Matthew Desmond, Evicted

Well, I continue to devour books, especially considering how blogging and tweeting have been less appealing with all the Trump purity wars.

Besides, I'm still getting over some repetitive stress injuries on my left arm. It's been too painful to blog sometimes, man.

In any case, this looks great, from Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City.

BONUS: Also good, from Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America.

Graduation Rates Rise, But Fewer Students Ready for College-Level Academic Work

The story's out of Greenville, S.C., so you can guess the race of the students who're graduating underprepared.

At the New York Times, "As Graduation Rates Rise, Experts Fear Diplomas Come Up Short":

GREENVILLE, S.C. — A sign in a classroom here at Berea High School, northwest of downtown in the largest urban district in the state, sends this powerful message: “Failure Is Not an Option. You Will Pass. You Will Learn. You Will Succeed.”

By one measure, Berea, with more than 1,000 pupils, is helping more students succeed than ever: The graduation rate, below 65 percent just four years ago, has jumped to more than 80 percent.

But that does not necessarily mean that all of Berea’s graduates, many of whom come from poor families, are ready for college — or even for the working world. According to college entrance exams administered to every 11th grader in the state last spring, only one in 10 Berea students were ready for college-level work in reading, and about one in 14 were ready for entry-level college math. And on a separate test of skills needed to succeed in most jobs, little more than half of the students demonstrated that they could handle the math they would need.

It is a pattern repeated in other school districts across the state and country — urban, suburban and rural — where the number of students earning high school diplomas has risen to historic peaks, yet measures of academic readiness for college or jobs are much lower. This has led educators to question the real value of a high school diploma and whether graduation requirements are too easy.

“Does that diploma guarantee them a hope for a life where they can support a family?” asked Melanie D. Barton, the executive director of the Education Oversight Committee in South Carolina, a legislative agency. Particularly in districts where student achievement is very low, she said, “I really don’t see it.”

Few question that in today’s economy, finishing high school is vital, given that the availability of jobs for those without a diploma has dwindled. The Obama administration has hailed the rising graduation rate, saying schools are expanding opportunities for students to succeed. Earlier this month, the Department of Education announced that the national graduation rate hit 82 percent in 2013-14, the highest on record.

But “the goal is not just high school graduation,” Arne Duncan, the departing secretary of education, said in a telephone interview. “The goal is being truly college and career ready.”

The most recent evaluation of 12th graders on a national test of reading and math found that fewer than 40 percent were ready for college level work. College remediation and dropout rates remain stubbornly high, particularly at two-year institutions, where fewer than a third who enroll complete a degree even within three years.

In South Carolina, even with a statewide high school graduation rate of 80.3 percent, some business leaders worry that not enough students have the abilities they need for higher-skilled jobs at Boeing, Volvo and BMW, which have built plants here in recent years. What is more, they say, students need to be able to collaborate and communicate effectively, skills they say high schools do not always teach.

“If you look at what a graduation diploma guarantees today,” said Pamela P. Lackey, the president of AT&T South Carolina, “the issue is we have a system of education that prepares them for a different type of work than we have as a reality today.”

Still, there is no single reason these rates have increased.

Economists point to a decline in the teenage pregnancy rate, as well as a reduction in violent crime among teenagers. Some districts use data systems to identify students with multiple absences or failed classes so educators can better help them. And an increasing number of states and districts offer students more chances to make up failed credits online or in short tutoring sessions without repeating a whole semester or more.

States also vary widely in diploma requirements. In California, South Carolina and Tennessee, the authorities have recently eliminated requirements that students pass exit exams to qualify for a diploma. Alaska, California, Wisconsin and Wyoming demand far fewer credits to graduate than most states, according to the Education Commission of the States, although local school districts may require more.

According to one analysis of requirements for the class of 2014, 32 states did not require that all graduates take four years of English and math through Algebra II or its equivalent, which is often defined as the minimum to be prepared for college.

“Students and their families rely on and trust the high school diploma as a signal of readiness,” said Alissa Peltzman, the vice president of state policy at Achieve, a nonprofit that performed the study. “It needs to mean something. Otherwise, it’s a false promise for thousands of students.”

Over the past decade in California, several large urban districts adopted coursework guidelines aligned to entrance requirements at the state’s public universities. Los Angeles initially required that students earn at least a C in those classes, but the number of students on track to graduate plummeted. Now grades of D or higher are accepted...

I'd bet reduced standards are the No. 1 factor in reduced college readiness. Certainly in California, if not the country as a whole. I mean, sheesh, a passing grade is a D for college credit, even in my political science classes.

But continue reading.

And it's interesting to note the inequality implications when comparing these less-well-off urban schools with affluent suburban ones, like the New Jersey school district where the battles are over whether students are pushed to get an A+ in calculus, rather than an A.

Social Class Differences Increasingly Affect Children's Success

Any educator serious about student success has to deal with the one thing that's not politically correct to discuss: influences from students' home life are perhaps the most powerful indicators of academic success. A classic book on this is Annette Lareau's, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. I only have students for one semester in my classes, but I try my hardest to impart as many basic life skills to students as I can. A lot of this is simply modeling values of hard work and professionalism, and then providing as much real-life examples of up-from-the bootstraps work ethics as possible. I also provide handouts and overheads on what it means to be a successful student, something that isn't appreciated by young people, especially those from non-traditional backgrounds.

Often, one semester is just not enough for students to make big changes, but at least the most conscientious students will have a chance to build on that foundation, internalizing those crucial tips from my classes, to increase their levels of student success. It's an entire culture that we have to battle against, and economic class disadvantages are extremely difficult to overcome.

In any case, at the New York Times, "Class Differences in Child-Rearing Are on the Rise":

The lives of children from rich and poor American families look more different than they have in decades.

Well-off families are ruled by calendars, with children enrolled in ballet, soccer and after-school programs, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. There are usually two parents, who spend a lot of time reading to children and worrying about their anxiety levels and hectic schedules.

In poor families, however, children tend to spend their time at home or with extended family, the survey found. They are more likely to grow up in neighborhoods that their parents say aren’t great for raising children, and their parents worry about them getting shot, beaten up or in trouble with the law.

The class differences in child rearing are growing, researchers say — a symptom of widening inequality with far-reaching consequences. Different upbringings set children on different paths and can deepen socioeconomic divisions, especially because education is strongly linked to earnings. Children grow up learning the skills to succeed in their socioeconomic stratum, but not necessarily others.

“Early childhood experiences can be very consequential for children’s long-term social, emotional and cognitive development,” said Sean F. Reardon, professor of poverty and inequality in education at Stanford University. “And because those influence educational success and later earnings, early childhood experiences cast a lifelong shadow.”

The cycle continues: Poorer parents have less time and fewer resources to invest in their children, which can leave children less prepared for school and work, which leads to lower earnings.

American parents want similar things for their children, the Pew report and past research have found: for them to be healthy and happy, honest and ethical, caring and compassionate. There is no best parenting style or philosophy, researchers say, and across income groups, 92 percent of parents say they are doing a good job at raising their children.

Yet they are doing it quite differently.

Middle-class and higher-income parents see their children as projects in need of careful cultivation, says Annette Lareau, a University of Pennsylvania sociologist whose groundbreaking research on the topic was published in her book “Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life.” They try to develop their skills through close supervision and organized activities, and teach children to question authority figures and navigate elite institutions.

Working-class parents, meanwhile, believe their children will naturally thrive, and give them far greater independence and time for free play. They are taught to be compliant and deferential to adults.

There are benefits to both approaches. Working-class children are happier, more independent, whine less and are closer with family members, Ms. Lareau found. Higher-income children are more likely to declare boredom and expect their parents to solve their problems.

Yet later on, the more affluent children end up in college and en route to the middle class, while working-class children tend to struggle. Children from higher-income families are likely to have the skills to navigate bureaucracies and succeed in schools and workplaces, Ms. Lareau said.

“Do all parents want the most success for their children? Absolutely,” she said. “Do some strategies give children more advantages than others in institutions? Probably they do. Will parents be damaging children if they have one fewer organized activity? No, I really doubt it.”

Social scientists say the differences arise in part because low-income parents have less money to spend on music class or preschool, and less flexible schedules to take children to museums or attend school events.

Extracurricular activities epitomize the differences in child rearing in the Pew survey, which was of a nationally representative sample of 1,807 parents...

More.

Education Gap Between Rich and Poor Is Growing Wider

But what about all that hopey-changey stuff?

At the New York Times:

The wounds of segregation were still raw in the 1970s. With only rare exceptions, African-American children had nowhere near the same educational opportunities as whites.

The civil rights movement, school desegregation and the War on Poverty helped bring a measure of equity to the playing field. Today, despite some setbacks along the way, racial disparities in education have narrowed significantly. By 2012, the test-score deficit of black 9-, 13- and 17-year-olds in reading and math had been reduced as much as 50 percent compared with what it was 30 to 40 years before.

Achievements like these breathe hope into our belief in the Land of Opportunity. They build trust in education as a leveling force powering economic mobility. “We do have a track record of reducing these inequalities,” said Jane Waldfogel, a professor of social work at Columbia University.

But the question remains: Why did we stop there?

For all the progress in improving educational outcomes among African-American children, the achievement gaps between more affluent and less privileged children is wider than ever, notes Sean Reardon of the Center for Education Policy Analysis at Stanford. Racial disparities are still a stain on American society, but they are no longer the main divider. Today the biggest threat to the American dream is class.

Education is today more critical than ever. College has become virtually a precondition for upward mobility. Men with only a high school diploma earn about a fifth less than they did 35 years ago. The gap between the earnings of students with a college degree and those without one is bigger than ever.

And yet American higher education is increasingly the preserve of the elite. The sons and daughters of college-educated parents are more than twice as likely to go to college as the children of high school graduates and seven times as likely as those of high school dropouts.

Only 5 percent of Americans ages 25 to 34 whose parents didn’t finish high school have a college degree. By comparison, the average across 20 rich countries in an analysis by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is almost 20 percent.

The problem, of course, doesn’t start in college.

Earlier this week, Professor Waldfogel and colleagues from Australia, Canada and Britain published a new book titled “Too Many Children Left Behind” (Russell Sage). It traces the story of America’s educational disparities across the life cycle of its children, from the day they enter kindergarten to eighth grade.

Their story goes sour very early, and it gets worse as it goes along. On the day they start kindergarten, children from families of low socioeconomic status are already more than a year behind the children of college graduates in their grasp of both reading and math.

And despite the efforts deployed by the American public education system, nine years later the achievement gap, on average, will have widened by somewhere from one-half to two-thirds.

Even the best performers from disadvantaged backgrounds, who enter kindergarten reading as well as the smartest rich kids, fall behind over the course of their schooling.

The challenges such children face compared to their more fortunate peers are enormous. Children from low socioeconomic backgrounds are seven times more likely to have been born to a teenage mother. Only half live with both parents, compared with 83 percent of the children of college graduates.

The children of less educated parents suffer higher obesity rates, have more social and emotional problems and are more likely to report poor or fair health. And because they are much poorer, they are less likely to afford private preschool or the many enrichment opportunities — extra lessons, tutors, music and art, elite sports teams — that richer, better-educated parents lavish on their children.

When they enter the public education system, they are shortchanged again...

Keep reading.

More funding and additional education reforms will have only a marginal impact on improving student achievement, and hence reducing inequality. The most significant gains are likely to come from changes in the culture, especially the strengthening of the family in minority communities. It would help, too, if public schools were freed from the tyrannical and debilitating control of the Democrat-left and the corrupt teachers unions, which will do nothing to improve educational performance if such reforms weaken their power.

Frankly, if the Obama administration would just start a minority education voucher program so that poor families could afford to send their kids to schools like Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., then we'd be a lot better off.

Venezuela's Food Shortages Trigger Looting

Venezuela's a freakin' joke.

At WSJ, "Venezuela’s Food Shortages Trigger Long Lines, Hunger and Looting":

LA SIBUCARA, Venezuela—Hours after they looted and set fire to a National Guard command post in this sun-baked corner of Venezuela earlier this month, a mob infuriated by worsening food shortages rammed trucks into the smoldering edifice, reducing it mostly to rubble.

The incident was just one of numerous violent clashes that have flared in pockets around the country in recent weeks as Venezuelans wait for hours in long supermarket lines for basics like milk and rice. Shortages have made hunger a palpable concern for many Wayuu Indians who live here at the northern tip of Venezuela’s 1,300-mile border with Colombia.

The soldiers had been deployed to stem rampant food smuggling and price speculation, which President Nicolás Maduro blames for triple-digit inflation and scarcity. But after they seize contraband goods, the troops themselves often become targets of increasingly desperate people.

“What’s certain is that we are going very hungry here and the children are suffering a lot,” said María Palma, a 55-year-old grandmother who on a recent blistering hot day had been standing in line at the grocery store since 3 a.m. before walking away empty-handed at midday.

In a national survey, the pollster Consultores 21 found 30% of Venezuelans eating two or fewer meals a day during the second quarter of this year, up from 20% in the first quarter. Around 70% of people in the study also said they had stopped buying some basic food item because it had become unavailable or too expensive.

Food-supply problems in Venezuela underscore the increasingly precarious situation for Mr. Maduro’s socialist government, which according to the latest poll by Datanálisis is preferred by less than 20% of voters ahead of Dec. 6 parliamentary elections. The critical situation threatens to plunge South America’s largest oil exporter into a wave of civil unrest reminiscent of last year’s nationwide demonstrations seeking Mr. Maduro’s ouster.

“It’s a national crisis,” said Marco Ponce, head of the Venezuela Observatory of Social Conflict, noting that unlike the political protests of last year, residents are now taking to the streets demanding social rights.

The nonprofit group recorded 500 protests over food shortages during the first half of 2015, 56 looting incidents and dozens of attempted lootings at grocery stores, pharmacies and warehouses. Even delivery trucks are frequently targeted. “If people aren’t outside protesting, they’re outside standing in line for goods,” Mr. Ponce said.

The unrest is a response to dramatically worsening living conditions for Venezuelans as the economy reels from oil’s slump following more than a decade of populist spending that left the government broke...

Still more.

Tiny Makeshift Houses Used by Homeless Could Soon Be Removed by the City of Los Angeles (VIDEO)

Well, if the homeless have these little houses, then I guess they're not homeless. These are their homes.

But local officials want the tiny shelters to come down.

Watch, at CBS News 2 Los Angeles, "Makeshift Homes Used by Transients Could Soon Be Removed from Streets of L.A."

Progressive Policies Drive More Californians Into Poverty, Especially Blacks and Hispanics

California's a far-left Democrat Party state, and apparently the disenfranchised poor are down with that.

Keep in mind who's really doing well amid that the state's economic recovery: the Silicon Valley types (in West L.A., the O.C., and San Diego too), and the Burbank-Hollywood entertainment industry, i.e., affluent leftists not dependent on welfare state transfer programs.

From Joel Kotkin, at the O.C. Register, "Progressive policies drive more into poverty":

Across the nation, progressives increasingly look at California as a model state. This tendency has increased as climate change has emerged as the Democratic Party’s driving issue. To them, California’s recovery from a very tough recession is proof positive that you can impose ever greater regulation on everything from housing to electricity and still have a thriving economy.

And to be sure, the state has finally recovered the jobs lost in the 2007-09 recession, largely a result of a boom in values of stocks and high- end real estate. Things, however, have not been so rosy in key blue-collar fields, such as construction, which is still more than 200,000 jobs below prerecession levels, or manufacturing, where the state has lost over one-third of its employment since 2000. Homelessness, which one would think should be in decline during a strong economy, is on the rise in Orange County and even more so in Los Angeles.

The dirty secret here is that a large proportion of Californians, roughly one-third, or some 3.2 million households, as found by a recent United Way study, find it increasingly difficult to keep their heads above water. The United Way study, surprisingly, has drawn relatively little interest from a media that usually enjoys highlighting disparities, particularly racial gaps. Perhaps this reflects a need to maintain an illusion of blue state success. If Republican Pete Wilson were still governor, I suspect we might have heard much more about this study.

State of Poverty

The United Way study – “Struggling to Get By” – delves well beyond even the recent Census Bureau analysis, which, by factoring in housing costs, already established California as the state with the highest percentage of poor people, at roughly one in four. United Way expanded this percentage by calculating what the charitable organization called the “Real Cost Budget,” which includes not only rent but also costs for child care, medical, health and transportation.

By United Way’s calculation, roughly one in three Californians can barely make ends meet, despite the state’s relatively generous transfer payments, subsidies and general assistance. Latinos and African Americans, as one might expect, fare worse, but roughly one-in-five non-Hispanic whites and 28 percent of Asians also are deemed struggling.

Roughly half of Latino households fall into this condition of poverty or near-poverty, as do a similar share of African American households. Those who do worst generally are poorly educated single mothers and their children. Poverty and near-poverty are greatest among Latinos, who also are bearing the majority of children. It is hard to imagine a more urgent wake-up call.

Not surprisingly, many of the foreign-born, the source of much of California’s population growth in recent decades, have fared poorly. Only 25 percent of households headed by native-born Californians fall below the United Way “Real Cost Budget” line for economic distress, but it’s 45 percent for those headed by the foreign-born, and nearly 60 percent for families headed by a noncitizen. The highest percentage is among Latino households headed by a noncitizen – a staggering 80 percent fall below the minimal level...

Keep reading.

Interesting thing about Kotkin is that he's a former leftist, or so they say.

Hat Tip: VDare, "The Collapse of California."

Broken City: San Bernardino, Once Solidly Middle-Class, Distills America's Urban Woes in the Age of Obama

So sad.

At the Los Angeles Times, "San Bernardino: Broken City."

As other CA cities rise out of the recession, San Bernardino has become one of the poorest http://t.co/lJhcy7Mwtk pic.twitter.com/b7UsBKUO4S

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) June 14, 2015

Bernie Sanders' Foul Socialist Odor

From Michelle Malkin, at FrontPage Magazine:

Elect @BernieSanders and we'll have more hunger, not less. That's how #socialism works. http://t.co/FFGGyzXIr1 pic.twitter.com/1YitjBNqGB

— Jeff Jacoby (@Jeff_Jacoby) May 31, 2015

Smells like socialist spirit! Mocktastic Bernie 'Old Spice' Sanders puts the 'rant' in 'deodorant' http://t.co/fYZRzIR5fE

— TwitchyTeam (@TwitchyTeam) May 26, 2015

Our store shelves have too many different brands of deodorant and sneakers. Just look at all those horrible, fully stocked aisles at Target and Walgreens and Wal-Mart and Payless and DSW and Dick’s Sporting Goods. It’s a national nightmare! If only consumers had fewer choices in the free market, fewer entrepreneurs offering a wide variety of products and fewer workers manufacturing goods people wanted, Sanders believes, we could end childhood hunger.

Nobody parodies the far left better than far-leftists themselves.

In an interview with financial journalist John Harwood on Tuesday, Sanders detailed his grievances with an overabundance of antiperspirants and footwear. “You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country. I don’t think the media appreciates the kind of stress that ordinary Americans are working on.”

Try to suppress a snicker: Sanders, Decider of Your Sanitary and Footwear Needs, is casting himself as the Everyman in touch with “ordinary Americans” to contrast his campaign with Hillary “my Beltway lobbyist and foreign agent operator Sid Blumenthal is just a friend I talk to for advice” Clinton.

Blech. By the looks of the 2016 Democratic presidential field, liberals really do practice the anti-choice principles they preach.

More.

Plus, from yesterday's morning talk shows, "Bernie Sanders Addresses 1972 Sex, Rape Fantasy Essay on Meet the Press."

He's a freakin' crackpot.

Gwyneth Paltrow Pledges to Live on $29 Food Stamp Budget for One Week

I like Gwyneth. She's my favorite loopy lefist, heh.

At London's Daily Mail, "Gwyneth Paltrow vows to live on just $29 worth of food for a week as part of a charity challenge - but is already under fire from critics for her 1,000 calorie-per-day menu."

And at Twitchy:

'Grandstanding limousine liberal’: Gwyneth Paltrow vows to live on SNAP budget http://t.co/KRhbTLX7Fv

— TwitchyTeam (@TwitchyTeam) April 11, 2015

When Bread Bags Weren't Funny

From Megan McArdle, at Bloomberg:

Last week, in her State of the Union response, Joni Ernst mentioned going to school with bread bags on her feet to protect her shoes. These sorts of remembrances of poor but honest childhoods used to be a staple among politicians -- that's why you've heard so much about Abe Lincoln's beginnings in a log cabin. But the bread bags triggered a lot of hilarity on Twitter, which in turn triggered this powerful meditation from Peggy Noonan on how rich we have become. So rich that we have forgotten things that are well within living memory:

I liked what Ernst said because it was real. And it reminded me of the old days.

There are a lot of Americans, and most of them seem to be on social media, who do not know some essentials about their country, but this is the way it was in America once, only 40 and 50 years ago:

America had less then. Americans had less.

If you were from a family that was barely or not quite getting by, you really had one pair of shoes. If your family was doing OK you had one pair of shoes for school and also a pair of what were called Sunday shoes -- black leather or patent leather shoes. If you were really comfortable you had a pair of shoes for school, Sunday shoes, a pair of play shoes and even boots, which where I spent my childhood (Brooklyn, and Massapequa, Long Island) were called galoshes or rubbers. At a certain point everyone had to have sneakers for gym, but if you didn’t have sneakers you could share a pair with a friend, trading them in the hall before class.

If you had just one pair of shoes, which was the case in my family, you had trouble when it rained or snowed. How to deal with it?

You used the plastic bags that bread came in. Or you used plastic bags that other items came in. Or you used Saran Wrap if you had it, wrapping your shoes and socks in it. Or you let your shoes and socks get all wet, which we also did.

I am a few years younger than Noonan, but I grew up in a very different world -- one where a number of my grammar school classmates were living in public housing or on food stamps, but everyone had more than one pair of shoes. In rural areas, like the one where Joni Ernst grew up, this lingered longer. But all along, Americans got richer and things got cheaper -- especially when global markets opened up. Payless will sell you a pair of child's shoes for $15, which is two hours of work even at minimum wage...

Keep reading.

My dad was born in 1913, in Jim Crow Missouri. He faced a lot of hardship in life, to say nothing of racism. Stories like Joni Ernst's were a staple of the dinner table around my house growing up. Thriftiness wasn't just some noble virtue, it was a way of life. And we weren't bad off at all. My dad drove a Mercedes. It's just once you do things a certain way, you don't change when things get better for you.

And yes, we are an extremely affluent society these days. Even the poorest Americans have access to the kind of basic commodities that the poor of the developing world can only dream about.

Amazing.

Let's Have a National Conversation About the American Ghetto

From Michael Grable, at American Thinker, "A National Conversation about the American Ghetto":

The Left has long argued ad populum that disproportionately white police forces and disproportionately black prison populations prove American law enforcement institutionally racist.

That's essentially the perception behind, for example, the Left's long campaign against racial profiling as a police engagement technique.

Media sensationalism this year about two black deaths at the hands of white policemen inflamed the argument, while the president of the United States, the attorney general of the United States, the mayor of New York, and race-hustling entrepreneurs from Al Sharpton on down to any brother in the street with a bullhorn jumped on the black-while-walking bandwagon.

Here, however, is one standup law-enforcement professional, Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke, Jr., who begs to disagree.

Sheriff Clarke publicly condemns anti-police populism as the Left's deflection of an urban reality with which he's professionally all too familiar and for which the Left's all too politically responsible. "This deflects," says Sheriff Clarke:

against the real thing that we need to have a conversation about in this country and it's the American ghetto. And that's where most of the policing unfortunately has to be applied. The American ghetto has chronic poverty, high unemployment where people can't find meaningful work, and kids shackled to failing public schools ensuring that they won't reach their God-given potential. This creates a permanent underclass in this country and ensures that this group of people will continue to live life at the bottom. That's the kind of conversation that we need to have, as to how these failed liberal government policies have led to the creation and emergence of the welfare state. And that characterizes the American ghetto. Let's have that conversation and get off this nonsense that it's the policing profession that needs to be transformed. There's nothing wrong with the policing of, or institution of, policing in America.

The very civil rights movement with its war on poverty which was to have rectified American racism has, instead, perversely perpetuated it in the creation of a permanent underclass living life at the bottom of an urban ignorance, criminality, and violence which most requires the very policing against which its political beneficiaries now rail. That's a pretty "fundamental transformation" of at least one aspect of America. And it's a transformation of which no American should ever be anything but ashamed...

Keep reading.

Sad that.

Why Poor Students Struggle

An interesting piece from Vicki Madden, at the New York Times.

Seems like a pretty accurate account, and race is not highlighted so much as socioeconomic background. Interesting.

California Drought Causes East Porterville Children to Go to School Unbathed

Now this is a bummer.

California, with the 8th largest economy in the world, and one of highest per capita income levels of the 50 states, can't even ensure that Central Valley residents have enough water.

At the Los Angeles Times, "'HI, DO YOU HAVE WATER?' IN A CENTRAL CALIF. TOWN, ANSWER IS OFTEN NO."

Cindy Crawford Offers to Pay for Toxic Chemical Cleanup at Malibu Schools (VIDEO)

Seems to me that Cindy Crawford would be sending her kids to private schools, but then again, this is Malibu. It's not like you're dealing with a bunch of inner-city poverty and the attendant cultural rabble.

At CBS Los Angeles, "Malibu Parents Demand Tests After Toxic Chemicals Found on 2 School Campuses":

KCAL9's Serene Branson reports parents have been pushing the district to fully test and clean up contaminated schools for four years - and concerned mom Cindy Crawford is among them.

Intellectuals Attacking Inequality Silent on the Decline of the Two-Parent Family

In my essay last night on the Marxist renaissance, I argued, "Real reform [of policies on inequality], indeed, must begin not at the level of the nation state but at the level of communities."

And moving down to an even more basic level of organization, consider the family. Leftists don't want to focus on those family and individual level factors, instead arguing that inequality is consequence of "structures" of racism, classism and disadvantage (or whatever else is in vogue these days).

But real success in eliminating inequality must focus on these lower levels of analysis.

From Robert Maranto and Michael Crouch, at the Wall Street Journal, "Ignoring an Inequality Culprit: Single-Parent Families":

Suppose a scientific conference on cancer prevention never addressed smoking, on the grounds that in a free society you can't change private behavior, and anyway, maybe the statistical relationships between smoking and cancer are really caused by some other third variable. Wouldn't some suspect that the scientists who raised these claims were driven by something—ideology, tobacco money—other than science?

Yet in the current discussions about increased inequality, few researchers, fewer reporters, and no one in the executive branch of government directly addresses what seems to be the strongest statistical correlate of inequality in the United States: the rise of single-parent families during the past half century.

The two-parent family has declined rapidly in recent decades. In 1960, more than 76% of African-Americans and nearly 97% of whites were born to married couples. Today the percentage is 30% for blacks and 70% for whites. The out-of-wedlock birthrate for Hispanics surpassed 50% in 2006. This trend, coupled with high divorce rates, means that roughly 25% of American children now live in single-parent homes, twice the percentage in Europe (12%). Roughly a third of American children live apart from their fathers.

Does it matter? Yes, it does. From economist Susan Mayer's 1997 book "What Money Can't Buy" to Charles Murray's "Coming Apart" in 2012, clear-eyed studies of the modern family affirm the conventional wisdom that two parents work better than one.

"Americans have always thought that growing up with only one parent is bad for children," Ms. Mayer wrote. "The rapid spread of single-parent families over the past generation does not seem to have altered this consensus much."

In an essay for the Institute for Family Studies last December, called "Even for Rich Kids, Marriage Matters," University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox reported that children in high-income households who experienced family breakups don't fare as well emotionally, psychologically, educationally or, in the end, economically as their two-parent-family peers.

Abuse, behavioral problems and psychological issues of all kinds, such as developmental behavior problems or concentration issues, are less common for children of married couples than for cohabiting or single parents, according to a 2003 Centers for Disease Control study of children's health. The causal pathways are about as clear as those from smoking to cancer.

More than 20% of children in single-parent families live in poverty long-term, compared with 2% of those raised in two-parent families, according to education-policy analyst Mitch Pearlstein's 2011 book "From Family Collapse to America's Decline." The poverty rate would be 25% lower if today's family structure resembled that of 1970, according to the 2009 report "Creating an Opportunity Society" from Brookings Institution analysts Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill. A 2006 article in the journal Demography by Penn State sociologist Molly Martin estimates that 41% of the economic inequality created between 1976-2000 was the result of changed family structure.

Earlier this year, a team of researchers led by Harvard economist Raj Chetty reported that communities with a high percentage of single-parent families are less likely to experience upward mobility. The researchers' report—"Where Is the Land of Opportunity?"—received considerable media attention. Yet mainstream news outlets tended to ignore the study's message about family structure, focusing instead on variables with far less statistical impact, such as residential segregation.

In the past four years, our two academic professional organizations—the American Political Science Association and the American Educational Research Association—have each dedicated annual meetings to inequality, with numerous papers and speeches denouncing free markets, the decline of unions, and "neoliberalism" generally as exacerbating economic inequality. Yet our searches of the groups' conference websites fail to turn up a single paper or panel addressing the effects of family change on inequality.

Why isn't this matter at the center of policy discussions? There are at least three reasons...

Well, those reasons aren't too hard to guess, but do read the rest.

Harsh Life of Missing 8-Year-Old Relisha Rudd Comes Into Focus

An almost unbelievable story of bureaucratic incompetence and incomprehensible evil.

At the Washington Post, "Relisha Rudd’s difficult past comes into focus":

Relisha Rudd’s absences piled up at Daniel A. Payne Elementary School, topping 30 days this year before someone notified the D.C. Child and Family Service Agency on March 13.

But it took an additional six days before the city agency took action. By then, Relisha, 8, had gone missing.

Police believe Kahlil Malik Tatum, 51, a janitor at the homeless shelter at the old D.C. General Hospital, where Relisha lived, killed his wife and now has the girl. They are looking for them up and down the East Coast.

With the search now into its eighth day with no breaks, Relisha’s difficult past is coming into focus. Guardians, social workers and employees at the subsidized shelter had extensive contact with Relisha but missed or ignored repeated opportunities to intervene weeks or even years ago, records show. And her mother, who allowed Relisha to be with Tatum, told school officials her daughter was missing school because she was sick, an explanation that authorities say delayed their ability to respond...

Keep reading this sorry-assed report.

I mean really? Who lets their 8-year-old child spend the days with a janitor at a homeless shelter? This dude Tatum took the child "swimming" and bought her presents. Hey, no hints something's awry there. Nope, not at all. And child protective services? No clue. Can you say city-agency clusterf-k?

This is not good. Not good at all. Ima say a prayer now.

Reading Books Is Fundamental

From black leftist Charles Blow, at the New York Times:

The first thing I can remember buying for myself, aside from candy, of course, was not a toy. It was a book.

It was a religious picture book about Job from the Bible, bought at Kmart.

It was on one of the rare occasions when my mother had enough money to give my brothers and me each a few dollars so that we could buy whatever we wanted.

We all made a beeline for the toy aisle, but that path led through the section of greeting cards and books. As I raced past the children’s books, they stopped me. Books to me were things most special. Magical. Ideas eternalized.

Books were the things my brothers brought home from school before I was old enough to attend, the things that engrossed them late into the night as they did their homework. They were the things my mother brought home from her evening classes, which she attended after work, to earn her degree and teaching certificate.

Books, to me, were powerful and transformational.

So there, in the greeting card section of the store, I flipped through children’s books until I found the one that I wanted, the one about Job. I thought the book fascinating in part because it was a tale of hardship, to which I could closely relate, and in part because it contained the first drawing I’d even seen of God, who in those pages was a white man with a white beard and a long robe that looked like one of my mother’s nightgowns.

I picked up the book, held it close to my chest and walked proudly to the checkout. I never made it to the toy aisle.

That was the beginning of a lifelong journey in which books would shape and change me, making me who I was to become.

That's a beautiful story.

Keep reading.

Blow was inspired to write about books from Jordan Weissmann, at the Atlantic, "The Decline of the American Book Lover." Yet, while the overall numbers on book reading are down (the average number of books read per year per person, for example), the numbers aren't all that bleak. There's lots of reading going on, even in this day and age. Indeed, Weismann argues that, 10 years after the introduction of Facebook, the decline in book reading may have bottomed out. As for Charles Blow, he needs to be spreading his gospel of book reading to the black community, especially to the kind of the inner city black thugs who dominate the news. Seriously. Go into the neighborhoods and extol the virtues of books. Bring James Baldwin to the brothers and sisters and have them shake their indifference and ignorance. That, as a long-term project, along with strengthening families, will do more to alleviate the inequality gap than all the social programs the White House wants to ram down the throats of the American people. In other words, reverse the cultural decline and you'll turn around the social disorganization from which Charles Blow was able to avoid.

A 'Mixed Bag'? Fifty Years Later and That's All to Be Said for 'War on Poverty'?

Because the left has announced its 2014 agenda will be a "war" against economic equality, I can understand why there was little discussion of this online yesterday. But this "mixed bag" after 50 years and hundreds of billions of dollars is a telling commentary on the inability of government to socially engineer economic outcomes.

At the New York Times, "50 Years Later, War on Poverty Is a Mixed Bag":

WASHINGTON — To many Americans, the war on poverty declared 50 years ago by President Lyndon B. Johnson has largely failed. The poverty rate has fallen only to 15 percent from 19 percent in two generations, and 46 million Americans live in households where the government considers their income scarcely adequate.

But looked at a different way, the federal government has succeeded in preventing the poverty rate from climbing far higher. There is broad consensus that the social welfare programs created since the New Deal have hugely improved living conditions for low-income Americans. At the same time, in recent decades, most of the gains from the private economy have gone to those at the top of the income ladder.

Half a century after Mr. Johnson’s now-famed State of the Union address, the debate over the government’s role in creating opportunity and ending deprivation has flared anew, with inequality as acute as it was in the Roaring Twenties and the ranks of the poor and near-poor at record highs. Programs like unemployment insurance and food stamps are keeping millions of families afloat. Republicans have sought to cut both programs, an illustration of the intense disagreement between the two political parties over the best solutions for bringing down the poverty rate as quickly as possible, or eliminating it.

For poverty to decrease, “the low-wage labor market needs to improve,” James P. Ziliak of the University of Kentucky said. “We need strong economic growth with gains widely distributed. If the private labor market won’t step up to the plate, we’re going to have to strengthen programs to help these people get by and survive.”

In Washington, President Obama has called inequality the “defining challenge of our time.” To that end, he intends to urge states to expand their Medicaid programs to poor, childless adults, and is pushing for an increase in the minimum wage and funding for early-childhood programs.

But conservatives, like Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, have looked at the poverty statistics more skeptically, contending that the government has misspent its safety-net money and needs to focus less on support and more on economic and job opportunities.

“The nation should face up to two facts: poverty rates are too high, especially among children, and spending money on government means-tested programs is at best a partial solution,” Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution wrote in an assessment of the shortfalls on the war on poverty. Washington already spends enough on antipoverty programs to lift all Americans out of poverty, he said. “To mount an effective war against poverty,” he added, “we need changes in the personal decisions of more young Americans.”

Still, a broad range of researchers interviewed by The New York Times stressed the improvement in the lives of low-income Americans since Mr. Johnson started his crusade. Infant mortality has dropped, college completion rates have soared, millions of women have entered the work force, malnutrition has all but disappeared. After all, when Mr. Johnson announced his campaign, parts of Appalachia lacked electricity and indoor plumbing.

Many economists argue that the official poverty rate grossly understates the impact of government programs. The headline poverty rate counts only cash income, not the value of in-kind benefits like food stamps. A fuller accounting suggests the poverty rate has dropped to 16 percent today, from 26 percent in the late 1960s, economists say.

But high rates of poverty — measured by both the official government yardstick and the alternatives that many economists prefer — have remained a remarkably persistent feature of American society. About four in 10 black children live in poverty; for Hispanic children, that figure is about three in 10. According to one recent study, as of mid-2011, in any given month, 1.7 million households were living on cash income of less than $2 a person a day, with the prevalence of the kind of deep poverty commonly associated with developing nations increasing since the mid-1990s.

To be honest, seeing people in poverty makes me sad. But the solution is more economic growth and opportunity, and especially expanding the culture of work, marriage, and thrift. The current Democrat agenda is simply creating a deeper dependency society, seen, for example, in New York's able-bodied black men standing around outside welfare offices waiting for their federal public assistance checks, enthusiastically referred to as "Obama bucks."

Why Obama Frets About Income Inequality, Not Family Breakdown

From James Pethokoukis, at AEI:

The Obama White House argues hard that rising US income inequality makes it tougher for Americans to climb the economic ladder. When President Obama gave a big speech on “social mobility” earlier this month – liberal pundits called it the “most important” of his presidency – he mentioned inequality more than two dozen times to pound the point home. And Team Obama has much publicized its chart illustrating the “Great Gatsby Curve” which suggests strong correlation globally between high income inequality and low earnings mobility.

How many times in such an important speech did Obama mention anything about American family breakdown perhaps impeding economic mobility? Just a couple of passing references.

Yet the issue of family breakdown deserves at least as much attention, if not more, from Obama than income inequality. Using data on local jobs markets from the Equality of Opportunity Project, e21 economist Scott Winship can’t find much of a statistical relationship between inequality – particularly of the 1% vs. 99% sort — and economic mobility. The EOP authors also find “a high concentration of income in the top 1% was not highly correlated with mobility patterns.”

What does seem to be highly correlated with mobility is family structure. In these communities, the share of families with single moms predicts mobility levels “quite well all by itself,” according to Winship’s analysis. Again, this result is not real surprising. Researchers on the left and right have found that kids raised by both biological parents fare better financially, educationally, and emotionally. And as the EOP scholars conclude: “Some of the strongest predictors of upward mobility are correlates of social capital and family structure.”

Some nice data plots at the post, so continue reading.

But seriously, leftists don't want to hear about family structure, because then the tangles of pathology that really drive poverty and structural unemployment for the underclass will blow up the left's lame inequality scam. It's all they've got to run on. The New York Times has more on that, "Democrats Turn to Minimum Wage as 2014 Strategy."