DQ3-Ch 8

CHAPTER 8

American Poverty: The Dream Turned Nightmare

Broadly speaking, observers can consider two sources of poverty—either personal weaknesses that encourage its onset or circumstances outside individuals, families, or communities that promote or even determine being poor. Stereotypes are often linked to the first condition. A stereotype is a set of distinctly negative traits that prejudiced people apply to all members of a group against whom they are prejudiced. Stereo-types affect both oppressing and oppressed categories of individuals. The oppressing group often develops critical images of the poor and other oppressed groups, which are self-serving, endorsing a conviction of dominant people’s superiority and justifying the maintenance of the current economic, political, and social status quo. Further-more stereotypes can savagely erode disadvantaged people’s self-image and performance.

In Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, J. D. Vance wrote about his poor white family, particularly his grandparents, who moved from Kentucky to Ohio. Vance indicated that his grandparents’ middle-class neighbors viewed them suspiciously—“[t]hey had too many children, and they welcomed their extended families into their homes for too long” (2016, 31). Clearly to the neighbors the Vances and other Kentucky migrants were no more than marginally civilized, retaining traits from their rural roots, such as raising chickens in their back yard. When one of their friends from Kentucky engaged in this practice, local government officials complained. The officials and local neighbors found it particularly objectionable that

when his chicken population grew too large, he’d take a few of the old ones, wring their necks, and carve them up for meat right in his backyard. You can imagine a well-bred housewife watching out the window in horror as her Kentucky-born neighbor slaughtered chickens just a few feet away.

(VANCE 2016, 31–32)

The idea of stereotypes seems to suggest that the people who display their qualities are inferior, quite possibly deserving to remain so. Sociological analysis, however, emphasizes the role of outside circumstances, describing various conditions that put poor people at distinct disadvantage.

This chapter examines the history of American poverty, the official definition of poverty, contemporary living for poor Americans, and the enactment of welfare reform. In the upcoming section, it becomes apparent that poverty has always been a reality in American society.

A basic concept throughout the chapter is the cycle of poverty, which is a circular process in which a set of interrelating large structures, primarily institutions, lock individuals and families into a low-income condition. The concept is provocative because it analyzes poverty as a dynamic, interactive situation, and it also encourages speculations about attacking poverty—breaking the cycle. The reality that the concept describes unfolds in the following manner, focusing on several factors discussed in the chapter—in particular, schooling, employment, and housing. In the American system of public education, poor individuals generally attend inferior schools where the level of learning is low and the dropout rate is high. As a result such individuals often receive little effective preparation for employment, usually finding that only low-skill, low-paying jobs are available to them. If desperate for money, individuals sometimes turn to the informal sector for money, perhaps selling drugs or other illegal goods. Such ventures further alienate them from the mainstream economy because such sources of income neither develop mainstream skills nor can appear on a résumé. Low income makes it likely that people start their own families in poor districts, where their children grow up, attend inferior schools, and repeat the cycle. Such additional factors as racial discrimination, delinquent and criminal activity, and illegal drug use also promote repetition of the cycle of poverty (Marger 2010, 162–63; Rank and Hirschl 2001; Wilson 2009, 19–20).

In evaluating poor people, Americans often disregard or deemphasize limiting conditions in their lives. Blaming the victim is a stereotyping perspective that focuses on an individual’s personal deficiencies, downplaying or ignoring such structural influences as the family’s economic status or its access to quality education (Ryan 1976). In reality, however, there is a substantial number of poor adults who are working full time, doing all they can to raise their families out of poverty. A few years ago Sally Steenland, a writer and anti-poverty activist, declared

We’re talking about millions of people—8.9 million working adults, in fact—who work full time but are unable to keep their families out of poverty. More and more, the face of the poor is that of mothers and fathers struggling to feed, house, clothe, and educate their children—parents who are doing their best but still aren’t getting by.

(2013)

Poverty has been a reality since the early settlement of the colonies.

THE AMERICAN POOR THROUGH THE CENTURIES

During the colonial era, male breadwinners were often killed or seriously injured in warfare, fires, epidemics, or work-related accidents, leaving their families instantly impoverished (Nash 2004, 9–12).

By the early nineteenth century, periodic depressions and increasing mechanization on farms put many farmers, unskilled laborers, and craftsmen out of work. These former holders of stable employment became a “floating proletariat,” often traveling long distances to find jobs (Iceland 2006, 12; Katz 2003, 228; Trattner 1994, 22). Yet the myth prevailed that work was available for every able-bodied person. Some individuals attacked that belief. Referring to a group of 700 unemployed job seekers, Josiah Quincy, future president of Harvard University, told a roomful of scholars, “These men long for work; they anxiously beg for it; yet it is not to be found” (Katz 2003, 228).

In the middle nineteenth century, thousands of workers illustrated Quincy’s conclusion, traveling hundreds of miles to dig canals for a dollar a day. The laborers had to pay one-and-a-half to two dollars a week in room and board. They were working in marshy conditions which often made them sick. At the end of jobs, many returned to their families with little cash and their health ruined. However, other men were so desperate for money that they readily replaced those who departed (Katz 2003, 228).

In poor families everyone suffered. Throughout the nineteenth century, diseases spread quickly through the expanding urban centers. The recently arrived urban migrants moved into cheaply built homes that lacked such basic modern requirements as clean running water and toilets. New York City was not only the nation’s largest city but also its most unhealthy. It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that municipal leaders began to understand that their poor living conditions contributed to the inhabitants’ health hazards. At that time the city had a crude sewer system, but most people’s homes failed to connect with it. While many residents had outhouses that tended to be covered in filth, the poor resorted to using trenches dug outside their dwellings. All in all, the absence of sanitary conditions nurtured epidemics of infectious diseases—smallpox, typhoid, malaria, yellow fever, cholera, and tuberculosis. Other cities faced similar if somewhat less lethal conditions (Brackemyre 2018).

Young children were particularly vulnerable. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Philadelphia, poor infants died in greater numbers from intestinal diseases and parasites caused by spoiled food, polluted water, and poor hygiene than more affluent youngsters. Poor children were also much more likely to be dropped, burned, or scalded than their wealthier counterparts. One reason for these accidents was that members of poor families usually drafted other adults and older children into the workforce, leaving infants and toddlers either unattended or under young siblings’ precarious supervision. Poor women were also disproportionately victimized. They were three times as likely as other women to die in childbirth. In such situations babies seldom survived (Klepp 2004, 72–73).

Religious and political leaders took few measures to help the poor, holding many of them responsible for their poverty. Once the Puritans accepted Newton’s law of gravity, which denied God a role in that process, they concluded that the deity should not be held responsible for outcomes in the natural world. That outlook included the immediate society, where the Puritans asserted that individuals, not God, were responsible for results. In the case of poverty, an individual needed to be willing to work hard to escape its painful effects (Olivas 2004, 270–78).

Drawing inspiration from the Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601, colonial government officials distinguished between the “deserving poor” and the “undeserving poor.”

•The deserving poor, who include the aged, infants, and people with serious illness or physical disability, were incapable of work and thus qualified for charitable support and a sympathetic evaluation.

•The undeserving poor were individuals who simply avoid work out of apparent lethargy or because alcohol, drugs, or some other debilitating influence caused physical and/or mental decline. They were contemptible and needed to be coerced into the workforce (Iceland 2006, 12; Katz 2013). With the undeserving poor, a blaming-the-victim outlook prevailed.

In 1834 the Reverend Charles Burroughs made a statement typical of contemporary leaders who distinguished between the deserving and undeserving poor. Burroughs declared that God’s inscrutable wisdom caused individuals to be members of the deserving poor. “It is the result, not of our faults, but of our misfortunes … [The undeserving poor are] the consequence of willful error, of shameful indolence, of vicious habit” (Iceland 2006, 12).

Many nineteenth-and early twentieth-century leaders expressed deep concern and even fear of those they considered the undeserving poor. In 1854 Charles Loring Brace, the head of New York City’s Children Aid Society, declared that the country’s greatest future danger was the persistence of “an ignorant, debased, and permanently poor class in the great cities.” Brace warned that these people had the most contemptible passions and habits. He added, “They corrupt the lowest class of working-poor who are around them. The expenses of police, prisons, of charities and means of relief arise mainly from them” (Katz 1993, 9).

Support for the idea of the undeserving poor has carried into modern times. Some journalists and social scientists tend to focus on impoverished people’s moral bearing and ignore or at least downplay social and economic conditions that are likely to have a major impact on producing what they describe as their personal failings—for instance,

not having stable marriages, giving birth to too many children from too many fathers, not being reliable workers, and over-indulging in drugs and alcohol. They focus on momentary pleasures rather than long-term planning, and parents aren’t sufficiently willing to sacrifice to improve their children’s lives.

(LINKON 2015)

Debate about the fundamental sources of poverty is likely to continue far into the future.

The distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor was a salient concern when officials began providing poor people assistance.

Governmental Efforts to Reduce Poverty

In colonial times the general outlook was that men were supposed to work and support themselves and their families. Single mothers, whether widowed, deserted, or never married, were usually not expected to provide for their children, and they became the earliest beneficiaries of arrangements where town officials found household heads willing to supply food and shelter in exchange for indentured servitude. This aid was usually for brief periods, supplied until the mother could find a more permanent source of income. Only white women received this aid. Town officials usually monitored free women of color but seldom sponsored their relief. Often they were expelled from the town, forced to fend for themselves and their children (Handler and Hasenfeld 2007, 151–52).

From the 1830s state governments passed laws requiring counties to maintain “indoor relief”—poor farms or poorhouses which were sufficiently forbidding that they deterred all but the most desperate individuals and families from seeking help. Poorhouse occupants were generally designated “undeserving,” expected to work long, hard hours as a combination of punishment, education, and reform. By the 1850s most poorhouses had become highly dysfunctional organizations. They tended to be badly built, poorly heated and ventilated, and crowded, with a largely untrained, often incompetent director and staff. Rowdiness, even chaos, tended to prevail. It was hardly a positive setting, and, an additional reality was that the poorhouse administrators required the inmates, often women and children, to swear publicly that they were poverty-stricken and in desperate need of assistance. These same officials generally asserted fierce control over various basic issues in the inhabitants’ lives—their food, clothing, and general behavior. An historian declared, “Consequently, it was the most desperate, those with the least pride, who often populated poor facilities” (Blakemore 2018).

Nonetheless until the early twentieth century, poorhouses remained prominent, only falling out of favor when public officials and poverty workers started realizing that these structures not only failed to reduce poverty but often destabilized already weakened families (Iceland 2006, 12; Katz 2003, 241).

In 1910 the first welfare program known as Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) started in Illinois, and by the end of the decade most states had similar initiatives. State statutes were usually broad enough to include all divorced, separated, or deserted mothers. However, ADC officials almost always restricted recipients to “deserving” mothers, who supplied a “suitable home,” where the mother as homemaker provided a healthy setting for the moral, physical, and emotional development of her children. No explicit standards designated what constituted a suitable home, and as a result most local offices fell back on traditional assessments, usually excluding mothers with illegitimate children and families of color. Substantial numbers faced exclusion. In 1960, for example, when 79 of 1,000 American children qualified economically for ADC, only 30 (less than half) were received in the program. During its first three decades, federal assistance functioned much like a private charity, with staff members summarily dismissing any clients who violated its vast complex of regulations. By the middle 1960s, however, the National Welfare Rights Organization, with a membership primarily composed of African American women and functioning as part of the civil-rights movement, started challenging the welfare status quo, focusing on the administration of what in 1962 had become the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). A host of court cases occurred, and they helped eliminate some of the more punitive practices. However, over time recipients’ payments have actually declined as the states, which were supposedly responsible for the full amount, have generally failed to pay all of it (Gordon and Batlan 2018).

While it seldom received blame, the federal government played a significant role, legislating the National Housing Act of 1949 and the creation of urban renewal, which increased poverty and welfare dependence. Starting in the late 1940s, the political leaders in many cities began to take over functional if fairly low-income districts for largely private wealthy groups’ redevelopment of the area, forcing the inhabitants to move into what has often been isolated, decrepit housing, resulting in, as one law professor indicated about Miami’s Overtown neighborhood, “ruined property values, destroyed businesses, and … dreams [turned] to nightmares” (Troutt 2013).

Meanwhile in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the standards for acceptance into the welfare program started to change. As African American families moved from the South into northern cities, they often encountered unemployment and persistent poverty. At first officials resisted the addition of large numbers of traditionally “undeserving” families to the rolls. However, civil-rights organizations, welfare-rights groups, and some Democratic politicians applied pressure on the program’s leaders. The numbers were decisive. In 1960 there were 3.1 million ADC recipients. That total rose to 4.3 million AFDC members in 1965, 6.1 million in 1969, and 10.8 million in 1974 (Handler and Hasenfeld 2007, 156–58). By 1995 the federal-assistance emphasis focused on so-called “welfare reform” providing temporary aid and strongly encouraging or requiring adults’ entrance into the workforce. The total number of recipients decisively shrunk to 4.1 million individuals, with 1.1 million adults and nearly 3 million children (Falk 2016).

In that era the federal government initiated a program to fight poverty and seek to curtail welfare. It was the so-called “War on Poverty,” which President Lyndon B. Johnson proposed in recognition of the late President Kennedy’s support for such an initiative. Considerable optimism greeted the program’s kickoff, particularly from the president himself, who in his 1964 State of the Union address declared exuberantly, “Our aim is not only to relieve the symptoms of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it” (Matthews 2014).

Johnson was hardly the only optimist about the War on Poverty. Community organizer and writer Michael Harrington attended a party where many of the guests were prominent. A well-known union official asserted that the upcoming moon mission made most earthly challenges seem quite modest. If we could land on the moon, “why can’t we put an end to the slums?” Harrington added, “[Everyone] … there, knew that our capacities were boundless, that we could deal with ghettos as well as outer space” (1984, 2).

It turned out to be much simpler to land a man on the moon than to wage a successful war on poverty. Many problems arose. The program was controversial, with liberal and conservative politicians differing on how the money should be spent. Then after riots occurred in many cities, the officials running the program, fearing poor people’s militancy, tried to cut back local residents’ participation on agencies’ boards of directors, further arousing activists. In addition, from the beginning the War on Poverty was seriously underfunded. Not wanting to produce added taxation either for businesses or for the middle class, the Johnson administration had little funding to create jobs or income supports for the poor. Then as the Vietnam War escalated and became increasingly expensive, the modest support for that other war steadily declined (Seccombe 2007, 35–36).

As welfare rolls grew through the 1960s and 1970s, many Americans reacted negatively, assuming that all or nearly all welfare families were headed by undeserving mothers. A blaming-the-victim perspective was in vogue. In the 1980s President Reagan coined the term “welfare queen,” referring to African American unwed mothers who would allegedly have children to get on welfare and then would raise their children inadequately, leading to a repetition of the same process along with involvement in crime and drug abuse. The idea of the welfare queen is a combination of two negative perceptions—a contemporary image of the “undeserving poor” and a racist stereotype. Like President Reagan many critics of the welfare system tend to “race code” their analysis of it, tapping into Americans’ tendency to perceive the program’s deficiencies as produced by its black clientele (Gilens 1999; Williams 2000). Later in the chapter discussion emphasizes that such negative generalizations about welfare recipients are gross oversimplifications.

Besides Reagan many other political leaders became increasingly critical of the program, citing its rising cost. In both 1967 and 1988, Congress passed legislation seeking to bring welfare mothers into the workforce. In both instances, however, financial allotments were modest, meaning the prospective job holders received little training or schooling, or child-care subsidy (Handler and Hasenfeld 2007, 179–80). When Congress enacted welfare reform in 1996, the legislators might have assessed the reasons why the earlier programs failed. However, the politicians and their constituents appear to have had other priorities.

Bolstered by public support, conservative legislators fixated on the “welfare queen” issue. They were aware of the statistical pattern—for instance that in 1994, 79 percent of African American births were out-of-wedlock, and over half of those involved poor children, many of whom were on welfare. AFDC, the critics declared, was creating dependency and destroying families. Whether clients were black or white families, welfare had to cease. These female family heads needed to get jobs, thereby restoring morality and a work ethic. Public attention focused on this perception and ignored certain significant statistical trends—that African American women’s number of children was declining; that the total count of out-of-wedlock births and the welfare rolls had begun to drop (Handler and Hasenfeld 2007, 182). In the middle 1990s, however, the only statistics regarding welfare that impacted in the public arena were those supporting the “welfare queen” image and the urgent need to terminate AFDC.

In 1996 Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, and President Clinton signed it into law. Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) replaced AFDC. In running for the presidency, Bill Clinton had triumphantly pledged to “end welfare as we know it” (Semuels 2016a). The TANF program did just that, but critics quickly recognized that the reforms often devastated poor families, pushing parents abruptly and prematurely into the workforce and undermining their critical caregiving roles (Mink and Kornbluh 2016). Welfare reform, which we examine later in the chapter, had begun.

An analysis of this program makes it apparent that underlying realities affecting welfare recipients are often more complex than politicians and most other public players indicate. In fact, simply measuring poverty is complicated and controversial.

WHO IS POOR?

A necessary foundation for a discussion about poverty is a designation of what constitutes being poor. To begin, an absolute threshold of poverty is a cutoff point establishing the minimal level of income below which families are unable to purchase sufficient food, clothing, and shelter to maintain themselves in good health (Walker and Walker 1995, 655). The official US measure of poverty is an absolute standard employing a two-step process—assessing the minimal cost for a nutritionally healthy diet and then tripling that figure to compute the threshold for a poverty income. It was Mollie Orshansky of the Social Security Administration who did the initial research on which the official US measure of poverty is based. Orshansky used the “Economy Food Plan” from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to determine the expense of the lowestcost nutritious if monotonous diet. Then from the 1955 Household Food Consumption Survey, she learned that families of three or more spent about one-third of their after-tax income on food. Each year the poverty thresholds have been updated for inflation (Iceland 2006, 22). As Table 8.1 indicates, the 2017 thresholds range from $12,060 for one person to $41,320 for eight persons (Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation 2018).

This approach to measuring poverty has both strengths and weaknesses. A positive attribute is that it has provided a distinct designation of at least a major portion of the people who are poor. This situation has proved particularly useful for researchers who can generally feel confident that since the middle 1960s a consistent standard for establishing poverty thresholds has existed.

TABLE 8.1Poverty Threshold for 2017 by Size of the Family

One person	$12,060
Two people	$16,240
Three people	$20,420
Four people	$24,600
Five people	$28,780
Six people	$32,960
Seven people	$37,140
Eight people	$41,320

For each additional person, add $4,180 to the allotment.

Source: Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (2018).

On the other hand, the official US measure of poverty has received several severe criticisms. To begin, the measure focuses on food costs, which have dropped to about a sixth of the family budget. Meanwhile the US measure ignores such critical, often rising expenses as transportation costs, child-care fees, health-care expenditures, and rental payments. In addition, the current measure provides a single threshold for a given sized family, not acknowledging that significant variations in the cost of living exist around the country. Furthermore the mere existence of an official US measure of poverty draws a sharp line between the poor and everyone else. Is that realistic? What about the family with an income that falls $1 or $50 above the official threshold? Are they safely removed from poverty status, or are they also significantly endangered? (Handler and Hasenfeld 2007, 6; Iceland 2006, 23–24; Seccombe 2000, 1096–97).

A study by researchers at the Economic Policy Institute addressed such concerns. It found that in hundreds of communities across the nation the cost of basic expenses, which included funds for housing, child care, health care, food, transportation, and taxes, was about twice the poverty threshold for a four-member family (Books 2004, 22).

It appears hard to dispute two conclusions—that the official measure of poverty is outmoded and that were Mollie Orshansky, who always based her computations on current sources, active today, she would call for a significant revision of her antiquated scheme.

In short, the official US measure of poverty appears to be defective. In addition, it is apparent that the current approach understates the breadth and depth of poverty, perhaps lessening public concern about the issue and helping to tamp down welfare programs’ expenditure. Still, at the moment the official measure is all we have, and it does provide some informative data as Figure 8.1 displays.

A distinctly different approach for assessing the extent of poverty involves using an international perspective. In other developed countries, poor workers’ earnings are closer to their nonpoor peers than is the case in the United States. American employees in the bottom decile of job holders, in short, distinctly poor individuals, earn 47.4 percent of the median-earning worker, a lower percentage than their poor counterparts in 20 other nations, whose portions ranged from 72.8 percent in Ireland to 51.7 percent in Finland (Gould and Wething 2012). So what’s going on? Do the American poor have some distinctive inherent inferiority? The reality appears to involve an entirely different set of conditions. In countries where the poor do relatively well, a national priority emphasizing the curtailment of poverty has developed, with a variety of initiatives and organizations attacking it. In particular, the most successful countries have developed effective social-insurance programs involving cash assistance to low-income families that often prove effective in preventing them from falling into poverty (Economic Policy Institute 2018). As Table 8.2 indicates, the United States is near the top in the size of its child-poverty segment.

FIGURE 8.1Percentage of Americans Living in Poverty over Time

The percentage of Americans living below the poverty threshold has remained fairly stable over a recent 26-year period. After the Great Recession of 2008, the figure rose slightly.

Source: Statista (2018).

The statistics for the American poor are impressive, exceeding some developed nations’ total populations. In 2016 according to the official measure, the United States contained about 43.1 million poor people representing a 12.7 percent poverty rate. The official measure uses data from the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement sent to American homes, and as a result it does not include homeless people (Center for Poverty Research, University of California Davis 2017). Table 8.3 focuses on poor families’ racial characteristics. Frequently sociologists have divided low-income Americans into two classes—the working poor and the underclass.

In 2015, 8.6 million individuals comprised the working poor, representing 5.6 percent of the total workforce on the job at least 27 weeks a year but earning less than the official figure adjusted for the size of their households raising them above the poverty threshold. They have been less likely to be employed full time than part time—3.4 percent of the nation’s full-time job holders compared to 14.1 percent of the overall part-time workers. The working poor tend to be limited educationally, with more not completing high school than those who did. As a result they generally enter low-paying occupations requiring little schooling, particularly service work involving such jobs as waiters/waitresses, bartenders, maids, and child-care attendants. Women have tended to be more highly represented among the working poor, and African Americans and Hispanics have had twice the percentage representation of whites and Asians (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2016; 2017; Gould and Cooke 2015).

The work is usually physically demanding. Journalist Barbara Ehrenreich held three low-income jobs in order to experience working-poor employees’ lives. She wondered whether home owners were aware how physically taxing it was to clean people’s homes, making them “motel-perfect.” Her team of maids inhabited “a world of pain—managed by Excedrin and Advil, compensated for with cigarettes and, in one or two cases and then only on weekends, with booze” (Ehrenreich 2002, 89).

TABLE 8.3Poor Americans Divided by Major Racial Group and Hispanic Origin

	Number of Individuals Below the Poverty Level (in Thousands)1	Percent of the Group That Is Poor
Total	43,123	13.5%
Asian	2,078	11.4
Black	10,020	24.1
Hispanic	12,133	21.4
White	28,566	11.5

Note

1.The U.S. Census Bureau provided the poverty levels for families used in this table. The thresholds adjusted for size of family are fairly similar to those shown in Table 8.1. Just to be clear: The total provided here of 43,123 means 43.1 million individuals below the poverty level.

In 2015 whites represented over half of the poor people belonging to the groups represented in this table. However, blacks’ and Hispanics’ percentage of their members living in poverty was higher.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau (2016, Table 2 (page 1 of 2). “Persons below Poverty Level, by Selected Characteristics, Race, and Hispanic Origin: United States, Selected Years 1973–2015”).

A study using data from the Current Population Survey indicated that disabled individuals are more likely to be poor than nonpoor (Brucker, Mitra, Chaitoo, and Mauro 2015). In many instances they find themselves facing jobs where their disabilities rule them out or prospective employers prematurely consider them ineligible. It can be a lonely, even despairing existence, with able-bodied observers likely to be disparaging, not appreciating the severe challenges disabled individuals often must face in their daily routine. For example, in a report on poverty and disability, a physically disabled man in his 30s explained:

My work is located outside my local zone which requires long wait times at transfer stops. To go to work it could take me 2 hours-plus to travel 9 miles and I have to call the day before to arrange this at 6:00 a.m.

(VALLAS AND FREMSTAD 2014)

Can members of this social class move a comfortable distance from poverty? One analysis suggested a “perfect lineup of favorable conditions” is necessary—job-related attributes such as a distinct set of work skills and a position that provides both a living wage and prospects of promotion; personal qualities like a focused sense of purpose, solid selfesteem, and freedom from illness, addiction, and debt; and finally, if necessary, assistance from family, friends, and government agencies. Any gap in this array of conditions means the people in question are unprotected and are likely to slip back into poverty (Shipler 2004, 4–5). Researcher David K. Shipler indicated that an impoverished, minimally educated individual facing the mainstream work world is like the prospect of “playing quarterback with no helmet, no padding, no training, and no experience, behind a line of hundredpound weaklings.… [A] poor man or woman gets sacked again and again” (2004, 5).

Would raising the minimum wage make a positive contribution? Clearly the public supports the idea, with 73 percent, nearly three-fourths of the population, endorsing the idea, and organized labor and anti-poverty groups committed to it (DeSilver 2017; Pew Research Center 2015a). In another survey 52 percent favored raising the figure to $15 an hour—which according to the prominent British magazine The Economist, given the US’s overall wealth, should be an appropriate amount for its minimum wage. The value of the minimum wage in purchasing power reached its maximum in 1968, declining by nearly 10 percent in the years between 2009 and 2017 (DeSilver 2017).

While state and local laws protect the majority of low-income workers from the federal minimum ($7.25 in 2018), such increases tend to represent a modest improvement, with a substantial number potentially benefiting from new legislation to raise the minimum wage. In particular:

•A figure of even $12 an hour would overcome the erosion of value for the minimum wage that largely occurred in the 1980s. Obviously $15 an hour would have an even more positive effect.

•If Congress revised the hourly rate to $12 an hour, fully 35.1 million workers, meaning more than one in four full-time employees, would benefit.

•Once the increases were phased in, the average job holder would receive a salary increase of about $2,300 a year.

•The individuals who would benefit from a federal raise are generally their family’s chief breadwinners, earning over half the family income (Cooper 2015).

The poor people who do not work often fall into the underclass category. This poorest unit contains a set of individuals and families which comprise about 12 percent of the population and have a yearly income of about $15,000 or lower. Few underclass members have completed high school, their job skills are limited, and many have physical and/or mental disabilities. Such traits make it unlikely that they will have successful work histories (Gilbert 2011, 244, 248–49).

In the general population in 2015, 76.2 percent (over three-fourths) of working-age adults between the years 18 and 64 were members of the workforce. In contrast, among poor people the figure was barely half—38.8 percent. In 41 of 50 states along with Washington DC, over half of the working-age poor population was not employed. They gave several reasons for not working. About one-third indicated they were ill or disabled, another quarter cited caring for family members, and additional factors involved attendance at school, retirement, and the inability to find a job (Dalaker, Falk, and McCarty 2016, 10; Employment Policies Institute 2016).

While various critics have suggested that the term “underclass” is cold, impersonal, or even racist, often targeting blacks and Hispanics, its use has remained prevalent, recognizing the harsh reality that confronts the poorest of the poor (Gans 2010, 104; Reed 2016, 263–65).

Many underclass members believe that a steady job is essential and yet find that their current circumstances make it impossible to obtain one. Some individuals, however, find such a goal fairly attainable. For instance, some high-school seniors might possess the potential to enter the job world but lack the information and guidance to make the move; high-school teachers and counselors can provide critical assistance here.

Eventually a certain segment of the underclass enters the informal sector, where, as noted in Chapter 3, government neither monitors nor taxes economic activity. Participants in these locations have certain, sometimes dubious, advantages over their mainstream counterparts, which include:

•The avoidance of taxes because officially they receive no income.

•Without income reported, individuals might elude such financial responsibilities as child support or debt repayment.

•Greater flexibility in arranging work hours and the pursuit of selfdirected job activities than in the mainstream economy.

•Few or no formal educational qualifications or background checks required (Nightingale and Wandner 2011, 2).

Sociologist William Julius Wilson suggested that the more marginal a neighborhood, the less restraint its members encounter to engaging in behavior that is illegal or widely considered inappropriate. Whether they are involved in street vending, unlicensed child care, drug dealing, illegal gambling, or prostitution, participants in the informal economy become increasingly marginalized from the mainstream world, removed from its demands for tight scheduling and discipline and also its opportunities (Wilson 1997, 69–75).

PHOTO 8.1 The young man who is selling drugs functions within the informal sector.

Source: Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock.

Both the underclass and the working poor are likely to experience a range of family problems.

THE PAIN OF FAMILY POVERTY

For poor Americans the struggle is unrelenting. In their study of working-poor families in five cities, social workers Roberta Reimer Iversen and Annie Laurie Armstrong commented on their respondents, declaring that “[i]n the richest large country in the world, they work full time year round, but they still do not earn enough to support their families” (Iversen and Armstrong 2006, 1).

Low-income individuals suffer structural vulnerability, meaning a distinct likelihood of encountering major difficulties or threats because of such deficient capital resources as money, education, or important information (Rank 2004a; Summers, Quandt, Talton, Galván, and Arcury 2015). Certain difficulties are common in these families:

•Poor children are more likely than their more affluent peers to suffer a lengthy list of health problems: These include mothers’ inadequate prenatal care; low birth weight; high infant mortality; iron deficiency; high levels of toxic lead; a clear risk of hunger and malnutrition; and elevated rates of heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, cancer, asthma, and dental problems (Handler and Hasenfeld 2007, 264–66; Iversen and Armstrong 2006, 62–63; McEwen and McEwen 2017; Seccombe 2007, 99; Zuberi and Teixeira 2017). The unhealthiness poor children face, however, goes beyond a list of diseases and destructive conditions. Sue Books, an educator whose research focuses on poor children, wrote, “Perhaps most devastating is the sometimes hidden but nevertheless debilitating anxiety created by living in crowded, run-down spaces with chronic shortages of money and fears of eviction, family dissolution, and random street violence” (Books 2004, 37–38).

•Another distinct vulnerability involves the quality of parental relations:As a result of the financial and psychological stresses associated with poverty, poor parents compared to their more affluent counterparts are inclined to be less nurturing and more authoritative and to administer harsher physical discipline (Dryden 2013; Seccombe 2002, 387). In addition, low-income families provide less intellectual stimulation than more affluent families even when parents’ education, ethnic groups, and family structure are statistically controlled (McLoyd 1998). The sheer volume of communication between adults and children varies markedly by class. A study of language use for children aged one to three found that parents in professional jobs used about 2,200 words per hour speaking to their children. Working-class mothers and fathers averaged about 1,300 words per hour. Finally welfare parents, the representatives of the poor in this research, used less than half the working-class figure—about 600 words (Barr and Parrett 2007, 113).

However, it doesn’t need to be that way. The organization Save the Children has emphasized that when poor children start school, they are as much as 18 months educationally behind their middle-class peers, whose parents have read and taught them more extensively. To lessen or eliminate that gap, Save the Children has developed a plan, hiring women from local poor communities to contact pediatricians and hospitals to obtain the names of pregnant women and young mothers with whom they can work. The coordinators provide information about a well-balanced diet, health care, and age-appropriate information, particularly early schooling. A recent supporter of the program visited one of the organization’s centers and spoke to a client. She

told me her girlfriends believe that the best thing to do for infants is to lay them in front of the TV, so they’ll be quiet and “learn.” But thanks to Save the Children, she is the one who has learned—to sing to her baby, to read to him, and to look at him when she speaks to him. I watched as she “narrated” to her son what she was doing, talking sweetly to him as she changed his diaper, got him dressed, and fed him.

(GARNER 2014)

Such a program can go a long way to compensating for the educational disadvantages poor children often face as they start school.

•In addition, a significant perception problem exists with poor single-parent families: Researchers, social workers, and government officials interacting with such units often fail to appreciate the significance of extended family networks. An extended family network is an interrelated kinship group which plays a role in members’ care, particularly children’s health and well-being. In poor African American and Latino single-parent families, aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents often make significant contributions ( Jones, Zalot, Foster, Sterrett, and Chester 2007; Sarkisian, Gerena, and Gerstel 2006). When extended family members, notably grandparents, provide residences for children, such arrangements tend to be quite brief, with about half lasting a year or less and occurring because of such emergencies as parents’ illness, loss of job, or the breakup of their marriage or cohabiting relationship. In general, extended family relations can be highly productive, pooling resources to keep members above the poverty level or at least reducing costs—for instance, when grandparents babysit, it not only frees parents to enter the job world but makes paid child care unnecessary ( JuelfsSwanson 2014). White middle-class outsiders tend to focus on the nuclear-family unit, failing to recognize the important role that extended kin sometimes play. These relatives can be very useful when they are trying to help poor children with various problems.

In poor families, parents and older siblings seldom serve as models for success. In Jay MacLeod’s study of young men in a public-housing project, he learned that only two parents had graduated from high school and that those who found work could only obtain menial, unstable, low-paying jobs. Based on their own experience, the parents had distinctly modest aspirations for their children. MacLeod asked his respondents what kind of jobs mothers or fathers wanted them to do for a living, and they indicated that parents’ concern was not what they did but simply that they were employed (MacLeod 2009, 58).

While all poor families are more vulnerable than their more affluent counterparts, certain parental traits increase the extent of it. For instance, when low-income parents start their families in their teens or drop out of school, they are likely to have difficulties establishing themselves solidly in the job world. The economic impact is obvious—sustained, often extreme poverty. As a result these children are likely to suffer such health threats as high infant-mortality rates, asthma and other chronic diseases, poor nutrition and growth opportunities, limited access to high-quality health care and immunization, and above-average exposure to obesity and its dangers (American Academy of Pediatrics 2013).

Another vulnerability involves single-parent families, most of which are female-headed and are more than twice as likely to be living in poverty than American families overall (DeNavas-Walt and Proctor 2015, 44). A journalist noted that those who start working are likely to find themselves “only one crisis away from losing that job. One broken car, one sick kid, one court date can upend the fragile system they’d created for themselves” (Semuels 2015).

An additional difficulty for single-parent families is that the majority receive no child support. Reasons for this outcome include fathers’ disappearance, their commitment to new partners and children, their inability to obtain employment because of limited literacy or insufficient job skills, or, though working, too little income to pay required child support (Iversen and Armstrong 2006, 70–71; National Conference of State Legislatures 2012).

Not only does poverty promote these families’ vulnerabilities, it reduces the likelihood of marriage and the formation of an economically secure partnership (Rank 2004b, 479). Without steady work adults—men in particular—commit less strongly to their partners and children. Sociologist William Julius Wilson spoke with a researcher who had conducted interviews with inner-city fathers over three decades—from a fairly prosperous era when factory jobs were plentiful in low-income areas to a time when unemployment had become widespread. The researcher stressed that at the later date family members were less involved with each other—in particular, less likely to encourage fathers’ relationships with their children. In addition, he explained that compared to the earlier era, “I found no instance … of families urging their children to marry or even to live together” (Wilson 1997, 102). Among the poor, however, successful families are quite common.

Decidedly one quality is apparent among successful poor families. Resiliency refers to effective adjustment to adversity—the ability to survive when facing risks or to rebound following a crisis (Seccombe 2002, 388). Various studies concluded that certain poor parents’ practices help create resilient families. These practices include frequent displays of warmth, affection, and emotional support; clear, reasonable expectations for children coupled with definite but not overly harsh discipline; the development of specific family routines and shared celebrations; and the maintenance of common values about money management and the use of leisure. In resilient poor families, other relatives step in to fill the parental role effectively if mothers and fathers are unavailable (Cauce, Stewart, Rodriguez, Cochran, and Ginzler 2003, 355; Owens and Shaw 2003, 273; Seccombe 2002, 388). Community-based programs providing family therapy sometimes emphasize the concept of resiliency, offering information about crisis and stress management and helping poor parents and their children identify concrete sources of stress while both developing strategies for coping with them and appreciating that in this realm advancement is a gradual, often painstaking process (Wray 2015, 228).

Poor children growing up in resilient families have received significant support for doing well as they enter the social world—starting in day care programs and then in schooling.

POOR CHILDREN’S CHILD CARE AND SCHOOLING

Some critics assert that impoverished parents are often unconcerned about their children’s education. However, a study of low-income families in five cities indicated that poor parents considered that schooling provided their children a major avenue for obtaining social mobility and avoiding the dire struggles they themselves had endured. Elizabeth Seabrook, a respondent, who was struggling to move her children to better schools outside her low-income district, declared, “Education is so important and I will tell that to my children until I can’t breathe anymore” (Iversen and Armstrong 2006, 176). Both child care and schooling often provide major challenges when families are poor.

Child Care in Poverty Areas

Because of cost or irregular working hours (evenings or weekends), poor parents are more likely than their more affluent counterparts to use relatives as caretakers, particularly grandparents. Not surprisingly research has indicated that poor families residing in locales with more extensive governmental spending on day care are more likely to use center-based facilities than their counterparts that are less well supported financially (Child Trends 2016a; Mather 2016). It can be a highly productive decision. The early years are crucial in the developmental process, and researchers have discovered that center-based day care is more effective in promoting childhood cognitive development than informal options (Bernal and Keane 2011; Shpancer 2017). Figure 8.2 indicates that in the United States over time poor children have been distinctly less likely than children overall to enter center-based child care.

Research indicates the quality of care children receive affects their development. One revealing study assessed the impact of different programs on children whose single mothers had recently left welfare for work. Conducting this research over five years with 451 families in three cities, the investigators found that on various cognitive measures involving such issues as the children’s ability to reason and to solve problems, those in center-based programs scored consistently higher than those in informal care (Handler and Hasenfeld 2007, 276). Compared to their nonpoor peers, poor children are less likely to attend center-based programs, and as Table 8.4 indicates, the result is that they tend to enter school with less developed school-related skills. Like the quality of child care for low-income families, the effectiveness of schooling links to finances.

FIGURE 8.2Percentage of Children from the Overall Population versus the Poor in Center-Based Child Care, 1995–2012

Compared to families in general, poor families between 1995 and 2005 were about 10 percent less likely and, between 2007 and 2012, 15 percent less likely to send their children to center-based child care. What these data do not address is that, in addition, when the poor do patronize center-based child care, it tends to be relatively cheap and as a result fairly low quality.

Source: National Center for Education Statistics, National Household Education Survey (2014, “Appendix 1: Percentage of Children, Ages 3 to 6, in Center-based Care, 1995–2012”).

Poor Children’s Education

Educator David Fulton indicated that the most important question to raise about American schooling is whether poor children have the same chance of obtaining a quality education as their more affluent counterparts. Fulton responded, “For most industrialized countries, the answer is yes. For us, it’s an embarrassing no” (2000). At the core of the embarrassment lies the American system of public-school funding, where a substantial amount of a school district’s financing comes from that locale. The result is often significant disparities in districts’ school funding, which do not occur in other westernized nations where the federal government distributes funds more equitably. The US system has powerful negative impacts.

FUNDING INEQUITIES In its report on school funding, investigators for the Education Law Center at Rutgers indicated that in most states the combination of district and state subsidy for education was sufficiently low for poor students that no possibility existed that their standardized test scores would reach the distinctly modest national averages. In Arizona, Mississippi, California, and Alabama, in fact, scores in poor districts were often so low that it would require $14,000 to $16,000 per student to boost the numbers into an acceptable range. A few states, notably Massachusetts and New Jersey, stood out as achieving decent test scores across school districts, including those that were poor (Baker, Weber, Srinkanth, Kim, and Atzbi 2017).

In the Chicago area, a massive discrepancy in district funding exists. In 2013 the Chicago Ridge School District, where about two-thirds of students are low income, received a local payment of $9,794 per student per year while in the Rondout District 72, an affluent suburb, it was nearly three times as much—$28,639. State funding slightly compensated the Chicago Ridge School District for their minimal funding, but the difference remained considerable. One factor producing the difference is that the Rondout District 72 contains many successful businesses generating extensive taxes. Another issue, however, is that affluent districts tend to be segregated economically, quite systematically keeping out low-income people and, as Chapter 6 indicates, promoting the ecology of class and the system of public-schooling funding just described (Turner, Khrais, Lloyd, Olgin, Isensee, Vevea, and Carsen 2016).

Because of their funding disadvantage, poorer school districts lose out in several ways. First, they cannot afford to compete for highly educated, more experienced teachers, who are usually the best prepared instructors to encourage a vibrant, nurturing classroom (Favero 2017; Hanford 2017; Mader 2015).

In poor districts middleand high-school math teachers are particularly scarce. Cierra, who lived in a poverty-stricken rural area in West Virginia, had a string of substitute teachers in the ninth and tenth grades. She was forthright in articulating the extent of her ignorance. “You can hand me, like, a freshman-year math and I’m like, ‘Um, no, I don’t know, I’m sorry’ ” (Hanford 2017). The deficiency is likely to be similar in poor urban districts. Several years ago the math supervisor for New Haven’s middle and high schools told me that each year one of her most difficult tasks was to locate math teachers for poorly funded schools. Sometimes she could not find instructors to fill the positions, and the courses limped along with a succession of marginally qualified substitute teachers (Doob 2005, 200).

Another trait of poor schools that disadvantages them is class size. Wealthier districts are able to afford smaller classes, which appear to promote better learning, especially in early grades than for poor and minority students (Biddle and Berliner 2002; Page and Jackson 2013). A survey found that the respondents considered the best way to promote school reform is to reduce school size. But to date evidence doesn’t pinpoint what is the most productive option to improve public schools in poor areas. A specialist in public policy observed that “the magnitude of the impact must be weighed against the impact of other reforms. For example, would paying higher salaries to retain a high-quality teacher workforce be money better spent?” (Woods 2015).

Poverty hurts schools in other ways. Because of economic limitations and discrimination, low-income families tend to concentrate in selected areas that are already poor and dilapidated. They also tend to be highly segregated. A pair of writers noted:

Underscoring the breadth of the challenge, the economic segregation of minority students persists across virtually all types of cities, from fast-growing Sunbelt places like Austin, Denver, Dallas, and Charlotte to struggling Rust Belt communities like Detroit, Cleveland, and Milwaukee, to the nation’s largest metropolitan centers, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston.

(BOSCHMA AND BROWNSTEIN 2016)

In about half the 100 largest cities, black and Hispanic students attend schools where at least three-fourths of the children are poor or low income. In 2016 throughout the nation’s public schools, nearly 41 percent of children were in poverty-ridden schools while whites have much less frequently suffered this situation—with barely a fifth as many, namely 8.5 percent in such schools (National Equity Atlas 2018).

In segregated, poor schools both average African American and Hispanic students score well below their white counterparts on standardized tests involving math and reading performance. Although various explanations for the gaps as well efforts to remedy them have been tried, they persist (Reardon, Robinson, and Weathers 2016). In fact, Richard Rothstein, a distinguished economist, suggested that this challenge is greater than most observers appreciate. He wrote:

We cannot substantially improve the performance of the poorest … [students of color] by school reform alone. It must be addressed primarily by improving the social and economic conditions that bring too many children to school unprepared to take advantage of what even the best schools have to offer.

(ROTHSTEIN 2014)

A set of researchers developed a concept to characterize many of the areas containing low-income students. An urban war zone is a poor, crime-and gang-ridden district numerically dominated by people of color in which deteriorated, violent, even war-like conditions and underfunded, largely ineffective schools promote inferior academic performance, including irregular attendance and disruptive or noncompliant classroom behavior (Easley 2016; Espinosa and Laffey 2003; Garbarino, Dubrow, Kostelney, and Pardo 1992; Good 2012).

In a study of a low-income elementary school, researchers found that students normally required to sit quietly and remain immobile in large groups became engaged and attentive when provided computer tasks, which addressed students’ interests and adjusted to their abilities (Espinosa and Laffey 2003, 151). However, such classroom reforms will not change the schools or districts in urban war zones, and all too often both politicians and media personnel manage to publicize urban war zones’ most lurid qualities and activities, using racial and ethnic stereotypes to accelerate the public’s sense of alienation. In this regard Chicago appears to receive extensive attention, sometimes from prominent people. A journalist noted:

Whenever President Trump or one of his boosters invokes Chicago as a shorthand for urban violence, we hear the racialized subtext loud and clear: Black and brown people here are out of control. You can almost hear the collective exasperated sigh ripple through our neighborhoods as they say Chicago is worse than Afghanistan, or hell, or whatever their default for the worst place in the world might be.

(MOORE 2017)

The debits of less-well-funded schools produce further disadvantages for poor students, often locking them into the cycle of poverty.

Tracking in Poverty Districts

Tracking is a process where educators evaluate students and then place them in programs with a curriculum that supposedly is appropriate for their abilities (Kohli and Quartz 2014;LeTendre, Hofer, and Shimizu 2003, 43–44). Criticism of tracking has been widespread, leading to such reforms as permitting low-tracked students more course options. Nonetheless students continue to be classified into tracks according to their short-term performance, and courses continue to be labeled, designating students’ eligibility to enter them. In fact, many schools’ systems use math performance as a basis for allocating students’ placement in other courses. While no research findings support this approach, it is likely, given low-income schools’ frequent scarcity of effective math teachers, to prove particularly disadvantageous to poor students (Grusky 2001, 575; Moore 2001, 539).

Overall whether they are by themselves in large inner-city schools or in a multi-class curriculum, poor students plagued by educational disadvantage dating back to infancy are likely to end up in general-education courses with watered-down offerings like “opportunity math” (designed for students who cannot learn algebra) or vocational preparation. As a rule the slow-learning tracks receive the most inexperienced teachers, who are likely to use the most mundane, unchallenging instructional techniques such as worksheets and drills (Barr and Parrett 2007, 144). These students have little reason to feel positive about their academic potential. Considerable recent research about tracking emphasizes the conclusion that within such a system, students readily accept the placement they receive, believing that the assessment of their capabilities is correct. A researcher on the topic wrote, “[The] bourgeoning literature assumes that adolescents make their appraisals in response to the continuing provision of information from various sources, such as parents, teachers, peers, and the mass media” (Karlson 2015, 117).

The social reproduction produced by tracking involves not only social class but also race and ethnicity, with as a rule white and Asian students ending in higher tracks and their black and Hispanic peers in the lower levels. In New Jersey Walter Fields, an African American parent, observed tracking first-hand, eventually petitioning the principal to get his daughter, who in spite of having the requisite grades and standardized test scores, didn’t receive the teacher’s recommendation for placement into an advanced math class. Commenting on the issue, Fields noted:

Now we arrive at the point—in 2014—where you can literally walk down a hallway in Columbia High School and look in a classroom and know whether it’s an upper-level … [track] or a lower-level … [track] based on the racial composition of the classroom.

(KOHLI AND QUARTZ 2014)

Poor racial and ethnic minorities are particularly likely to encounter ferocious stereo-types that help thrust them into low tracks.

When poor students fail to master basic skills, they are kept in lower tracks and are sometimes forced to repeat the grade. Caught in a debilitating educational cycle, these students almost never catch up with their age peers and often do not advance from the slow-learning track. In many states underachieving students, who are disproportionately poor, male, and minority-group members, have been removed from regular facilities and placed in alternative low-performing schools where the goal is behavior modification, not educational achievement. A Texas research program involving over 100,000 K-12 students found that these low-achieving research subjects received only two hours of instruction a day, obtained no evaluation for reading levels, and were placed in a multi-grade classroom (Barr and Parrett 2007, 28).

Tracking provides a prime illustration of the self-fulfilling prophecy, namely an incorrect definition of a situation that comes to pass because people accept the incorrect definition of the situation and act on it to make it become true (Doob 2000, 272–73). Addressing such a reality, sociologist Kristian Bernt Karlson used the National Educational Longitudinal Study to examine data about eighthand tenth-grade students in math (6,013) and English (7,217), with 3,169 overlapping in the two samples. Overall, she found students were responsive to tracking information, using it to help formulate their expectations about their extent of future educational success and sometimes revising their middle-school evaluation based on their high-school placement. Karlson noted, “As expected, these revisions are particularly pronounced when placement is consistent across subjects, and they exist primarily when placements in high school contradict tracking experiences in middle school” (2015, 135). Mike, a black student in a school where tracking was prevalent, experienced such a shift and explained it this way. He said, “I used to do good. I got all A’s in grammar school. Now I’m doing shitty. I guess I started out smart and got stupider” (MacLeod 2009, 102). Mike’s response was quite typical of low-tracked students, downplaying the impact of tracking and other structural vulnerabilities, taking the responsibility fully on himself, and virtually assuring the like-lihood of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Like tracking, testing has also victimized low-income children.

High-Stakes Testing and Other Destructive Trends in Poor Schools

In the 1940s Henry Chauncey, the founder of the Educational Testing Service, suggested that multiple-choice variations on intelligence tests could be used to sort individuals into categories based on their abilities. Chauncey had so much faith in these tests that he believed that the results should determine both the schooling and the jobs individuals in different categories should receive. Willingness to use standardized tests was not widespread, but Chauncey believed in the system—that these tests provided the most successful means of determining students’ academic potential. An important step Chauncey took to increase their use was to approach James Conant, Harvard’s president, with an early version of the Standardized Aptitude Test (SAT), convincing him “that the test was an accurate measure of intelligence, not just of the quality of a test taker’s education. Harvard began using the test for scholarship students in 1934 and, starting in 1941, required it for all applicants” (cptv Frontline 2014). Chauncey’s faith in SATs was so extensive that he became convinced that the existing elite should be replaced, with those at the top of the economic and political structures being the individuals who scored the highest in his tests (Afflerbach 2002, 349–50). It seems unlikely that members of the power elite ever endorsed such a plan. In educational circles, however, Chauncey was influential.

It appears that Chauncey was the first advocate of high-stakes testing, a situation in which the outcome of a standardized test becomes the sole basis for determining students’ educational progression (Dworkin 2005, 170). In modern times such testing became prevalent with the establishment of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002, requiring states to administer standardized reading and math tests to students in the third to eighth grades and imposing increasingly harsh punishments on schools that failed to show “adequate yearly progress” in their results. Poor students, in particular, often must spend considerable time on standardized-test preparation that limits what many educators consider effort better spent on such more creative topics as hands-on projects and group interactive activities (Mulholland 2015). The National Research Council conducted a nine-year study, concluding that while the emphasis on high-stakes testing and other standardized testing yielded little improvement in learning, it produced considerable negative effects on students, teachers, and schools (Hout and Elliott 2011).

Many teachers are ambivalent about standardized testing and high-stakes testing in particular. They want their students to do well, recognizing that good scores are important for success in school. However, studies have shown that teachers feel the emphasis on testing hurts students’ performance in the classroom. First, they are bothered about the time that standardized-test preparation takes from their own curriculum. For many teachers a strong suspicion prevails that preparation for the standardized tests and the tests themselves provide students few learning benefits. Second, particularly in poor areas where test scores have generally been low, school officials have an additional concern (Barone 2006, 154–55; Hoffman, Assaf, and Paris 2001). They are often fearful of high-stakes testing, realizing the results “may be used to trigger penalties for schools, including negative public ratings, the replacement of staff members, or even closure” (Great Schools Partnership 2014).

Not surprisingly research shows that teachers tend to be unenthusiastic about supporting standardized testing. In a phone survey of 1,500 teachers, 42 percent indicated that an emphasis on improved standardized-test scores had a “negative effect” on the classroom while 15 percent, barely a third as many, felt such an outcome would be “positive” (Walker 2014). Teachers are hardly alone in their criticism. In a national telephone poll of 1,000 adults, a distinct majority—64 percent of the general public and 67 percent of public-school parents—indicated that schools put too much emphasis on standardized testing (PDK/Gallup Poll 2015).

Whether the testing situation involves the high-stakes variety or some other form of standardized tests, poor schools and their students are the most consistent victims of this practice. Critics have emphasized that:

•Students should not be held to the mainstream test standards when they attend schools that are grossly underfunded and possess many uncertified teachers, large classes, outdated texts, and limited access to computers and other modern technology. In particular, poor schools are less likely to afford the actual books, supplies, and practice exams that expressly prepare students for standardized tests.

•An implication of the previous point is that because of the especially disadvantaged conditions they suffer, poor students over time will steadily lose ground in testing to their more affluent peers (Barone 2006, xv–xvii; Dworkin 2005, 172). The situation is likely to be very stressful. One observer, who was both a parent and a teacher said, “Families who are struggling financially are in … difficult situations because they’ve been pressured to raise the scores to keep their schools open,” (Knefel 2015).

In the first quarter of the twentieth century, several prominent psychologists administered early versions of intelligence tests in English to various European groups, interpreting lower scores for Italians, Jews, or Poles as indications of biological inferiority. The fact that many members of these groups knew little or no English was simply ignored (Kamin 1974, 15–19). In a similar way, many advocates of high-stakes testing downplay or overlook poor children’s abundant disadvantages.

Besides such practices as high-stakes testing and tracking, poor children’s everyday routine is debilitating.

THE PEDAGOGY OF POVERTY Educator Martin Haberman concluded that in the academically undernourished context of poor schools a pedagogy of poverty prevails—a set of ineffective, even destructive teaching practices often imposed on poor children. These practices include:

•Teacher-centered discussions and activity: Studies have demonstrated that among young children the effective learning process requires frequent hands-on assignments. Such practices compel students to be actively involved. In contrast, a distinctly passive learning experience dominates if the teacher directs all or most of the coursework, telling a largely noninteractive group what to do.

•Low-quality schooling coupled with low expectations: Teachers in poor areas, many of whom are new and inexperienced, often do not think their students can perform at a high level. In many primary schools, children spend a significant amount of time making collages and posters and coloring pictures as intended demonstrations of “hands-on learning.” Meanwhile basic reading and math skills receive scant attention. Within a few years, many of those students end up tracked into general-education courses and away from the more advanced academic offerings (Barr and Parrett 2007, 30–31).

The concept pedagogy of poverty is useful because it encourages an observer to look beyond a blaming-the-victim perspective and to appreciate the specific conditions affecting outcomes in most poor classrooms. School officials’ low expectations appear to be a fundamental prerequisite for the pedagogy of poverty. While new teachers might not share this outlook, their colleagues’ positions on the issue and students’ performances are likely to bring the recent arrivals’ expectations into line. In the course of his research on poor young men, Jay MacLeod interviewed Bruce Davis, a young, enthusiastic guidance counselor in the Occupational Education Program. Davis predicted that like their relatives they were headed for unskilled work. He said, “They’re generally from homes where people are laborers … [K]ids who go to college are from homes where parents went to college. That’s how it works, it seems to me” (MacLeod 2009, 116). Davis’s expectation for his students was low—that they would be models of social reproduction, assuming the same occupational positions their parents have held. Teachers like Davis are not likely to feel motivated to challenge the pedagogy of poverty.

Poor children’s parents, in fact, can help challenge social reproduction in the schools.

POOR PARENTS’ PARTICIPATION IN SCHOOLING A study of 88 third-and fourth-grade children and their parents from the middle, working, and poor classes found that almost all the middle class, less than half the working class, and only a third of the poor parents reported that they knew a teacher (Horvat, Weininger, and Lareau 2003, 330). This finding suggests that if poor children need teachers’ assistance, their parents are often not well positioned to initiate it.

Since teachers are often out of touch with their poor students’ parents, they tend to be unaware of the long work hours and inflexible schedules many of them face, simply concluding that the parents, even when problems occur in school, are uninvolved with their children’s education (Iversen and Armstrong 2006, 197). Data drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth involving 1,878 families found that when comparing children at risk for low scores in reading or math or for behavioral problems, poor mothers were much less likely than their counterparts in more affluent groups to have paid leave or flexible schedules (Heymann and Earle 2000). Thus these poor mothers had less chance to meet with teachers or take other steps to help their children.

Because of their demanding work lives and limited relations with teachers, many poor parents feel isolated from their children’s school. In Iversen and Armstrong’s study of low-income families in four cities, Aida, whose eight-year-old son Juan had both behavioral and academic problems, complained that the teacher provided little detailed information about his performance. As a result when she tried to tutor him, she had no idea how to go about it. Aida explained that “when I pick him up and bring him [home], he would sit there and look somewhere else. I am like ‘I am telling you to read this word’ ” (Iversen and Armstrong 2006, 180).

An international investigation that examined 34 studies of poor schools found that besides a deficient environment supporting learning (such as a dearth of books, computers, and other essential tools for learning), parents’ input was often deficient—“lack of parental academic involvement, authoritative parenting, lower maternal education” (Banerjee 2016). Research evidence suggests that low-income parents’ involvement in and support for their children’s schooling can offset the negative elements of education in their locale. To help succeed educationally, poor children can benefit from parents as active role models for learning—that their extent of involvement is a better predictor of their contribution than their social-class background—but in poverty-stricken neighbor-hoods mothers and fathers are often without high-school degrees and thus lack the educational foundation to provide a positive impact in this regard (Carter 2013).

Since low-income and affluent schools differ substantially in the opportunities they offer students, it is hardly surprising that Table 8.5 shows that the respective sets of parents have significantly different perceptions of their children’s educational setting.

The conclusion seems clear: that schooling for poor children has been relatively unsuccessful. The potentially good news is that using the information they have gathered in recent decades, researchers and educators know what steps could improve schooling in poverty districts.

MEASURES TO IMPROVE POOR CHILDREN’S EDUCATION This process should begin at the preschool level, thereby providing children a firm foundation for their primary education. A report issued by the Brookings Institute and Princeton University concluded that high-quality, center-based early childhood education is the most productive programmatic approach for low-income three- and four-year-olds. The criteria for a high-quality center include a high teacher–pupil ratio, instructors who are college graduates with training in early childhood education, and a well-planned, cognitively stimulating curriculum. Effective programs feature teachers who can work well with nearly all children including those possessing mild to serious health or behavioral problems (Rouse, BrooksGunn, and McLanahan 2005, 12–13). To establish such a national program, of course, would be expensive, and so families must provide much of the funding. Not surprisingly data indicate that the higher the family income, the greater the likelihood children have received some preschool instruction at an educational center. In 2010 while 55 percent of children entering kindergarten had joined such programs, the numbers were distinctly more modest for less affluent children—44.3 percent for those in the lowest-income quintile versus a much more robust 69.9 percent in the highest (Klein and Whitehurst 2015).

While the amount of funding affects school quality, other factors can also influence it:

•The active participation of parents and community organizations with schools in poor districts: Substantial evidence indicates that sometimes low-income parents have not only become involved with their children’s learning but with the schools themselves (Child Trends 2018). In fact, the evidence of 30 years of research is compelling, demonstrating that when schools in poverty areas achieve academic success, productive partnerships with families and community organizations have been established (Chadwick 2004, 14). A prime illustration is the Reform Support Network sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, which has focused its efforts on 11, largely big-city areas, promoting parental engagement and other community activities to produce “turnabout initiatives” helping to make poor schools much more effective for their students (Reform Support Network 2014).

Poor families can benefit greatly from such assistance. As a rule more affluent parents are often better equipped to participate in their children’s schooling activities. Data on this topic support such a difference. In 2011–12 a survey by Child Trends, the nation’s largest database on children and their families, found that 45 percent of children living outside poverty had a parent who volunteered to engage in some activity at the school or to serve on a committee compared to a lower 27 percent of poor parents (Child Trends 2013).

•Movement toward alignment: This point extends the previous one, emphasizing that in poor areas schools often need to take concrete steps to promote parental involvement. A small but provocative study followed this strategy, providing some promising results about collective parental effort. The researcher divided 32 parents into two groups of 16 each. Members of the comparison group received no instruction or encouragement about supporting their children. The other group received extensive information—initially involving direction from social workers on how to develop a personal sense of empowerment about engaging in a project involving their children and the school; and then joining groups of parents to identify and discuss the issues (Alameda-Lawson 2014, 201). It turned out that the children of the two sets of parents produced different results in the SAT practice tests. While only six of the 16 members in the comparison group improved their scores from a previous practice test, 15 of the 16 children whose parents received group instruction raised their scores in all three SAT content areas covered (Alameda-Lawson 2014, 207). In sum, the researcher indicated that

rather than focus exclusively on how individual parents might independently support the work and achievement of their own children, … [observers might expect] that schools serving low-income communities might benefit by examining how parent groups or parent collectives might address some of the broader … poverty-related barriers to children’s school success.

(ALAMEDA-LAWSON 2014, 200)

While organizationally it is probably easier and cheaper to focus such an initiative on individual families, it does appear that the use of parent groups might be distinctly more effective.

•Good teaching as a critical component: As I have noted, all too often poor districts receive young, inexperienced teachers with few tactics to combat the pedagogy of poverty. Over time, however, some instructors in poor classrooms have the requisite traits to excel. Martin Haberman, who spent decades observing successful classrooms in poor schools, indicated that effective teachers in those settings recognize that their students often face a number of debilitating conditions, including inadequate health care and nutrition and various forms of abusive treatment, and that a significant part of the teacher’s job must be engaging their students in spite of these hindrances. If the students disengage, these effective teachers persist, seeking new ways of involving them and never forgetting that the principal task for all participants in education is to learn about themselves and the world (Books 2004, 8–9; Haberman 1995, 3–21).

The conditions such teachers face can be complex, not readily understood. A study using survey data involving largely white female instructors from low-income schools in Boston, Chicago, and San Antonio produced provocative findings, addressing teachers’ ability to prove supportive for poor minority students. The information involved black and Hispanic students aged 15 to 20 years old. The outcomes with African Americans were fairly predictable: The more culturally aware the teachers were, namely the greater their capacity to understand blacks’ lives and their challenges at school, the more elevated they considered their academic potential. With Hispanic students, however, the survey provided opposing results: The more culturally aware the teachers, the worse they predicted this group’s academic performance would be. It might be that the high national school dropout rate for Hispanic students contributed to the teachers’ evaluation (Mahatmya, Lohman, Brown, and Conway-Turner 2016, 442–43). It’s a complex educational world, and the authors indicated that future teachers need expert assistance in preparation to work with their often racially and ethnically diverse students. They wrote, “As multicultural classrooms continue to grow in the United States and abroad, our findings highlight the global need for preparation and professional development around culturally responsive teaching” (Mahatmya, Lohman, Brown, and Conway-Turner 2016, 444).

The previous point and much that precedes it suggests that the pedagogy of poverty appears to play an all-too-prominent role in modern poor people’s lives. A specialist on adult education asserted that if poor people are going to provide invaluable leadership in defeating poverty in their nation, then it is essential to eliminate the pedagogy of poverty and replace it with a more enlightened approach “that goes beyond a ‘dumbed-down’ popular education for the oppressed” (Hoist 2014, 263).

Chapter 11 provides further evidence involving successful schools in poor districts. Like schools other organizations and groups in poverty areas are often ineffective in assisting local residents.

LOW-INCOME COMMUNITIES AND THEIR SOCIAL CAPITAL

It is apparent that in communities two types of social capital exist—the local organizations providing financial, medical, and other types of basic assistance; and family, neighborhood, and other nearby networks supplying information and support. Poor people not only have fewer social networks than their nonpoor peers, but those systems tend to be less helpful, possessing fewer resources to assist low-income residents attempting to raise themselves and their families out of poverty. A half-dozen studies conducted in the 1990s indicated that over time poor children have become more physically isolated from the nonpoor in their neighborhoods and communities (Keister and Southgate 2012, 185–86; Seccombe 2000, 1106).

For many Americans support from major sources of social capital has continued to dwindle. Mary Clare Amselem, an analyst for the Heritage Foundation, indicated that upward mobility has become particularly difficult as such key institutions as two-parent families, churches, and neighborhoods groups have declined in the support they provide, leaving the social fabric of many people’s social capital in tatters. Amselem wrote:

Particularly in impoverished areas, a positive common culture is critical to reinforce behavior that will improve a person’s long-term prospects. Thus, rethinking the role that certain institutions can play in low-income communities could help to rebuild the elements that boost economic mobility.

(2013)

In their communities certain groups are particularly deprived of that essential social capital. For poor blacks the deprivation has been particularly virulent, with low-income African American families, powerless to do anything about it, often funneled into highly segregated areas, causing those areas to become steadily poorer and more segregated, losing social capital and other essential supports (Massey and Denton 1993, 118–25). A set of researchers studying such a poor black community were emphatic, using a decisive phrase in their article’s title to assert “ain’t nothin’ here in Buffalo” (Richardson, Glanz, and Adelman 2014). Another illustration on this issue involving a major group concerns immigrants arriving in the United States who because of their poverty often end up in poor districts with limited social capital and are further disadvantaged in developing such networks by their limited capacity to speak the language (Nawyn, Gjokaj, Agbényiga, and Grace 2012).

Such poor areas are likely to have lost their historic sources of income and social capital—factories, banks, large grocery stores, and a host of small businesses that link people both to the labor market and to what were once vibrant local communities. In the Woodlawn neighborhood located on the South Side of Chicago, there were over 800 commercial and industrial establishments in 1950. Forty-five years later only about 100 small businesses survived. Sociologist William Julius Wilson indicated that what had once been a vibrant neighborhood, which was crowded at rush hour, was now deserted, “an empty, bombed-out war zone,” with broken glass and garbage scattered around the vacated, boarded-up buildings. The few active businesses were “liquor stores and currency exchanges, these ‘banks of the poor,’ where one can cash checks, pay bills and buy money orders” (Wilson 1997, 5).

The residents of the Woodlawn neighborhood are among the millions of Americans deprived of effective health care. A study of low-income families in three cities found that because of lower earnings following the recession of 2003, they had to rotate paying the bills, with rent the top priority. Almost none of these families had employersponsored health insurance, and even those who did had trouble keeping up with the premiums. Many of the respondents had substantial medical bills produced either by one-time problems like an accident or a major operation or a chronic condition like heart disease or cancer. The study concluded that for most of these research subjects the opportunity to obtain health-care coverage to protect themselves from such debt was simply out-of-reach (Handler and Hasenfeld 2007, 118–19).

Compared to the overall population, people without health insurance tend to be less educated, with those lacking it more than twice as likely—28.6 to 12.3 percent—to have not completed high school. In addition, poor people were considerably more likely to be without coverage, with their percentage being about twice what the general population displayed (Berchick 2017). Researchers on health-care statistics estimate that the number of deaths caused by the absence of health insurance lies somewhere between 20,000 and 45,000 a year (Obamacare Facts 2018). Table 8.6 displays the relationship between household income and health-care coverage.

Many lowincome people without health insurance have jobs. Gorgeanne Kohler went to Washington to testify, telling lawmakers her brother Billy’s story in order to emphasize the common life-or-death nature of health insurance. He had arrhythmia and lost his health insurance when he was laid off in 2003. In her testimony the sister explained, “He called every health insurance company in Pittsburgh in hopes of buying a private plan, but the answer was always the same: ‘denied due to his pre-existing condition.’ ” Kohler got a job delivering pizzas, but it provided no health-care coverage, and so his survival was imperiled. When his implanted defibrillator’s battery ran low, he couldn’t pay for a replacement and died on the way home from work. Gorgeanne Kohler testified, “He drove two blocks, came to a stop sign, put his car in park, and slumped into his steering wheel” (Delaney 2017).

TABLE 8.6Health Care Coverage for Different Income Groups

Household Income	Percent of Income Category Not Covered by Government or Private Health Insurance
All US inhabitants	8%
Less than $25,000	13.7
$25,000–$49,999	11.9
$50,000–$74,999	9.8
$75,000–$99,999	7.6
$100,000–$124,999	5.8
$125,000 or more	4.2

Not surprisingly as household income increases, the proportion of an income group without health insurance declines.

Source: Barnett and Berchick (2017).

The Affordable Care Act, better known as “Obamacare,” has been a health-care reform law that was supposed to prevent such deaths. It provides tax credits, decreasing medical costs to low-income households with incomes between 100 and 400 percent of the poverty level. In addition, the legislation makes individuals with income below 138 percent of the poverty ceiling eligible for the Medicaid program (HealthCare.gov 2018). Obamacare has been productive, providing medical coverage to millions of people who had not previously received it. A significant drawback, however, is that states must approve the Affordable Care Act and 14 of them have failed to support the new law, leaving nearly two million people without medical coverage (FAMILIESUSA 2018; Garfield, Damico, and Orgera 2018).

Multiple millions of Americans unable to afford health insurance often turn to the organizations of last resort—the emergency rooms within the nation’s public hospitals, which once totaled about 1,300. Since the middle 1970s, however, these facilities have been forced to serve increasing numbers of impoverished patients, and by 2017 about 300 had gone bankrupt, leaving a total of 1,003. The chief of medicine at one of these public hospitals, Grady Memorial in Atlanta, called these bankruptcies “the canary in the coal mine” (Dewan and Sack 2008, A1; Mitchell 2017).

The precarious nature of those hospitals’ survival, however, hardly deters low-income patients’ patronage of emergency rooms, particularly in public hospitals. A survey of emergency-room use found that 55 percent of poor people as opposed to nonpoor’s 41 percent indicated that for their last visit there was no other place to go (Gindi, Cohen, and Kirzinger 2012). Respondents in a study of low-income, urban respondents indicated that emergency-room care was cheaper, more accessible, and more effective than outpatient treatment. One interviewee explained that the doctor’s office would normally advise to “just go to the ER.” The individual added, “Since they always say [to go to the ER] anyway, I just go straight to the ER and don’t even bother calling [the primary-care clinic]” (Kangovi, Barg, Carter, Long, Shannon, and Grande 2013, 1199).

Another problematic quality of poor communities involves violence. “When poverty expands, pathologies—crime, poor health, unemployment, lost property values—often rise,” explained Gene Nichol, a professor of law at the University of North Carolina (Perlmutt, Off, and Williams 2014). In poor areas residents are more than twice as likely to be the victims of violent crimes than individuals living in nonpoor locales (Harrell, Langton, Berzofsky, Couzens, and Smiley-McDonald 2014; U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development 2016). Young people aged 16 to 24, about a third of whom are poor and living in poverty-stricken neighborhoods, are the most likely demographic to be both the victims and the perpetrators of crime (Vittana 2018).

A distinctly alienating reality of living in a poverty-stricken area is that the residents, who sometimes sorely need police support and protection, often fail to receive it. A study involved nearly 1,300 survey respondents who were primarily female, unemployed, and extremely poor, with over three-fifths reporting income under $20,000. The research subjects characterized the police in 29, often uncomplimentary, ways. Respondents’ positions addressed the police’s legitimacy and behavior:

•55.5% Police officers will treat you differently because of your race/ethnicity.

•42.5% Officers in your community are legitimate authorities.

•34.3% They try to do what is best for the people they are dealing with.

•31.9% Police stand up for values that are important to you.

•30.2% They respect people’s rights.

•30% Police treat people with dignity and respect.

(LAVIGNE, FONTAINE, AND DWIVEDI 2017, 7–9)

PHOTO 8.2 These police officers are searching for a burglary suspect in Camden, New Jersey, a city that is one of the most impoverished and crime-ridden in the country. Such conditions, which exist in many urban areas, make it likely that relations between the police and local inhabitants will be both suspicious and hostile.

Source: Getty Images ID 153947336.

It is hardly surprising that these poor respondents would feel isolated and alienated from the police. This was just one of many local problems with which they had to deal. When poverty concentrates in a section of a city, the complications it brings include health and mental-health problems, limited education, inferior job opportunities, and high levels of crime. The Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey, a study of over 3,000 families that oversampled poor neighborhoods, concluded that the residents of poor urban locales were particularly disadvantaged in such essential out-of-area activities as shopping, traveling to work, and medical treatment. Poor whites have faced such limitations, but for their black and Hispanic counterparts such barriers have been even greater (Krivo, Washington, Peterson, Browning, Calder and Kwan 2013).

The Great Recession of 2008 has accelerated the growth of American poverty (Iceland and Hernandez 2017), with the percentage of poor people living in high-poverty, isolated neighborhoods moving upward from 11.4 percent in the 2000s to 14.1 percent in 2017 (Science Daily 2017). At times poor people’s isolation in such areas can produce dangerous and debilitating outcomes. Mona Hanna-Attisha, a doctor, who had battled the city of Flint, Michigan about largely poor children’s undue exposure to lead in the water supply, was also concerned about poor families’ limited access to public transportation. She explained, “Every day in my clinic I have a 30% to 40% noshow rate—30% to 40% of the kids who are scheduled to come don’t come,” HannaAttisha said. “It’s not because their parents don’t love them; it’s because they have every other obstacle in the world to get there” (Henderson and Tanner 2016).

While poor people sometimes encounter negative social capital, they can also develop positive forms of it. In her study of over 600 female respondents either on welfare or moving off it, sociologist Karen Seccombe found that most of the women had supportive networks: Family members were usually the preferred source for assistance, but some sought help from neighbors and friends either instead of or in addition to family members (Seccombe 2007, 145). Some such neighborhood social networks prove potent. For instance, the Iu Mien (Indochinese) refugees in Oakland and the Mardi Gras Indians in New Orleans have developed the confidence and skill to help their fellow residents. Even they, however, face the challenging prospect of dealing with mainstream organizations that often fail to recognize their contribution and as a result fail to be cooperative (Miller 2012).

Seccombe found that in public-housing projects inhabitants varied in the extent to which they developed social networks. Some opted not to seek local contacts, proudly emphasizing their independence and self-reliance; a number relied on a few, perhaps two friends or neighbors; and others developed a wide circle of friends. During an hour-and-a-half interview with Janie, a 19-year-old mother of an infant daughter, four interruptions occurred—telephone calls or visits to borrow an item or to see if Janie needed anything from the grocery store. Referring to her network of friends, Janie indicated that she and her daughter were not alone. She concluded, “We have an extended family of sorts” (Seccombe 2007, 145).

In attempting to escape poverty, individuals and families can find that two sources of social capital prove helpful. There is emotional and financial support from their families even when such assistance represented a sacrifice and also various programs exposing them to experiences, habits, information, and skills that have helped them advance educationally and occupationally (Duncan 2001, 79). To be effective, both sources of social capital, particularly programs providing assistance, need to feature informed personnel who recognize that poor residents, particularly recent immigrants, are diverse in their outlooks and goals. In the past many pioneer program initiatives simply assumed that impoverished people want to stay put, hopefully improving their quality of life. Nowadays, however, it is clear that inhabitants are highly varied, with some viewing the poor neighborhood as a place where they should get all help possible in preparing themselves to move on to more promising and prosperous locales (Hopkins 2014).

An experiment done in five US cities illustrated the impact of effective programs. Low-income families with children living in high-poverty publicly financed housing were randomly assigned to one of three treatment groups—the experimental unit whose members relocated to private-market apartments in poor areas, receiving housing vouchers, help in locating their residences, and several other types of organizational assistance; the comparison segment that was provided vouchers but no advice about location and no counseling; and the control unit, which obtained no assistance. Between two and four years later, the study revealed that the experimental group achieved certain advancements over the other categories of respondents, including better self-reports of parents’ physical and mental health along with higher quality of parenting and also children’s reduction in antisocial behavior, improved performance in reading, math, and standardized tests, decline in asthma attacks and injuries requiring medical treatment, fewer criminal victimizations, and lessened depression and anxiety (Ludwig 2003).

The previous experiment suggests that fairly modest inputs of organizational assistance to poor families can significantly affect outcomes. In the middle-1990s the Boston Housing Authority (BHA) obtained federal funding for Mission Main and Oakland Park, two large housing programs. On the face of it, the developments appeared to encounter a similar set of conditions—demolition of all or most units; replacement with low-density buildings; income-mixing of the new tenants; and efforts to integrate the new developments into the surrounding neighborhoods.

Offsetting these similarities, however, the two projects displayed distinctly different planning processes. At Orchard Park major conflicts were resolved along the way. A significant factor was the positive relationship between the tenants and the BHA team, especially its architect, who had worked well with the Orchard Park Tenants Association in an earlier rehabilitation. Furthermore the BHA and the Orchard Park tenants consistently sought to communicate their plans to the surrounding neighborhood, whose residents were low-income like themselves and were pleased to learn that the vacant land would be returned to residential use. BHA staff relieved some residents’ fears of public housing, explaining that the new units would be carefully managed and that many if not most tenants would be employed.

In contrast, at Mission Main the BHA team and the architects did not develop a trustful relationship with tenants. Initial differences and misunderstandings mushroomed to substantial distrust. In addition, Mission Main residents always had a difficult time with their neighbors, resisting efforts to relate to this larger community, which was primarily middle class and white.

All in all, differences between the two tenant groups and their relationships with both the BHA and the neighboring communities—the development of trust at Orchard Park and its absence at Mission Main—significantly impacted quality of life within the two public-housing projects. It appears that over time Orchard Park residents would be likely to have much more productive social-capital development with their neighbors and other outsiders than would their counterparts at Mission Main (Keyes 2001, 145–47).

Certainly social capital can be the critical factor that can start someone on the journey to escape poverty. J. D. Vance, the person who wrote Hillbilly Elegy, explained that because of his poor, rural upbringing he had no idea about the information required to get him into Yale Law School and later a high-paying law firm. With his contacts and experience in the Marine Corps and helpful professors, he developed the critical social capital that made his advancements possible (Spencer 2016). Vance wrote, “The professors I’d selected to write my [recommendation] letters had gained my trust. I had listened to them nearly every day, took their tests, and wrote papers for them” (2016, 198).

In recent years Americans have increasingly recognized the importance of social capital. This section has demonstrated that social networks develop in a variety of contexts, including significant ties helping to obtain jobs.

POOR PEOPLE’S WORK

Sociologist Jay MacLeod concluded that ours is a very unequal society where “[t]here are simply not enough good jobs to go around. For every boss there are many workers, and the gap in their pay is unparalleled among industrialized nations” (MacLeod 2009, 241).

Has the American economy been purposely structured for social inequality? In particular, have business leaders committed themselves to developing a reserve army of labor (discussed in Chapter 2)? What analysts can substantiate is that the economy has been structured to produce increasing business profits and that this focus has often been detrimental for various income groups, most notably the poor. Table 8.7 lists some statistics displaying the working poor’s economically deprived prospects.

Table 8.7Major Traits of the Working Poor

•7.5 million working poor in 2007 versus 9.5 million in 2014

•Working poor rate 5.1 percent of the total workforce in 2007 versus 6.3 percent in 2014

•Among the working poor employed 27 weeks or more, a higher percentage part time than full time: 13.5 percent of total part-time employees were working poor as opposed to just 4.1 percent among full-time job holders

•Women more likely to be working poor, and African Americans and Hispanics twice as likely aswhites and Asians to be members of the working poor

•With rising education, people less likely to belong to the working poor. Among job holders without a high-school diploma employed 27 weeks or more, 18.3 percent classified as working poor compared to 2 percent of college graduates

•The working poor more prevalent in service jobs than in any other major occupational category

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics (2016).

A number of factors have undermined poor people’s employment opportunities:

•Deindustrialization and globalization: Starting in the 1970s, manufacturing jobs have been disappearing. Previously individuals with limited education employed in that sector could make a decent living, supporting a family reasonably well. Nowadays it is often cheaper for companies to downsize and outsource.

•Technological change: The development of computers has eliminated the need for many typists, secretaries, clerks, and other types of limited-skill workers.

•The decline of unions: As Chapter 7 detailed, the number of unionized workers has decreased in recent decades. It is well established that unionized employees tend to obtain higher wages than their nonunionized counterparts.

•A domino effect: At this writing 29 states and Washington DC have a higher minimum wage than the federal standard, which is $7.25 per hour. Many experts feel that such amounts are insufficient to lift families out of poverty. This is an important deficiency since about two-thirds of minimum-wage earners are 20 years or older, and about 40 percent of them are the sole providers for their families (Brady and Wallace, 2001; Iceland 2006, 77–78; National Conference of State Legislatures. 2018; Seccombe 2000, 1099–100). In Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich, claimed that jobs for the working poor never proved to be economically viable. Furthermore living on minimum wage has not inspired revelations about ingenious means of saving money unknown to the middle class; economic worries have been unrelenting. In her research, Ehrenreich noted, housing “is the principal source of disruption in their lives, the first thing they fill you in on when they arrive for their shifts” (2002, 25). This comment might bring to mind an earlier observation—that a significant oversight in the official US measure of poverty entails the absence of housing costs.

•Increase in part-time work and jobs without benefits: To avoid facing penalties for failing to make health insurance available or simply in response to business downturns, employers have forced more low-income workers into part-time positions, totaling 27 percent of all poor workers in 2014 (Center for Poverty Research, University of California, Davis 2014; Guerin 2018; Henry J. Kaiser Foundation 2018).

These disadvantages involving work are apparent when one examines the employment process poor people face.

The Prospects of Low-Income Employment

In Jay MacLeod’s study of young men living in a public-housing project, he asked his respondents about their job plans. They were usually reluctant to reply, realizing that with limited schooling their work potential was sharply limited. MacLeod found that no matter how hard he pressed Jinks, the young man “refused to articulate his aspirations: ‘I think you’re kiddin’ yourself to have any. We’re just gonna take whatever we can get.’ ” Jinks’s assessment, MacLeod concluded, seemed both insightful and accurate (2009, 63).

As McLeod’s respondents appreciated, the brutal fact is that poorly educated individuals have few good job prospects. A study using data from the National Current Population Survey found that only about a fifth of the positions held by people without at least some college credits involved filling such “starter” positions as bank tellers, roofers, or data entry keyers requiring little or no training and experience while leading to good-paying positions. For most poorly educated, low-income individuals, prospects for upward mobility are remote.

In a study of low-income families in five cities, the parents’ jobs usually displayed a number of undesirable traits: wages that were too low to maintain families with children; relations with supervisors or bosses featuring ineffective communication or mistrust; employer-provided benefits that were either unaffordable or nonexistent; workplace scheduling almost never involving flexibility for accommodating such family needs as a child’s illness or a doctor’s appointment; and extensive vulnerability to layoffs and declining wages in subsequent jobs (Iversen and Armstrong 2006, 171). Even during the boom years of the late 1990s, nearly three in 10 working-poor families with children under 12 had insufficient income to meet the calculated expense of what constituted a basic family budget (Appelbaum, Bernhardt, and Murnane 2003, 1).

Low-income workers faced with such an economic squeeze are likely to consider changing jobs, finding that training is often essential if they are going to advance. The Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC) has emphasized that most programs dealing with poor people’s employment have focused on getting individuals jobs, paying little attention to helping them retain their positions or, as MDRC has done, advance occupationally. Large research projects assessing a one-strategy-fits-all approach generally produce mixed results. More successful outcomes involving job retention and increased earnings have emerged when such organizations as the Minnesota Family Investment Program and Wisconsin’s New Hope Program provided a combination of financial incentives and job coaching that addressed the rising worker’s specific outlooks and needs (Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation 2013).

Many respondents in the previously mentioned five-city study sought job training. Most of them appreciated the importance of both the “soft skills,” which help develop manners, personal habits, communication abilities, and friendliness in order to relate to coworkers, bosses, and the public, and also the “hard skills,” that involve specific teachable abilities associated with a particular job. Some informants felt that even a brief training, four weeks or even less, produced a combined sense of confidence and knowledge that transferred positively to the job site. Nonetheless the researchers heard students, instructors, and employers express a common lament—that training programs that were less than a year long were ineffective. Wendy, for instance, was preparing to become a health-insurance representative. She claimed that the trainers did not provide enough specific information. While they expressed personal preferences about what job candidates should learn, “they are not educating you on what the … [workplace terminology is] going to be or what the health industry is all about. With a little more education it [would be] much better” (Iversen and Armstrong 2006, 105).

In transferring individuals from welfare to work, job-training agencies often have supplied a case manager whose duties have involved an assessment of the clients’ success both in training and advancement into the job world. They have provided support in such specific areas as the sustainment of clients’ motivation, improved knowledge about finances, choice of jobs that can promote the transition to the work world, the location of such public benefits as the earned income tax credit, which can help make families financially solvent, and the awareness of useful steps leading to job retention (Annie E. Casey Foundation 2013; UC Davis Extension, Center for Human Services 2018). The American Psychological Association’s Division of the Psychology of Women concluded that the key between client and case manager is “[t]he development of a trusting, personal relationship.… This connection helps to overcome many obstacles, such as isolation, hopelessness, and suspicion” (American Psychological Association 2018).

A client in a job-training program provided corroborating testimony. Isabel, who had a new job, a new residence, and had just been reunited with one of her two children, also planned to go to school, attending a training program. She felt overwhelmed and turned to her case manager. Isabel said, “She was great, and she told me, ‘God, you are nervous, but don’t worry about it. School will still be there; you can do … [it] in June’ ” (Iversen and Armstrong 2006, 110). As a result of this important exchange, Isabel postponed training for several months, a decision that promoted success both in her relationship with her son and at work.

Once on the job, many low-income workers are strongly motivated to increase their income.

Battling on Up?

Starting in childhood the conditions in the areas in which poor people live affect their success on the job. A study using census data that included almost all American children born between 1978 and 1983 found that while the area in which children grew up affected their eventual job success, no simple pattern emerged. As a case in point, the affluence of a census tract is an influential factor, but it is hardly the only impactful one. For instance, on a given day in 2010, 44 percent of black men who grew up in Watts in low-income families were in prison while 2.3 miles to the south in Compton a much smaller 6.2 percent of black men from equally poor families were incarcerated. On the other hand, some powerful generalizations arose from the research. The investigators learned that children who lived in somewhat more affluent neighborhoods did better financially. They found, for example, that if at a child’s birth the family moved from a neighborhood within a given county where the likelihood of upward mobility was in the bottom quarter of expected probability to another neighborhood within the same county where the chances of upward mobility were in the top quarter for the county, that child would become an adult who on average would earn $206,000 more than if he or she remained in the first locale. The study concluded that the neighborhoods in which children lived were impactful, but they were a particularly powerful influence during the adolescent years as the young people entered critical years for developing the outlooks, knowledge, and skills they would possess as adults (Chetty, Friedman, Hendren, Jones, and Porter 2018, 1–6).

Once on the job, low-income job holders seeking to make more money usually require training. What such individuals generally discover is that (a) such programs are much more plentiful for the preemployment than the postemployment phase and (b) that such assistance is much more likely to go to high-skilled, well-educated workers than to lowskilled, lesseducated job holders (Gabe, Abel, and Florida 2018; King 2004; O’Leary, Straits, and Wandner 2004). On the second point, a study of about 175,000 low-wage American workers found that when assessed in the course of a year, only about 5 percent found a better job, and those individuals tended to be relatively well educated, namely a high-school degree or more. Most commonly these workers found better jobs as truck drivers, nurses’ aides, customer-service representatives, secretaries and administrative assistants, and wholesale and manufacturing salespeople (Gabe, Abel, and Florida 2018).

Another investigation using national data from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Program revealed that about 42 percent of low-wage workers who chose to change jobs and then stayed with their new employers escaped poverty completely. In sharp contrast, just 17 percent passed beyond the poverty threshold when staying with their original employer. A major factor in escaping poverty has been job holders’ ability to locate higher-paid positions in such industries as those cited in the previous study (Andersson, Holzer, and Lane 2005, 78–90).

One problem affecting low-income workers’ jobs is housing, with its high cost making it nearly impossible to escape chronic indebtedness. Alicia Hamiel, a mother of two in Philadelphia, is typical. Employed 26 to 38 hours a week at a McDonald’s, she earned a minimum wage of $7.75 and paid $400 a month in rent for a single room, representing about 34 percent of her earnings at the maximum number of hours. “I feel like I’m failing as a mom,” she said. “If I can’t make sure they have a roof over their heads, what am I doing? I feel like I’m doing the best that I can” (Guardian 2017).

A National Low Income Housing Coalition report indicated that there is not one county in the nation where a minimum wage earner would be able to spend less than 30 percent of their earnings to pay for a two-bedroom apartment (National Low Income Housing Coalition 2018).

Housing is one of the most potent contributors to social reproduction, with residential costs curtailing or even eliminating the option for low-income workers to relocate in areas where better paying jobs are available. In the twenty-first century, housing costs for poor people in most cities have often risen sharply as new regulations have slowed the construction process and made housing considerably scarcer and more expensive (Ganong and Shoag 2017; Semuels 2017).

In battling to advance themselves, low-wage workers find themselves pitted against relentless corporate opposition. The largest, most formidable corporate employer is Walmart, which has 1.3 million employees—more than the combined populations of Vermont and Wyoming—in its American stores, a massive 1 percent of the nation’s job holders (Greenhouse 2015; Kahle 2010; Ritholtz 2017). As Chapter 1 indicated, when some Walmart workers threatened to go on strike, the company produced a surveillance team to monitor their actions, committing, as always, to preventing unionization and any other actions which would significantly increase the likelihood of workers’ rising wages. Walmart has been very successful at keeping wages low. In 2018 half its workforce was part time, up from just a fifth in 2005, costing the company considerably less because in the case of part-time employees Walmart was not responsible for health insurance or other fringe benefits (New York Post 2018).

While Walmart has been an industry leader in keeping low-income workers’ earnings low, an entire region of the country, the South, has made ample contribution.

Between 1980 and 2013, the number of midwestern auto-industry jobs fell by 33 percent and simultaneously increased by 52 percent in the South. In manufacturing generally, South Carolina showed a rise of 196 percent and Tennessee 103 percent. As the number of southern workers in the auto industry and other types of manufacturing increased, earnings fell. Reasons for this trend include southern states’ failure to provide legislation raising the minimum wage and factories’ abundant use of low-paid temp workers discussed in Chapter 7 (Meyerson 2015).

In order to insure their huge profits, companies like Walmart have subsidized political candidates and initiatives that support workers’ low wages (Kahle 2010). Overall the prospects have literally paid off for major corporations. Consider the following information: In 1968 the hourly inflation-adjusted minimum wage, covering state and regional variations, was $9.58 per hour, essentially in line with their contribution to productivity. Forty-six years later in 2014, that minimum wage rose modestly to $10.89 per hour even though these workers, better educated and more skilled than in the past, were making an accelerated contribution worth $18.42 per hour (Mishel, Gould, and Bivens 2015). These, of course, are hardly the statistics that inspire corporate and political leaders to raise wages.

Table 8.8 summarizes major traits of poor workers making minimum wage. The upcoming discussion of welfare reform examines the complex challenge of bringing former recipients into the workforce.

TABLE 8.8The Workforce’s Poorest Members: A Profile of Minimum Wage Workers, 2017

Total: 1.8 million job holders with earnings at or below the federal minimum wage composing 2.3 percent of the nation’s hourly paid workers

Age: Generally young, with about half below 25 years old compared to about a fifth of hourly paid workers overall

Gender: Women representing 62.8 percent and men 37.2 percent of the total

Major groups race/ethnicity: Whites 75.4 percent, blacks 16.5 percent, Hispanics 16.5 percent, and Asians 3.8 percent

Education: High-school graduates or more 77.2 percent; some college, no degree 28.8 percent; bachelor’s degree or more 10 percent

Marital status: 68.4 percent never married, 21.2 percent married with a spouse, and 10.4 percent widowed, divorced, or separated

Time spent: Full time 35.1 percent and 64.7 percent part time

Occupations: About two-thirds of minimum-wage workers in service jobs, particularly those involving food preparation and other serving-related positions

Residential location: Southern states, namely Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Virginia, have the highest percentage of workers at or below minimum wage while western states along with one in the Midwest—California, Washington, Montana, and Minnesota—have the lowest percentage.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics (2018).

THE WELFARE REFORM ERA

Did welfare reform truly introduce an improved program, or did it continue the longtime war on the poor? As previously noted, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 was signed into law, eliminating Aid to Families with Dependent Children and replacing it with TANF, which in most states required that all able-bodied program clients become economically self-sufficient within 60 months, though states can make adjustments to the standard (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities 2015; Downing 2011). As Figure 8.3 indicates, the passage of this act signaled an ominous, steady financial decline in poor children’s cash-assistance support.

Throughout the analysis of welfare reform, the discussion provides evidence about the effectiveness of the TANF program.

Running the Tanf Gauntlet

It seems reasonable in keeping with the idea of a gauntlet to view this experience as several sequential influences:

•Impact of various factors influencing individuals moving into the job world: As a rule TANF case workers have emphasized the primacy of human capital and skill development (Banerjee and Damman 2013, 428). While both of these factors are important, research and analysis of clients entering programs have indicated the impact of a broad range of barriers to success including neighborhood quality of life, physical health, mental health, the lack of high-school graduation and/or adequate training, drug dependence, partner physical or sexual abuse, and the unavailability of decent child care. The combined impact of these negative forces can be formidable. Research has indicated that TANF clients without such barriers succeeded in working 82 percent of the year in contrast to those with six or more on the job only 7 percent of the year (Anderson, Halter, and Gryzlak 2004, 188; DeLuca and Clampet-Lundquist 2016; Leukefeld, Carlton, Staton-Tindall,and Delaney 2012; Pilkinton 2010, 1013).

FIGURE 8.3Percentage of Poor Children Receiving Cash Assistance over Time

With the advent of the TANF program in 1996, the percentage of poor children receiving cash assistance from federal and state sources declined steadily.

Source: Child Trends (2017).

•Prospects of earnings from low-wage jobs being more than TANF payments: Often individuals have found that the financial incentive to leave welfare was minimal or nonexistent. In 2013, for example, for a single mother and two children the TANF program paid better than the minimum wage in 35 states, taking into account the Earned Income Tax Credit provided to low-income employees. Four years later TANF continued to pay better than 34 states’ minimum wage (Harner 2018; Roy 2013). One individual, who eventually returned to TANF, valued her job as a teacher’s assistant and appreciated supporting herself. However, a comparison of the total income and benefits she received on welfare with her work earnings indicated that while “I was struggling on public aid, now I was working very hard every day, and I was getting $80 a month less by working” (Anderson, Halter, and Gryzlak 2004, 188).

•The likelihood of obtaining earnings above the minimum wage: A study of over 15,000 TANF clients concluded that those who had vocational training in a particular occupation and on-the-job training were earning more money (Davis, Lim, and Livermore 2011). The Wisconsin Regional Training Program/Big Step has provided such assistance to work organizations and their employees, notably seeking feedback from employers about what decently paying jobs they need. Then the program trains individuals with a high-school degree or an equivalent for those jobs. “Our goal is to really build training programs that are intended to link people to family-sustaining employment and long-term careers,” Mark Kessenich, the director, explained (Semuels 2016b). Seldom, however, can TANF clients obtain such training.

•Conditions supporting job retention: Specialists in welfare reform have suggested that success for the TANF program requires a reorientation “[t]o direct TANF resources to the program’s core purposes—cash assistance, work assistance, and work supports” (Floyd, Pavetti, and Schott 2017). Congress, these analysts contend, could require states to spend a substantial share of their TANF funding, perhaps 60 percent in these areas (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities 2015; Floyd, Pavetti, and Schott 2017). But to become a successful program where clients move from welfare to long-term employment, TANF officials must deliver a program that addresses clients’ most pressing needs and inadequacies—that, as the quotation from Kessenich indicated, brings individuals to stable, long-lasting jobs supporting families. Gayle Hamilton, a prominent evaluator of programs for lowwage workers, has suggested the plausible use of “a career pathways framework” that employs an effective combination of education, training, and life-skills programs—activities that managers are very likely to value—to prepare clients for employment in specific job sectors where over time they can advance to higher positions within the sector (2012, 6).

Hamilton, however, is a realist, and she admitted that “while a number of strategies have been effective in helping adult welfare recipients enter employment and increase their earnings, … much remains to be learned about how best to increase the self-sufficiency and financial well-being of low-income parents” (2012, 7). To my thinking that qualifies as an understatement. Recall the data from Figure 8.3 showing over time the steadily downward percentage of children receiving cash assistance, dropping to a deeply troubling 16 percent in 2014 (Child Trends 2017).

Such children belong to floundering families. A floundering family is a house-hold in which the breadwinner(s) appear(s) to lack the ability to establish financial independence. These family heads thrown off the rolls generally have serious barriers to employment such as those previously cited. Sometimes the problems these household heads face are acute. One mother was so physically impaired that she could not lift a gallon of milk off the table. Another was too depressed to maintain basic hygiene. Some family heads displayed cognitive functioning so low that they could not read simple words or numbers or tell time. Such families have had breadwinners with meager, often irregular earnings, frequent absence of child support from noncustodial parents, and the exhaustion of TANF assistance (Handler and Hasenfeld 2007, 343–44; Hill and Kauff 2002; Parrott and Sherman 2006, 12–13).

Evidence has indicated that families without either TANF or job support suffer significantly, having trouble obtaining food and paying bills, including fees for medical emergencies. In addition, the family heads find themselves isolated from the various job-related resources that TANF provides (Parrott and Sherman 2006).

Floundering families facing formidable challenges sometimes survive on as little as $2 a day, with their numbers increasing about fivefold between 1985 and 2011. Sociologist Kathryn Edin interviewed Ashley, who lived in a Baltimore housing project where she had almost nothing—practically no furniture and no formula for her baby, food, or money. Not surprisingly she barely had the strength to hold up her child’s head. Such dire poverty forced parents to make desperate decisions. Even though it could leave them almost incapacitated and iron deficient, some often sold their blood plasma for money. Despite severe asthma, one woman in Edin’s study found a job cleaning unheated homes during a Chicago winter (Franke 2016; Tach and Edin 2017). Such experiences hardly elicited compliments about TANF.

Not surprisingly when sociologist Karen Seccombe asked her respondents about the positive aspects of the welfare system, they would laugh then “grimace, shake their head in disbelief, stare back blankly, comment that they needed more time to think about an answer, or curtly retorted, ‘There are none!’ ” (2007, 168).

Once past the initial jolt of surprise at the question, some respondents mentioned positive attributes. First, a number of individuals conceded that the system, though meager in its allotments, did provide some financial support. Without it many poor families would be forced to live on the streets or in a homeless shelter. As one woman said, “It keeps me out of dumpsters.” Second, as part of the welfare package, respondents had access to various programs, which provided critical services these recipients could not have obtained elsewhere. Seccombe’s informants most frequently mentioned Medicaid, which financed medical assistance to clients who otherwise could not have afforded it, and also food stamps. Many prized these two benefits more highly than the welfare check itself. Third, the women spoke favorably about several forms of financing that directly bolstered their job-seeking efforts, particularly child-care payments and transportation vouchers. Besides the money these programs represented a morale boost for women making a strong effort to move off welfare. As one beneficiary said, “The system tries to help those who help themselves” (Seccombe 2007, 170). An informative website provides a summary of the TANF benefits and work-support services available in the various states, Washington DC, and several territories. It has become popular, receiving 1.4 million hits during one month in 2018 (Benefits.gov 2018).

While clients had occasional positive observations about the TANF system, they had many criticisms of it. To begin, most emphasized that the financial value of the TANF package was low. One recipient was angry that such a wealthy country accepted such degraded living for poor children. She wondered how children who went to bed cold and hungry could perform effectively the next day in school. She asked, “How can anyone grow up normal, intelligent, and become a productive member of society living like that?” (Seccombe 2007, 71).

Another deficiency involved the delivery of services, with clients complaining that the system provided too little one-on-one help; was geared simply to lowering rolls through job placement, regardless of the job’s quality; and was ineffective and impersonal. On the last point, respondents mentioned a number of particulars. Two factors contributing to the system’s ineffectiveness were case workers’ large client loads, meaning that a given welfare recipient received very limited attention, and rapid case-worker turnover, making it difficult or impossible to develop an effective relationship with a TANF representative over time. The clients’ most heated complaint about staff members focused on their tendency to look down on welfare recipients. One respondent explained:

To me their job is to downgrade us. They don’t like us, they don’t respect us as human beings, they feel that we are the ones that are in need … and that they can treat us like low people that are in poverty.

(ANDERSON, HALTER, AND GRYZLAK 2004, 190)

Undoubtedly the most downgraded clients are racial minorities. Using national data from 50 states, researchers Kyoung Hag Lee and Dong Pil Yoon found that a higher percentage of blacks than whites were sanctioned and forced to leave the program—such an outcome in spite of the fact that the dismissed black clients had more schooling and training than their white counterparts. Other studies the investigators cited also suggested similar racial discrimination. A number of factors that might come into play include a frequent support of racially linked sanctions in a state with a large African American population, some case workers’ discriminatory approach, and prospective employers’ anti-black sentiment. It’s a situation, the researchers concluded, that needs to change. They wrote that “through this current study we suggest that to reduce … racial disparities in the uses of sanctions, state governments should have an appropriate sanction process, training programs for caseworkers, or other policy changes” (Lee and Yoon 2012).

Another weakness of the TANF system has been its harsh, even punitive approach to providing benefits. When clients get a job, they generally lose all previous benefits—cash grant, food stamps, housing subsidy, and Medicaid. Holding a low-paying position, the newly employed head of household would often find herself worse off economically than when she was on welfare (Seccombe 2007, 173). The worst off of all, however, are unemployed adults aged 18 to 49 who are not receiving training or are disabled or raising young children. After three months outside the workforce these half a million to a million people are cut from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), losing their food stamps, which is a critical factor in the safety net. Experts on welfare at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities called this measure “[o]ne of the harshest pieces of the 1996 welfare law” (Bolen, Rosenbaum, Dean, and Keith-Jennings 2016).

In contrast to such policies, a pair of long-time poverty analysts summarized how the TANF program could accomplish what a program of cash assistance for mainly single-mother families should provide—“help adults get and keep jobs, and help them get the education and training they need to make full use of their talents and the childcare they need to be able to stay employed.” Sometimes, however, jobs are not available, and so TANF should provide “a decent safety net for families who have no other source of income” (Edelman and Ehrenreich 2010). Unfortunately like earlier government programs, welfare reform has not effectively attacked the conditions that make people poor. This has been a major problem where many bright, innovative people and organizations have made valuable contributions, but the political and economic leadership has generally failed to get on board.

Yet polling data suggest that the future is somewhat promising. A nationwide survey of 1,500 adult Americans showed that 16 percent indicated that the government did too much for poor people, 21 percent said it did about the right amount, and 59 percent (nearly three-fifths) said its efforts were not enough. Overall the public appears to favor stronger government support for poor people, but sharp political differences exist; 76 percent of Democrats compared to less than half the figure—37 percent of Republicans—believe the efforts to date have not been enough (Pew Research Center 2016). These findings appear to suggest that discussion and debate will persist on this complicated, disturbing, and contentious issue.

Conclusion

Since the late eighteenth century, American organizations and individuals have made some effort to alleviate poverty, often drawing a distinction between the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor. Starting early in the twentieth century, the state of Illinois began providing welfare support to white, “deserving” mothers. From that time until the late 1960s, the program expanded, with opposition to it building from the 1970s into the 1990s and eventually leading to federal legislation initiating welfare reform.

In modern times there is an official definition of poverty, which has some assets but receives sharp criticisms from many experts on the subject. While the official definition appears to understate the number of poor or near poor, all observers seem to agree that individuals and families falling below the poverty threshold are indeed poor.

One means of examining poor people’s limited resources is to focus on their capital deficiencies. They obtain little financial capital, with the minimum wage insufficient to elevate families above the poverty level. Low-income employers have increased the number of part-time and temporary jobs, which generally offer neither stability nor a reasonable opportunity to expand income over time.

Deprived of sufficient financial capital, poor families must live in areas offering substandard human capital—child care and schools. Low-income families are unlikely to be able to afford quality child-care programs, putting their children at a cognitive disadvantage before starting formal education. Major drawbacks to poor schools include less effective teaching, large classes, and dysfunctional exposure to tracking and high-stakes testing.

Because of the deprivations and stress poor families experience, the cultural capital these parents provide their children contributes less to later success than that which more affluent parents offer. In particular, compared to their high-status counterparts, poor parents talk less and are more authoritarian, curtailing the development of decision-making abilities.

Finally, whether it involves negotiations with school officials to obtain tutoring to improve reading skills or a business contact to secure a job, low-income individuals generally possess less effective social capital.

Research suggests that the welfarereform legislation, which was signed into law in 1996, did not take into account the various capital-related deficiencies poor heads of household possess. The proponents of this program often appear to have subscribed to a blaming-the-victim approach. The outcome has been that the majority of TANF recipients has either ended up with low-level jobs, have returned to welfare after brief employment, or lost TANF support after they exceeded the time limit. A significant segment of family heads with neither jobs nor welfare is individuals who face one or more severe barriers to entering the job world.

Once people are locked into the cycle of poverty, its impact on their lives is formidable. The black CEO of an inner-city whole-sale firm described his sense of the effects. If there is “a bunch of poor people together … I don’t give a damn whether they’re white, green or grizzly … You’re going to create crime and everything else that’s under the sun.” When asked, the businessman conceded that he could understand some employers’ reluctance to hire poor blacks (Wilson 1997, 130). This quotation addresses the impact of the cycle of poverty, particularly prospective employers sometimes shying away from job applicants because they live in certain low-income areas.

The cycle of poverty accelerates from the interaction of a set of factors. To break the cycle outside intervention is necessary. Academic experts and program developers have focused on different entry points where intervention can be effective—notably children’s health care, child care, schooling, housing assistance, job training and retraining, and caseworkers’ consultation with clients’ prospective or current employers (Cizon 1966; Floyd, Pavetti, and Schott 2017; Grant 2006; Hamilton 2012; Sen 1999).

Illustrations in this chapter have suggested that well-organized, substantial intervention at any point increases poor people’s chances of materially improving their lives. When provided critical supports, many, perhaps most, poor heads of household try hard to function productively in the job world. The issue that the rest of the citizenry should assess is whether they consider it a worthwhile expenditure to subsidize effective means of breaking the cycle of poverty and bringing millions of poor families into the relative comfort of the economic mainstream.