Commenters on the AJC Get Schooled blog were largely unsympathetic to a new study showing poor children in the metro Atlanta area have lower odds of escaping poverty than their peers in many other areas. The study cited many possible reasons, including the poor quality of k-12 education, limited job access and more single-parent families as factors. Here is a sampling of comments:
Pride: Atlanta spends $14,000 per child per year on education. Lack of money is not the problem.
FormerTeach: This is not a problem that will be easily solved. I am in favor of transferring teachers within a school district every few years. This will not solve the problems presented by family indifference to education, but it will expose lower-income students to the high-caliber teachers routinely found in middle- and upper-class areas of town. This is especially important in elementary school, when students get the basics they need to build on. And it might also serve as a way to get unqualified teachers out of the profession, as higher-performing areas would not tolerate the indifference to education often found in economically disadvantaged areas of town.
Abacus: Poverty is not the cause of children being late or skipping school, homework not being done, and disrespect to teachers. Poor parenting is.
Class80: So tell me, what is the difference between APS today and the Dalton Public Schools in the '60s? I was a "poor child," and they did a great job. My family grew up in "poverty," but my mother would have slapped you if you had offered her welfare. I grew up in a two-parent family where there were my mom and dad, an aunt and four kids in a one-bathroom house. Clearly, there are other factors at work here. My mother would have never let us children be late or miss school. That would have earned a "switching," or maybe even the "belt" from my father.
Lee: Golly Gee Batman, if we just gave these poor people some money, free housing, free health care, free education, etc., in a few years, the entire country will be nothing but Einsteins. Y'all tell me how that works out for you. We've been there and done that for the past 40 years. Poor people with average-and-above IQs will do the things that allow them to move upward. They will go to college or technical school. They will keep jobs. They will instill that work ethic in their children. They will realize that a welfare check and selling a little dope on the side is not a viable financial plan.
AtlParent: Combine this with a recent study out of Stanford that emphasized the growing academic achievement gap over the last few decades between children of the affluent and children of the middle class and the poor. That study identified the two big advantages of children from affluent families: 1) cultivation and education before kindergarten, and 2) summers. The gap between the other children and children of the upper classes was large upon entering kindergarten. That gap tends to shrink a bit during the school years through high school, but expand again over the summers. If we want any hope of genuine opportunity in this country, we need quality education that begins earlier. That's not the expression of a political view; that's the expression of pragmatism.
