy are not much different than those offered by the Democratic Party under Great Society liberalism in the 1960s. Wilson's right that tight labor market's provide opportunity and upward mobility for the "truly disadvantaged." Yet, a shift away from conservative growth policies to statist public assistance approaches (a key part of Wilson's plan) will only further entrench the underclass Wilson so much wants to help. We need robust economic growth and avenues for people to get up and out of the inner cities. Urban renewal's a fine goal (something that seems central to Wilson's agenda), but alleviating poverty is entirely possible in the absence of restoration of robust inner cities. Combining these goals seems to naturally assume that living in the nation's urban cores is the exclusive residence pattern for the traditional poor and minorities. But I can't imagine improved futures for society's worst off if urban spatial assignment in a big-government regime of traditional welfare state provision is offered as a "new" paradigm for a problem that's as old as industrialization.

Facts on Teen Pregnancy

My commenter Tim is back, and he raised a ruckus yesterday about my post on teenage sexual abstinence.

Tim says: "Turns out Mississippi has the highest teen pregnancy rates, while New England has the lowest." He also argues that "the top ten states for teen pregnancies are all red states"; and he questions my response that minorities are more likely to become pregnant. Tim thus holds, oddly, that partisanship rather than income demographics is the key to understanding the issue.

Well it turns out that Robert Stacy McCain's written an entry on this, "Teen Pregnancy: Fact vs. Spin":

The Associated Press:

Mississippi now has the nation's highest teen birth rate, displacing Texas and New Mexico for that lamentable title, a new federal report says ....

The three states have large proportions of black and Hispanic teenagers — groups that traditionally have higher birth rates, experts noted.

Indeed, and if you take a little time to examine the actual CDC report, what you find is that the birth rate (births per 1,000) for females 15-19 breaks down like this:

White.........26.6
Black..........63.7
Hispanic....83.0

Ergo, states where blacks and Hispanics constitute a large proportion of the 15-19 population will tend to have high rates of teen pregnancy. Furthermore, the category "Hispanic" encompasses many nationalities, with varying rates of teen pregnancy, so that for instance, those of Mexican origin have a teen birth rate of 92.9, while Puerto Ricans have a teen birth rate of 69.3.

There's more at the link.

My question to Tim: Does partisanship correlate with low intelligence?

Gap Year is New High School Elective

I wanted to share with readers this article on the "gap year" for high school graduates, from the Wall Street Journal. It turns out that colleges are encouraging more and more students to take a year off from school, to travel and get work experience. The time away from intensive study serves as a refresher and a primer on life in the "real world."

What struck me about the article is how the gap year seems, frankly, like a privilege of the affluent, and that was just after reading the introduction:

Like many motivated, focused high-school students, Lillian Kivel had worked hard academically and in community service in hopes that her efforts would win her acceptance into a good college. It did. Trouble was, Ms. Kivel's focus was much less clear when she had to decide which college to attend -- the Boston-area senior had applied to 38 schools because her interests were so varied.

At the suggestion of friends, Ms. Kivel decided to take a gap year -- a year outside of academia between high-school graduation and college matriculation. It wasn't rest and relaxation that Ms. Kivel sought, but rather an opportunity to gain life experience and focus her goals. Gappers, as they're called, typically feel that taking a year off will give them a head start in college -- and life. "I [have] the opportunity to explore my interests, like medicine and China, outside the classroom," she says.

Ms. Kivel eventually decided to attend Harvard College, but deferred entrance until fall 2009. Ms. Kivel lived at home this fall and interned at the Boston branch of Partners of Health, a global health outreach nonprofit. She's also serving as a legislative aide in the Massachusetts Statehouse. And she's auditing at anthropology class at Harvard.

To fill her spring months, Ms. Kivel turned to gap-year consultant Holly Bull, president of Interim Programs, to help her sift through more than 100 different programs in China. Ms. Kivel will live with a host family in Shanghai, study Chinese language, history and culture in a classroom setting, and teach English to children. "I have gained so much by ... becoming more responsible and independent [and] exploring my interests," Ms. Kivel says.

Ms. Kivel's example is probably pretty typical for ambitious and enterprising middle class kids. I would expect my oldest son, who is now in 7th grade, to be seeking counseling on his college choices when he gets to that point, not the least of which from myself.

But actually I thought of my students at my college. Community college is so diverse, economically as well as ethnically. The idea of being accepted to an elite East Coast university, and have the chance to postpone matriculation for a year for the opportunity to travel to China, is an extreme luxury at minumum for the majority of students who attend my classes.

Ms. Kivel is expected to spend $12,000 to fund the Shanghai semester, which she'll finance from her earnings and from her parents' contributions. The article notes that financial aid and scholarships are available for gap year opportunities, but the process of research and applying for these resources is "daunting." That alone would be an impediment to the typical student body constituency of community colleges. Just reading a class schedule and navigating the college bureaucracy has been identified as a barrier to advancement at the two-year level, and research has shown, in fact, that proprietary colleges like the University of Phoenix have a better record of providing resources and tracking to keep kids on pace toward educational goals.

In any case, the gap year sounds likes a great opportunity for kids to spread their wings a bit before hitting the halls of the university. As always, I'm just thinking about how we can shift the culture among the disadvantaged (kids and parents) so they'll be able to pursue opportunities like this as well (and more "social spending" is not necessarily the answer).