#Education and Poverty

[lysandyyy]

Okay, so speaking of my Writing and Critical Inquiry class, I have this "Blog Post" project. So, today, we're gonna talk about how poverty affects the education system. I *really* liked this article that I found in my college's library on this subject, so if my post doesn't suffice your thirst for knowledge (which it shouldn't, you should always be thirsting for knowledge, but that's not my point. But please read this article if you have the time it's so good.) I will preface, however, that it was made like decades ago, so he refers to black people only as Negros and says the N slur once. So, y'know. be prepared.

He starts out the article with this quote I actually really liked from Pat Sexton's  "Education and Income: Inequalities of Opportunity in Our Public Schools," where he says, "There is an enormous book by a Mrs. Pat Sexton which indicates that a person is likely to get an education in proportion to how much money he has." I wholeheartedly agree with this because I grew up in Charleston, WV. This led to my parents being eager to move away because they were scared to send my sister to a middle school that was rife with drugs and violence, but they didn't have the money to send her anywhere else. This article is old as dirt, and it's very specific to its time, however, I believe that's why it's scary how accurate this is to the modern day. He speaks on how the main people who are hurt by not getting a proper education are Immigrants and African Americans. Specifically Irish Immigrants, which is my ancestry.

He speaks on what he sees in both his community and in the news across America, how we see underserved and underprivileged kids grow up to be "Criminals" and just generally not good people. He accredits this phenomenon to these kids not getting proper schooling and opportunities, causing them to not be able to work, causing them to have to turn to drugs and brothels. He also partially blames educators for this problem, which I disagree with because there are such nuances and different factors that go into teaching children. There's a bunch of red tape to sift through, and Admin is very strict on what we can teach and talk about with our students. However, I do agree that the education system needs A LOT of work. We need to teach our students things that will give them background on how to be a functioning member of society, but we also need to teach them life skills like taxes, public speaking, tolerance, and social skills.

Which brings me to the problem of America's "Education Debt." Education Debt, as paraphrased from the article "From the Achievement Gap to the Educational Debt: Understanding Achievement in U.S. Schools," Educational Debt is what the American Education System accrued by giving rich, white men a "head start" on education. By implementing "Residential Schools" and by not letting black kids have access to the same schools as rich white kids, black, native, and immigrant children are less likely to succeed in schools because they are still trying to catch up both historically and economically to their more privileged peers.

All this to say, we need to find ways to make this "debt" shrink. I had to research this for my Teachers in Diverse Societies class, and my findings were that we simply learn and adapt to the environment we're in. The best way to help underprivileged kids is to give them the opportunities they need to be successful. Whether that's having better teachers in schools or districts moving tax money around so that all the schools get the same amount of funding so all kids can be equally as successful, or what. The old saying goes, "It takes a village to raise a child," but what are we doing as a village to help the children around us and not just our own children? All children deserve to have equal opportunities for success, so we as a society need to stop being selfish and help the kids who need us, not just kids who have the money to pay for that help.

[intheholler]

what joke are you really tryin to tell when you make fun of appalachia and the greater south?

even when you "just" mock our accents (you and i both know what you're really implying when you take on the drawl), the punchline of your joke there is poverty.

those who prefer a more overt route over backhanded implication: when you laugh at our education, or lack thereof, the punchline of your joke is still poverty. systemically underfunded schools packed with underprivileged children who aren't getting the same standards of education as the rest of the country is a real knee slapper boy i tell you what

when you mock our dental health and start quipping about toothless hillbillies, you're still laughin at poverty. appalachia is disproportionately uninsured compared to the rest of the nation. fellas most of us can't afford the privilege of regular, preventative dental visits and checkups, let alone the cost of huge procedures when things finally get dire. beyond that, our poverty is generational. from the get go we inherit bad teeth from family who couldn't afford that shit neither.

in the same vein, when you make fatphobic comments about said disproportionately-uninsured region--one with few jobs available to begin with, let alone work that pays enough to afford wholesome, unprocessed foods that don't rot yer teeth for supper--the butt of your joke is,, u guessed it,, ✨ poverty ✨

but to me the real kicker is the cousin fucker jokes. how can you not see that when you snark about inbreeding, when you piss yourself over that infamous billboard and oh, how could anyone possibly need to be told that?!, your punchline is not only poverty and a lack of education enough to develop critical thinking skills and the ability to build safe support networks, but you're also usually guffawing at incestuous rape and vulnerable children on top of it. peak comedy.

really though, how is any of that funny?

what happens to everyone's class consciousness the moment we start talkin about the hollers n the deep south?

why does health insurance, quality education, and food security for all suddenly go from issues worth fighting for to punishments, and ones we deserve to be humiliated for on top of it?

i know im just a dumb ol hillbilly n all, but i reckon i just don't get what we're supposed to be laughin at here

[palatinewolfsblog]

"We should measure the prosperity of a nation not by the number of millionaires but by the absence of poverty, the prevalence of health, the efficiency of public schools, and the number of people who can and do read worthwhile books." W.E.B. Du Bois.

[gayeilgeoir]

Women, please stop undermining your period pain. Complain about it, be annoyed, grit your teeth, clench your stomach, do everything you need because men need to start getting it into their head how bad it is.

I’m gay, so I have more male friends than my straight counterparts, and oh my gods, they don’t get it.

When I was talking to my friend, he was so genuinely shocked when I said period pains have made me throw up before, and some women can even faint. Because women are always undermining their pain. We are taught periods are a thing to be so constantly ashamed of, when they’re not! So be obvious, don’t hide it and ask for the help you need.

[centrally-unplanned]

As a tangent note, education-as-opportunity discourse is one of those things where another author (in this case Freddie deBoer) has already just said it all, so I feel a bit foolish repeating the points. For the record I guess, the idea of addressing inequality via "redistributive opportunity" in schools is a contradiction in terms, accepting as valid that say being a barista can never be a good job so we fix society by giving everyone the opportunity to be "better" than that. Which flies right in the face of the fact that society needs baristas and the number of baristas is not meaningfully going to shift via having "better schools" because people want coffee. Not only does the education system not exist, at all, to "fix" inequality, it is itself inherently unequal, concerned as is it with heterogeneous acquisitions of heterogeneously-valued human capital. And this is a trait inherent to education, not specifically a product of any given school system. You can't squeeze any blood out of this stone.

[tilbageidanmark]

[tiredkilljoy]

It’s so obvious sometimes when people have weird ass judgments about Zaunites being uneducated. As if it wasn’t obvious from a young age that they had to rely on their smarts to survive as long as they did. It’s giving - I’ve never considered the politics behind education and didn’t grow up knowing it was study and succeed or starve.

[xwhitenoise]

obsessed with wta book of hungry names tbh

it's great in general but also. the main party is such a wreck. bunch of werewolves who are fighting some silent hill shit every week, but are also young adults who clearly were not very well prepared for just. the world.

[lesbiansandgayssupporttheminers]

Honestly, this country is a disgrace. No child should be in the situation where they don't have enough to eat, or can't access education due to lack of money.

At my current place, we also give away basic stationery, period products etc to students in need. It does put you at a disadvantage when you're the kid in the class who can't afford £10 for a calculator.

There are schools doing laundry for kids, providing them with clothes, even bedding in some cases.

But schools are increasingly running short on money (as are teachers themselves)- having schools as a sort of social safety net of last resort is a situation that's going to fall apart at some point, unless schools get proper funding.

But wouldn't it be better to ensure students aren't in this situation in the first place?

[alwaysbewoke]

nice. of course the k-12 education system is underfunded, leading to constant teacher shortages, inadequate facilities, and subpar student outcomes. healthcare access is alarmingly poor, with an unneeded high uninsured rate that leaves many without normal, essential medical services, and even with recent medicaid expansion, mad issues still remain. health outcomes are fckn dismal, with high rates of chronic diseases and preventable deaths. obesity levels are among the worst in the nation (no wonder with all the food insecurity and lack of healthy lifestyle options around there). income inequality is out of control. they got many of their citizens living in poverty with almost zero prospects for improvement. on top of these issues, oklahoma has one of the highest incarceration rates in the country, driven by harsh sentencing laws and systemic failings which targets black and poor (because of course (because america)). all on top of a legacy of racial injustices. i mean the tulsa race massacre. need i say more? but yea they should totally spend 1bil on entertainment. that's a totally reasonable thing to do smfh.

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

By Gregory E. Williams

Louisiana governor Jeff Landry – who recently tried to stop summer school lunch programs – is pressuring Louisiana State University (LSU) to resume parading its live tiger mascot at home football games. This hasn’t happened since 2015, when Mike the Tiger VI was still alive. The current Siberian Bengal tiger, Mike VII, kept in an enclosure at LSU’s Baton Rouge, has never been subjected to this.

[intheholler]

so @indiestarlight was tellin me about a conversation they were having with an international friend, trying to explain generational poverty in the south and why it feels so impossible to break out of. they asked if they could share with me what they said, and upon readin it i found it so on the nose that i asked for permission to share it here.

of course, education or a lack thereof is only one path we get stuck on when trying to get out of poverty, but i think it does a good job of illuminating a very common appalachian multigenerational experience, in a very human way, and is something interesting to consider if you ain't from here and wanna get a better understanding.

and i think this part in particular here...

and yep alright now even though great-granddaddy was a union organizer your daddy is a republican—and maybe you aren't, and maybe you try to reason with him, but it's hard to get through to him when the objective truth is that yeah, liberal politicians HAVE failed him, and yeah, liberal politicians DO ignore the south.

...deserves an entire fucking post on its own. anyway, enough of me. read their full thoughts under the cut

for many people in the south it's just an endless cycle of. your great-granddaddy was never able to graduate school. so he worked in the mines, or in a factory, or in any other job he could get without a degree. he didn't make enough money to send your granddaddy to college, either. maybe your granddaddy graduated high school, maybe he even got a scholarship and managed to enroll in college—but then his daddy broke his leg and couldn't work anymore, or his ma got sick and couldn't take care of his little siblings, or or or a thousand other issues that could've been solved with money or better access to healthcare or better access to education, but he didn't have any of those things so instead he came home to take care of family and he never got a degree and then he also worked whatever job he could get without a degree. and your granddaddy didn't have enough money to send your daddy to college, and anyway when your granddaddy went to college for a semester everyone treated him like dirt and all the professors acted like he was stupid, so why would your daddy wanna go to college, anyway? and then your daddy thinks that colleges are full of stuck-up snobs, and ohh now fox news is telling him that's because colleges are full of pansy liberals who've never worked a day in their lives, not like him, not like his family who've been fighting just to scrape by for generations, and yep alright now even though great-granddaddy was a union organizer your daddy is a republican—and maybe you aren't, and maybe you try to reason with him, but it's hard to get through to him when the objective truth is that yeah, liberal politicians HAVE failed him, and yeah, liberal politicians DO ignore the south. and now maybe you do want to go to college, but… with what money? with what opportunities? you can't get academic scholarships because the educational barriers you've faced mean that even though you graduated high school, your grades aren't near good enough to get any kind of scholarship on them. income-based scholarships exist, but they can be hard to get, and they'll cover maybe 40% of the cost of attending school, and there's no way in hell you can cover the other 60% yourself. your great-granddaddy worked in the mines, 'cuz he didn't have a degree. you work in mcdonald's, 'cuz you don't have a degree. and one day your own kids are gonna ask about going to college, and you're gonna have to tell them that mcdonalds doesn't pay you enough to pay their tuition. and the cycle continues, and every time you go to online leftist spaces and try to get people to help you organize and make things better, instead everyone just mocks you for your accent, for your "bad" grammar, and they make jokes about how stupid and uneducated everyone in your hometown is, and you realize they are never going to take you seriously and they are never gonna help you

[raionmimi]

*Slaps Symweaver* This bad boy can fit so many shoujo cliches in it

Bonus panel:

[sheisanimposter]

Tomorrow is my very first day at a real university at 32 years old. I grew up in rural poverty where the system likes to keep people like me, but I will soon be the first person in my family to hold a 4 year degree.

As a child I related so much to Raul Dahl’s Matilda-the reader in the tv family-but as I grew older education became more and more of a privilege than a priority. The reality of hardship buried my love of learning.

I recently unearthed a clip from a vhs tape of my first day of first grade and barely recognized my childhood self. She was unable to contain her smile as she got ready for school, she was ecstatic, she couldn’t even sleep the night before. She LOVED school.

Now it’s the night before my first class and I am so giddy. I can’t sleep.

I know to my classmates I’ll look more than 10 years older, but this is who really lives inside me and I’m so proud of her.

[abimee]

by the powers that exist i swear to god i will be in a better situation like overally by this time next year so help me. ill actually have a full-time job and a decent living situation and will not sound on the brink of death i promise you all that

[piniatafullofblood]

when I grow up I want to live. I want to live somewhere with a forest and a river nearby, and pretty colorful tiles and archways in my doors. I want to invite my friends over to my house to eat, and to play board games, and have a sourdough starter and get really good at making bread and pasta. I want a cat. I want to be able to see something pretty at a store and buy it for myself, no mater what kind of price tag might be on it. I want to rest well, and I want to plant a garden on the side of my house, and I want to grow food, and give it to my friends. I want to have a place where I can go to make my pottery.

I want to live.