More than half (55 percent) of the nearly 28 million people in low-income families with children are in households headed by a married couple.
.. If today’s families looked as they did in 1979 (meaning fewer single parents), the poverty rate would be 1.6 percentage points lower, she finds. If the distribution of income today looked as it did in 1979, the poverty rate would be 7.1 percentage points lower.
.. However, there is one thing about being married that very much does tend to lift families out of poverty: having two incomes. There’s no demographic in America doing better income-wise than dual-earner households, who on average earn more than $100,000 annually. It’s simple math: Most of the time, two incomes combined is going to result in a sum greater than $40,000.
.. And that’s a big part of the reason that, overall, married couples are doing better than single-parent households—just 7 percent of married couples with two incomes are making less than $40,000, according to data from the Census Bureau.
Map: Economic Distress: U.S. Zip Codes
Stop Humiliating Teachers
There’s an element of this rage at bad teachers that’s hard to talk about, and so it’s often avoided: the dismaying truth that we don’t know how to educate poor inner-city and rural kids in this country. In particular, we don’t know how to educate African-American boys, who, according to the Schott Foundation for Public Education, graduate high school at rates no better than fifty-nine per cent. Yet if students from poor families persistently fail to score well, if they fail to finish high school in sufficient numbers, and if those who graduate are unable, in many cases, to finish college, teachers alone can hardly be at fault.
.. By the time kids from poor families of all races enter kindergarten, they are often significantly behind wealthier children in vocabulary, knowledge, and cognitive skills. Of course, good teachers can help—particularly that single teacher who takes a kid in hand and turns him around. But, in recent years, teachers have been held responsible for things that may often be beyond their powers to change. They are being assaulted because they can be assaulted. The real problem is persistent poverty.
.. The heart of the criticism: the tests measure demographics (the class and wealth level of the students) more than teachers’ abilities.
.. The political atmosphere in the country has become so polarized that spirited teachers—men and women who actually say something—will not survive hostile parents or a disapproving principal without the protection of tenure. Abolishing tenure would create instability and even chaos.
.. We have to make teaching the way to a decent middle-class life. And that means treating public-school teachers with the respect offered to good private-school teachers—treating them as distinguished members of the community, or at least as life-on-the-line public servants, like members of the military.
.. We also have to face the real problem, which, again, is persistent poverty. If we really want to improve scores and high-school-graduation rates and college readiness and the rest, we have to commit resources to helping poor parents raise their children by providing nutrition and health services, parenting support, a supply of books, and so on. We have to commit to universal pre-K and much more. And we have to stop blaming teachers for all of the ills and injustices of American society.
Bunga Bunga Billionaire Nation
Watch that Howard Stern interview, and it’s easy to see Trump as an American version of Silvio Berlusconi, the “bunga-bunga” billionaire elected to office in Italy, in part because all his traditional party opponents were seen as weak and ineffectual.
.. Trump’s success at connecting with the economic and cultural anxieties of blue-collar whites largely explains why he hasn’t been damaged more by his disputes with groups that usually function as the gatekeepers for conservative support, from the Fox News Channel to National Review. Voters at Trump rallies are often quick to acknowledge he isn’t a typical Republican, or a classic conservative. Yet they don’t see his deviations from party orthodoxy as disqualifying because they view him as championing them against forces they view as threatening
.. This attraction to strength seems to be connected to an inchoate sense that the world is falling apart. The voters we spoke to were concerned about a lot of potential threats — terrorist, economic, and cultural — and hoped that a strong president would protect them from dangers within as well as from abroad. Voters said they no longer felt free to be themselves in their own country — policed in their speech, unable to pray publicly or even say “God bless you” when someone sneezes. “Everything’s so p.c.,” said Priscilla Mills, a 33-year-old hospital coordinator from Manchester. “And then the second you do say something, you’re a racist.” Trump, who had 21 percent of the vote in our small sample, has capitalized the most on the political-correctness grievance, which is likely to surface in the general election no matter who becomes the nominee.
.. the GOP-primary voter is more motivated by mood than by policy.
.. The people can’t really put their finger on what’s wrong, but they sense — correctly, in my view — that something is very seriously wrong. Trump gives them a sense that the problem is the Other (Wall Street, immigrants, et alia), and that by force of will, he will set things aright.
.. This is the kind of thing that politics cannot fix, this degraded parenting culture. Years ago, a friend of mine who worked as an elementary school teacher in a school filled with impoverished kids used to go to these kids’ houses after school to meet with their parents (or rather, almost always, the parent; there were no dads in these houses). He said over and over, it was the same thing: the TV was on all the time, blaring loud, and the mother was completely checked out. It was chaos externally, and (therefore) chaos inside these kids. My friend finally became so overwhelmed by the enormity of the problem, and the unwillingness of the parents to lift a finger to change the course of their children’s lives, that he quit teaching and went into another line of work. He saw no hope there.
.. The American people are right to sense that things are falling apart, but they misunderstand the ultimate sources of the disorder. This country needs new and better political leadership; that is undeniably true. But at best, it would only solve part of the problem, and not even the most important part.