Reverse Robin Hood: Poor Districts Pay More, Get Less

Sometimes there are some really egregious local issues that deserve national attention.  This one comes from Pennsylvania, and I hope some of you will take some action.  There is a convenient narrative that poor districts pay less in taxes, so their schools get less funding.  There is another narrative that per pupil spending on education is too high.  Both can be true, but neither is the whole story.  In Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, the story is quite different (Montgomery is right outside Philly, where the author of "If I were a poor black kid" that inspired this post was writing).  According to an article in the Pottsdam Mercury, low income districts are absorbing some of the largest budget cuts. 

The Problem

The article discusses a recent report released by the Education Law Center (ELC) that advocates for low-income students in PA.  The report has analyzed funding, which was cut to the tune of $1.5 billion since 2008.  According to their analysis "school districts with a low income population and high property tax rate, like Pottstown, have absorbed up to 10 times more of the $1.5 billion in cuts to state education funding than wealthier districts."  Worse, more cuts are slated and the most recent budget proposal calls for them to hit districts like Pottstown.  

The ELC analyzed Montgomery because the county is home to some of the best and worst in the state. Half of the ten districts with the smallest cuts and "all but one of the districts faring the best under Corbett’s budget are located in southeast Pennsylvania and read like a who’s who of wealthy locales." Not surprisingly, these districts also are among the lowest in student poverty concentrations in PA. 

Why It Matters

What is interesting about this policy is that districts have many low-income students, but some very high property tax rates.  An argument that I hear a lot, "It is not fair for the wealthy to subsidize students in schools their kids can't use," thus doesn't apply here.  Even if you buy into this argument and it applies, these allocations serve to entrench systemic inequalities:

• Low income parents have fewer resources to provide educational opportunities and programing for their kids after school, which leads to decay of previous learning and less overall time spent learning (in and out of school). 
• Low income parents tend to work more hours, be more likely to be single parents, and have less time to allocate to their children's education (as say to putting food on the table or trying to get a table) 
• Low income families tend to have fewer ties to the education system and the benefits of education, thus reducing resources to their schools can send very negative signals.  If you already doubt the value of school and see that your schools are not well funded or effective, then you are more likely to feel like your beliefs have been reaffirmed. 
• Lower budgets cut the amount of time that schools can offer programming and the amount/types of alternative programs they can offer.  That means that poor children are exposed to fewer things, are less likely to find topics that engage them, and are more likely to be routed into an unfilfilling career or track. 

Are these guaranteed outcomes? Absolutely not.  All the same, we should be very concerned as a nation when some of our most disadvantaged students are forced to face even more barriers to success than those that poverty and societal scorn already place upon them.   This is not an argument for higher per pupil expenditures. This is an argument about being fair in how difficult cuts need to be made.  This is an argument for allocating resources and talent in ways that maximize the outcomes at a systemic level.  You can't deny that investing more in students whose parents already provide a lot of support for education and extracurricular programming is somewhat wasteful in a budget-scarce environment.

Act on it!
 

• Write Governor Corbett and ask him to justify and reconsider this regressive policy
• Email: Governor@pa.gov
• Call: 717-787-2500
• Submit an Inquiry Online: http://www.portal.state.pa.us/portal/server.pt?open=514&objID=1072219&parentname=ObjMgr&parentid=11&mode=2.
•  Contact the PA representatives who might change the coming budget:
• Senate Education Committee: http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/cteeInfo/cteeInfo.cfm?cde=23&body=S
• Senate Finance Committee: http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/cteeInfo/cteeInfo.cfm?cde=25&body=S
• Montgomery County's General Assembly Members: http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/home/findyourlegislator/county_list.cfm?CNTYLIST=MONTGOMERY 
• Write your local school board or legislator or mayor/governor and inquire about how funding is distributed and how they make cuts when they face budgetary scarcity.  I guarantee this is not isolated to Montgomery County, PA. 

Speak Out!

• Post some ideas for letters you might write to these officials to ensure more equitable funding for schools. 
• Have you seen this in other areas in the US? Call them out!  

It Ain't Easy Being Upwardly Mobile and Poor

As you may recall, I grew up poor and ended up going to college.  Surely, that’s success, right?  My investment in education and motivation behind this blog stem from the belief that by writing about these issues we can craft a better system that ensures that more people go from poor to more.  I have to say, though, that I read a rather disappointing article in Jezebel that highlights a Cornell study.  The study shows  that poor people who go to college are less likely to marry than rich people who go to college or poor people who don't get advanced degrees.  Especially guys (oh boy...is it stuffy in here or is that just my college degree laughing at me?).  This post will be less study-based and a bit more of a personal reflection on some of the largely unconsidered barriers to poor people succeeding.  It is no small task providing the ideal system that promotes equitable advancement through education, but even if you did that, it is no guarantee that people will (or perhaps should) jump to take advantage of it. 

There are a lot of impediments to a poor person that make you really give pause as you move up the educational ladder.  One of the big ones is that a lot of the information you learn has no relation to your background.  As my European History teacher said, “this class is the story of DWG” (dead white guys).  One of my favorite poems "Prière d'un petit enfant nègre" (Prayer of a little black boy) from Haiti provides the thoughts of a young Haitian boy who laments going to the French schools that talk about history from places he will never know and that take him from walking under the mangroves with his dad.  If you are not wealthy and white, it is really hard to connect.  It’s not that you can’t relate to or learn from people that are unlike you, but when everyone you learn about is remarkably similar to each other but completely different from you…well, it sends a signal.  It says that history doesn’t remember your kind.  School reinforcing your smallness while you are trying to escape it is not the greatest encouragement that you are going to go far.

Even if you, as I and many others have, get past your historical absence from textbooks, you then have to deal with a feeling of extreme guilt.  Every time you mess up, it is wasting all the sacrifice of your family.  When I went to Stanford, I was suddenly in an upper-middle class environment that I wasn’t paying for.  Even as I lived relatively frugally, I’d get to go on ridiculous things like ski trips and wine tasting that I wasn’t paying for.  It is hard to not feel guilty when you are skiing in Tahoe (and trying not to mow down defter six year olds on the slopes) while your single mom is heading to work at the crack of dawn to make ends meet.  Guilt is a powerful impediment to enjoying your success and to even viewing it as success.

There is also the intense separation of points of views that creates big tension between your past and future relationships.  As you get more educated, people start to resent you for being condescending or “thinking you are better.”  It is funny because they encourage you to get an education, but once you try to encourage them, it sounds like meddling or judgment.  To have friends or relatives think you are some out-of-touch, paternalistic know-it-all is a strong disincentive.  In minority communities, this can manifest itself as “being too white.” Meanwhile, you start to resent them for their stubbornness, for refusing to acknowledge that studies have shown that “x” will make their lives so much better.  In this, you and the person who once encouraged you both start to question the wisdom behind upward mobility.

The separation is not just the tension of your differing educational levels, but also of your changing interests.  Typically, you are educated outside of your community if you are an upwardly-mobile poor person (my high school was 12 miles from home in Chicago, my grammar school about 6).  My education got me excited about languages and foreign countries, and conscientious travel is not all that big where I come from.  I really care about buying local.  My mom and I have constant spats about it because she’s very right when she says, “It’s nice that you can afford to buy at small places, but I need to go to Target.”  Likewise, I’m right when I say, “Yes, but places like Walmart are shown to kill jobs in Chicago and you are hurting people just like you.”  It’s an awful catch-22, and it’s an impediment.  What the hell do you talk about at Thanksgiving that won’t provoke a fight?  I thought that was the job of a drunk uncle, anyway.

It is also really hard when people you knew can’t understand what you are doing with your life.  You are an “international something or other” major who wrote a very long paper on “something to do with Arabs.” “Yes, I did write my honors thesis in International Relations on Iraqi refugees.”  “Right, and what is this diplomat thing again? I know you’ve told me, but I can’t remember.”  Then try explaining to people “I work on promoting the labor provisions of free trade agreements.” (blank stares abound).  The thing is that people suspect you are successful, but all the people you really want to impress can’t understand well enough to be fully proud because they get what you’ve accomplished.  It's even worse because they expect you to be knowledgeable about EVERYTHING, and you suddenly get questions like "The doctor says I should get a biopsy, but I don't know...what do you think?"   Try responding, "Ask me about the Democratic Peace Theory, not medicine."

What’s worse is that in the end, you are changed but you don’t fit into your new life so well either.  Your middle class friends talk uninformedly about how to help the poor—your people, what YOU yourself once were—or what poor people need.  People laugh at you when you say that you were on welfare as a kid and were attacked by gangs on the way to school because “what? You went to Stanford, give me a break!”  Worst of all is that gnawing feeling that you’ve changed.  You know you can’t go back, but you can’t fully buy into your new class.  You will buy expensive coffee and think with disgust, “damn, when did I become such a bougie tool?” And when you don’t fit in, that means it is harder to find someone to relate to where you are coming from or where you are heading to, and that is why the Jezebel article notes the upwardly-mobile poor have such a hard time marrying.  

So, to be poor and then successful, you need to overcome leaving your neighborhood, inviting a widening gap between you and everyone you knew, learning new things that you can’t use to help those who once encouraged you, feeling perpetually out of place, and constantly questioning yourself.  Put that way, it doesn’t feel like success.  Plus, if it is success, then why do those who encouraged you have such a hard time with so much of it?   If you are just changing to fit society’s model of success, are you not just a pawn like all the other poor people who feel they lack any control in their government or society?  

These questions don’t get raised in policy circles because poor people rarely get that entry and because these are frankly hard emotions to just put out there.  Class makes people very uncomfortable, so they also don’t often want to hear these kinds of things.  Worse yet, because you escaped and so many others did not, you may not be the best voice for those other poor…maybe you too are different?  

So the next time you offer a voucher to a parent who doesn’t take it, the next time you hear about high drop out rates in charter schools with great results, kids who reject scholarships to stay close to home or not go to college…maybe you’ll understand why.  Maybe you will also get why the battle to improve our education system is not just logistical, political, and systemic…it’s also psychological.