Kofi Assabil, a member of the class of 2020 from University of Colorado Boulder, knows the grim job market all too well. Assabil started his job search in January 2020, months prior to his graduation. But when the pandemic reached the United States and everything went remote, he started to worry. “I realized that things were going to be harder. I was going on LinkedIn and Indeed…calling a few connections every two weeks to see if they had any opportunities,” but “even with internships, it was tough.” Along with several of his roommates, Assabil opted to wait out the labor market crunch in graduate school instead.

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The most recent estimates from Georgetown University indicate that approximately 70 percent of college students work part or full-time during their studies, suggesting 30 percent of new grads — up to 1.2 million recent college students — may be ineligible for unemployment once they graduate, unless they have proof of a rescinded job offer.

As a result, this generation of college graduates is struggling to find work. Coupled with a lack of government support and mounting student debt, personal financial conditions are proving difficult for many. According to the most recent data, among the 69 percent of college students that took out loans in 2019, the average debt upon graduation was $29,900, although numbers are higher for students of color. While Congress placed a temporary moratorium on payments for federal loans, there is still $137 billion in outstanding private student loan debt that is unaffected by the moratorium. Those bills are coming due, whether recent grads are ready for them or not. For the 22 percent of college undergraduates who are also parents, the financial burden is only heightened by the need to care for dependents.

The combination of insufficient economic opportunity and inaccessible unemployment benefits could have serious long-term implications. Elaine Weiss, an analyst from the National Academy of Social Insurance, believes that this will push new college graduates into lower paying jobs, since they cannot afford to wait for an offer that provides a higher wage.

According to a UCLA study, individuals who graduate college during a recession can expect between 10 to 20 percent lower lifetime earnings compared with their peers. According to the Federal Reserve, 40.3 percent of recent college graduates are underemployed. Further, this effect has become more amplified over time, as successive graduating classes experience higher and higher post-college unemployment rates.

One potential solution for new grads is a jobseekers’ allowance that could support them while they look for work. The allowance, which could partially replace foregone wages, would allow recipients to support themselves while they continue to look for work. Australia has a similar program dedicated specifically to providing financial assistance to youth and student job seekers with monthly benefit levels ranging from $1,153 to $1,924, depending on financial and family circumstances. While it’s no windfall, a benefit of that size would help cover a large portion of living expenses for many Americans. Other countries, such as Sweden, provide $1,101 per month, while also providing public child care and a child allowance for any families with children under the age of 16.

The results of these stronger unemployment programs have been well documented. One study from Georgetown University found that during the Great Recession, the enhanced unemployment insurance increased workers’ wages by 2.6 percent, with greater benefits for women, people of color, and people with lower educational attainment. This suggests that unemployment insurance programs help facilitate the job search process, allowing workers more time to find a job aligned with their skills.

With another college class soon to graduate into a still-weak labor market, the imperative of stronger unemployment insurance only becomes more important. While the passage of the American Rescue Plan is welcome news for the American economy, the bill failed to include unemployment protections specifically targeted at recent college graduates. The U.S. should take note of the work done by other nations to provide adequate financial stability for recent graduates as they enter the labor market. History tells us that the failure to do so will have lifelong impacts for college graduates.

Some parents and members of the State Board of Education have expressed concerns about how the process puts up barriers for low-income families, families with limited transportation, and immigrant families that are already on high alert under the Trump administration.

In a Twitter thread, Julie Lawson, a parent of a third grader in the district and PTA president of her son’s school, described roadblocks in the volunteer clearance process. The TB test costs $60 and is not covered by insurance. The single location that offers fingerprinting services for the district is located downtown and is only open during normal business hours, when working parents may have to take time off to go. “All of this is a major access barrier for a parent who wants to chaperone their kid’s field trip,” she said.

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A traditional TB test takes 48 hours and requires two separate visits — one to take the test and the other to have results read. Lawson has spent a lot of time reminding parents of the cost, where to go, and how to coordinate and communicate with health care providers — some of whom don’t want to give the test to their patients without risk factors present.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends TB screening for those who have been in close contact with TB, those who have traveled to countries with a high prevalence of the disease, people who live or work in high risk settings, health care workers, and children who have been exposed to adults with TB. According to the CDC website, “TB tests are generally not needed for people with a low risk of infection with TB bacteria.”

So, why does DCPS require it for volunteers? Jessica Sutter, a member of the State Board of Education, who has fielded concerns from parents about the policy, and who asked the district directly, says she’s still unsure. She says the district told her that they were operating on a Department of Health directive that required proof of a negative TB test of all DCPS employees, volunteers, and contractors.

Further, Sutter says, the district told her that free TB tests were going to be provided at the Tuberculosis and Chest Clinic, a clinic that provides diagnostic and medical management of persons who have been diagnosed with or are suspected of having TB. But after visiting their website, which states that they do not perform routine TB screening, such as those for job or school admission, Sutter says that does not appear to be the case.

“At DC Public Schools (DCPS), the safety and security of our students is our top priority. Fingerprint-based FBI background checks are required by law, and as of this time, proof of a negative Tuberculosis (TB) test is required of all DCPS employees, volunteers, and contractors per guidance from the DC Department of Health,” said DCPS in a statement. “Balancing the safety, health and security of our students with the need to create a welcoming environment for all families in our school buildings as partners in their child’s success is critically important. DCPS is reviewing the TB and fingerprinting policy for parent volunteers to seek out opportunities to provide more flexibility and partnership with family members whenever possible.”

Different school districts around the country have different approaches to volunteer clearance. Some districts do require all of the same components as DCPS, but they also offer vouchers for free testing at local clinics or a tiered process, where the clearance requirements are commensurate with the level of involvement. Many districts require only a background check or a background check and fingerprinting.

School districts need a clear understanding of who is volunteering, of course, but without putting up barriers to family engagement. While Becky Reina, founding chair of the Ward 1 Education Council, a volunteer organization that advocates for public schools in the ward, describes the fingerprinting as easy, with a short wait, she’s quick to acknowledge that entering a government building that requires signing in with a government issued ID is something that could cause anxiety for some parents. “Given the hostile immigration environment parents are living with under the Trump administration, no amount of reassurance will satisfy much of D.C.’s immigrant community,” she said.

Emily Gasoi, a State Board of Education member, representing families in Ward 1, said the fingerprinting piece is driving a lot of the fear among some families. She first became aware of parental concerns about the DCPS policy through school and PTO meeting visits, where she repeatedly heard from constituents that the process, while onerous for everyone, presented a particular deterrent for families with insecure immigration statuses and those unable to afford the costs associated with the process.

“This is more than an inconvenience, it’s an equity issue,” said Gasoi. While Gasoi understands the need for a clearance process that keeps students safe, she suggests there could be more equitable ways of clearing volunteers and that the district consider different policies for different levels of volunteers.

For her part, Lawson spent dozens of hours coordinating with a handful of nearby schools to have a fingerprinting unit stationed in the schools’ neighborhood for a day. In order for the district to send the unit, though, a minimum number of applicants who had already completed the online background check and TB test had to sign up.

In the end, only 16 applicants out of 40 who initiated the process completed fingerprinting. While some parents said they completed the fingerprinting on their own time, Lawson said that for most, she couldn’t confirm an appointment because she never received a TB result.

The benefits of having a child’s primary caregiver involved at their school are numerous. Research shows family engagement results in improved student achievement, reduced absenteeism, and better grades, test scores, and behavior. Sutter says, “We absolutely want every child in the care of our schools to be kept safe, but whose responsibility is that, financially? And how do we make this accessible rather than burdensome in such a way that it will discourage especially low-income families from participating?”

This piece has been updated to add a statement from DCPS.

But for their son’s first few years of school, when Custen was working in Draper, Utah, attending the annual Individualized Education Program (IEP) meetings that laid out this plan could have threatened their job. To participate in meetings 40 miles away, “I would need to use PTO, and there would need to be space available in the schedule for me to leave,” they explained. “If someone else had already claimed time off that day before I had the chance to, then I wouldn’t be able to take the time off myself without receiving a strike for an absence, which would put my job security at risk.”

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Custen’s son receives his services in part through IDEA (the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act), which serves around 14 percent of public school students. IDEA guarantees a right to an IEP, which includes an evaluation of a student’s educational abilities and needs and provides a detailed plan for any support services, specialized instruction, or accommodations they may need due to a disability. These accommodations may include alternative assignments, permission to record a spoken lecture, large print textbooks, extended testing times, assistance with organizing a desk space, or access to speech-to-text software, among many others.

Parents can be crucial partners when it comes to selecting accommodations in an IEP, but Custen’s job was making it impossible to get a seat at the planning table. Meanwhile, Custen’s ex’s schedule allowed him to regularly attend — a disparity that led to family stress and communication gaps around their son’s education plan. Their son’s behavior was different when he was around his father than when he was around Custen, for example, in part because their ex struggled to accept that their son was neuroatypical.

“He would often go into meetings with unrealistically rose-tinted lenses on our son’s behavior and progress,” Custen explained. “He would skew his own perception of our son’s capabilities and milestones. For instance, he would do 90 percent of the work in getting him dressed while our son would do 10 percent of it (such as pulling up pants or sticking arms through sleeves once his shirt was already pulled on for him) and claim that our son was capable of dressing himself.” This led to confusion over what kind of assistance their son would actually need at school.

Custen’s frequent absences meant the services their son received were selected based solely on his behavior around his dad. “The fact that I was not present at these meetings meant that they were taking him for his word on our son’s at-home behavior,” Custen shared. In turn, “they would have to hear from me later and go through the process of editing notes and plans for the IEP. I can’t imagine that it was easy or comfortable for the team helping our son to be caught in the middle of such a back-and-forth between [me and] my ex either.”

Some parent advocates believe problems like Custen’s could be partly alleviated by a recent announcement from the Wage and Hour Division of the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL). The agency responded to a parent whose employer denied their request to take intermittent Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) leave to attend IEP meetings. The agency clarified that employees whose children have “serious health conditions” (those for which a patient receives either inpatient care or continuing care from a medical provider) requiring IEPs are able to take time off under the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) to attend IEP meetings without losing their job or continued health insurance coverage.  FMLA allows eligible employees to take up to 12 workweeks of leave in a 12-month period for serious health conditions or to care for family members.

According to the decision, parents can use FMLA leave to attend IEP meetings because they involve medical decisions, discussions of children’s health and well-being with respect to those decisions, and the provision of proper physical and psychological care. Notably, the DOL also said a child’s doctor doesn’t have to be present in order for a parent to use FMLA time to attend their IEP meeting.

Amanda Morin, an education writer/author, parent advocate, and former teacher, knows many parents simply won’t be able to take advantage of the clarified policy, especially if they are low-income. Seasonally, intermittently, or self-employed parents are rarely eligible for FMLA, which is restricted to private employers with 50 or more employees working for them within 75 miles of a central worksite. Employees are only eligible if they’ve worked for at least 1,250 hours across the 12 months prior to the leave and have worked for their current eligible employer for a full year.

“Even parents who do have FMLA may not always be able to afford the time off if it will have to be unpaid,” she explained. Overall, around 59 percent of U.S. workers were covered by FMLA as of 2012. That number may have shifted downward since then due to the influx of freelance positions and the rise of the gig economy.

In many ways, this decision looks like a major move towards greater equity in education. Family members work schedules are often intimately connected to their children’s IEP meetings. For researcher, writer, and former teacher Mireya Vela, IEPs have always been a part of her life — and her job choices. Vela’s son, now 25, began his IEP at four years old after his speech delays and other developmental issues became apparent.

Vela tailored her work schedule, and even her choice of career, around her son’s educational and medical needs. “From the time my son was six to the time he graduated high school, I only worked part time. I couldn’t work longer than that,” Vela said. “I often had 2-3 jobs at the same time. But all my jobs worked around my need to drop everything and run to the school.” What’s more, Vela consistently advocated for meetings longer than the customary school-requested 45 minutes, and attended them flanked by a support team of clinicians and advocates — which often meant some rescheduling.

A parent’s ability to take FMLA time off for an IEP meeting will also depend on their child’s exact diagnosis and necessary support services. Morin said “it may also be challenging for parents of kids who don’t have a medical diagnosis, but have an IEP, because getting documentation of the need for leave isn’t as clear-cut.” There might be cases where a child is in clear need of services to help them with a disability or developmental delay, for example, but their family is uninsured or underinsured or can’t afford to see a high-level specialist. In other cases, a student might have to go through an extended period of testing or medical assessment before they receive a final medical diagnosis. Without a documented specific diagnosis, a parent may struggle to prove their eligibility for FMLA leave.

Still, Morin calls the ability to use FMLA intermittently for IEP meetings “a step in the right direction,” especially because not all eligible parents may have known that they could use time off for this purpose. “I’m pleased that it shines a light on the fact that an IEP meeting is tied into a child’s health and well-being,” she said. “I think, for parents who have not been able to leave work to get to meetings, knowing this is available, and feeling confident enough to bring it to an HR department to use the new policy, has the potential to be really empowering and increase family-school engagement.”

An equal, engaged dynamic between schools and families is critical, says Morin, because parents often understand their children more intimately. Parents also have more knowledge about how a student might learn or interact in different settings, which could impact the frequency or types of services they may need.

The DOL’s recent announcement marks a potential step forward in terms of recognizing IEPs as crucial to children’s well-being, health, and quality of life, rather than positioning them as optional “add-ons” to a one-size-fits-all public school education. For Brim Custen, family-school engagement was indeed the driving factor in their son’s well-being and educational progress at school. Later, when Custen began working as the communications coordinator for the Utah Pride Center, their new employer’s greater flexibility allowed for much more active participation in the development of their son’s IEP, and they saw a sea change after becoming more directly involved.

Initially, Custen’s inability to attend IEP meetings forced both families and school administrators to wade through red tape as they struggled to come to a full understanding of exactly what Custen’s son could and couldn’t do. “When he would move to a new classroom with new teachers, there would be some growing pains as they adjusted to the fact that I would seldom be present in person at these meetings,” explained Custen, “and I would end up having to disagree with my ex and provide different perspective after the fact through email or phone call.”

No longer mired in confusion, the team working with Custen’s son was able to communicate more clearly and flesh out a comprehensive plan to help him pay attention and regulate his emotions both in and out of class. “Thanks to there being an IEP in place and a team of teachers and therapists who understood his needs and worked within them, I’m proud to say that my son is doing vastly better in his behavior, self-control, and retention of information in school than we had anticipated he’d be able to,” Custen shared.

Alex, a teacher in the Bay Area, says conditions in her school have been particularly bad this year; many buildings in the region are not designed for high heat, thanks to the historically temperate climate. Her classroom doesn’t have openable windows, so she uses a fan to try to suck air in from the cooler hallway, but it’s not enough.

“Students will ask to go to the bathroom more often just to get into the hallway where it’s cooler,” she told TalkPoverty. She said the heat makes students feel sluggish and unfocused, a problem particularly acute for young women in her class who struggle with body image, and stay tightly wrapped up even in high temperatures. “I also notice that I tend to run out of energy a lot faster on hot days.”

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Not ideal for a high school teacher trying to keep order in a classroom of 16-year-olds, even one who loves her job and is passionate about education.

This is a problem that’s only going to get worse due to the confluence of rising temperatures thanks to climate change — average temperatures in the U.S. could increase by as much as 12 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100 and have already risen several degrees since 1900 — and declining school funding. Schools that don’t overheat today are going to in the future.

Education budgets were cut deeply during the Great Recession and some states haven’t returned to their pre-Recession funding levels; capital spending across the country hasn’t recovered to pre-recession levels either. As a result, schools that urgently need temperature control updates along with other infrastructure improvements face an uphill struggle to increase their budgets.

Overheated classrooms aren’t just uncomfortable. They can actively inhibit health and learning. There’s a large body of evidence showing that air conditioning can improve student health and academic performance, and research as far back as 1984 on the effects of learning in a hot classroom.

A May 2018 paper found that a temperature increase of just one degree can reduce the amount learned over the course of the school year by 1 percent. The researchers estimate that around 30 percent of schools in the U.S. lack air conditioning, and that even within hot areas with widespread air conditioning penetration, kids in low-income schools are less likely to have access to have cooling at school.

They also argue systemic inequality can exacerbate this phenomenon among low-income students of color, who live in hotter regions and are more likely to attend schools without adequate temperature control.

Jisung Park, one of the researchers, said that, “What we’re finding is totally consistent with the last mile of the school desegregation movement not having been completed … the neighborhood-level disparities driven by residential wealth still very much hold true.”

Park, an environmental economist, is swift to note that simply installing air conditioning — itself a known contributor to climate change — is not the solution. Greening electric infrastructure, taxing carbon, and taking other measures to tackle climate change is key, he said.

So is investing in school infrastructure, including new buildings; maintenance to bring schools up to new standards; and retrofitting to help schools adapt, inside and out, to climate change. That must include rich and poor districts alike, or the inequalities they observe will perpetuate themselves.

An Oklahoma educator who works in a school with a high percentage of low-income black students sees the consequences of being housed in outdated school buildings without adequate resources firsthand. Her classroom can get up to 80 degrees, and it takes a noticeable toll on her students. “I’m trying,” overheated students will tell her. “I’m tired, it’s too hot in here.”

Her school actually has a climate control system, complete with thermostats in every classroom. But it is not well-maintained. It can take hours for the district to respond when teachers put in a request for help.

For one of her colleagues across the hall, that means suffocating in heat as high as 90 degrees until her class is relocated to a comparatively cooler spot. But, she says, in the state with some of the worst education funding in the country, there are so many things going wrong that overheated classrooms aren’t at the top of her list.

This isn’t just a problem indoors. It’s also an issue in the schoolyard. Schools serving low-income students tend to have less greenery, and that’s not just an aesthetic problem. Trees, shrubs, and other plants can help to control temperatures, including indoors, when they’re planted strategically to provide shade to a building’s hot spots.

The lack of shade also increases exposure to harmful UV radiation on the playground, setting kids up for future health inequalities. From the moment they walk into school for the first time, some students are set up for failure, with Park noting that access to greenery can improve temperature control, but also offer mental and physical health benefits.

Oklahoma is not the only state struggling with school infrastructure, from campus trees to sound roofs. Across the United States, kids are attending classes in outdated, poorly-maintained, inadequate, and sometimes unsafe buildings. Schools across the country are struggling with lead contamination. Environmental Protection Agency regulations govern schools that maintain their own water supplies, but not those using municipal water that may get contaminated on its way to the tap. Kids are overheating, and they can’t even drink the school’s water.

It will cost $200 billion nationwide to bring America’s schools into good condition.  But schools, especially low-income ones, face a funding crisis. They rely on property tax revenues alongside some state funding to fund capital improvements, pay teachers and staff, and cover the numerous other expenses associated with running a school. Wealthy districts have a larger tax base and more access to loans and bond issues, and consequently spend more; their students are more likely to attend class in appropriately-cooled classrooms, to drink from lead-free taps, and to have access to well-maintained amenities.

“Targeting school facility upgrades should be part of a long-overdue federal infrastructure bill,” said Park, “or an education reform package.” Modernizing, and installing, HVAC systems is not a trivial task. Failure to make these investments, however, will keep low-income children in the U.S. at a permanent, sweaty, disadvantage.

Editors’ note: By request, the teachers in this article have been anonymized.

In an attempt to to give parents, particularly those with little disposable income, a break from those big numbers, many states in the coming weeks will turn to an old tax policy standby: sales tax holidays.

In 2019, 16 states have sales tax holidays planned, on which sales tax is waived or cut for a select group of items, most often back-to-school supplies or disaster preparedness goods ahead of hurricane season. The vast majority of them fall on either the last week of July or in early August.

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The first such holiday took place in New York in January 1997, as a response to the fact that New Jersey levies no sales tax on clothing. Florida implemented a sales tax holiday the following year, and then Texas did the same the year after that. From there, their popularity grew significantly: 2010 was the peak year, with 19 states implementing some version of a holiday.

Today, these holidays are often promoted as providing a specific benefit to “hardworking” families and low-income people by lowering the cost of goods that have been deemed necessities. And as a bonus, local small businesses that have been hurt by the rise of internet commerce will theoretically see a jump in shoppers too.

But once you get past the self-congratulatory pablum of the lawmakers hyping these holidays, you see that they are much less beneficial for low-income folks than they appear.

The theory behind sales tax holidays is simple: Because the sales tax applies to everyone equally, and because low-income people spend most of their income, a suspension of the sales tax helps them more than it will a household that saves a large percentage of its income. Indeed, most states have tax systems that take more from the poor than the rich, with sales taxes largely to blame.

However, a sales tax holiday does little to change that equation for a simple reason: People with less money don’t have the ability to plop a whole bunch of it down in a store when a sales tax holiday comes along. When 40 percent of households can’t even access $400 in an emergency, it’s simply not an option to spend big sums in order to take advantage of a tax gimmick. This is the same reason that low-income families can’t just buy in bulk in order to save money on household goods: They don’t have the cash to fund larger purchases, even if it would be a cheaper approach in the long run.

Richer households, though, can do just that.

Per a 2010 study by the Chicago Federal Reserve, households with incomes under $30,000 and single-parent households derive essentially no benefit whatsoever from sales tax holidays. Instead, “the wealthiest households and households consisting of married parents and young children have the largest, statistically significant response.”

Sales tax holidays may even wind up hurting the poorest residents of a state because, to make up the lost revenue, governments wind up setting the usual sales tax rate higher than it would otherwise have been. And there’s some evidence that retailers game the tax holiday system too, marking up their products in the days before the holiday and then pocketing the difference when the sales tax is removed.

But the biggest problem is that a policy aimed at giving people a break ends up undermining the sort of programs and services that would actually help those same people far more. Altogether, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), states will lose more than $300 million in revenue this year due to sales tax holidays. And ITEP expects that total to increase as internet shopping becomes more prevalent in the coming years, because currently nearly every sales tax holiday applies to online purchases.

That’s $300 million that won’t be spent on health care, job placement, affordable housing programs, or schools. Money that could be spent on direct services is instead plowed into a bank shot tax break that can’t possibly help low-income people more than a direct infusion of cash or more social services would. Several states implementing tax holidays for back to school season – including Texas, Oklahoma, and Alabama – still spend less per student than they did before the Great Recession. Instead of sustained investments in the classroom or tax credits aimed specifically at them, low-income parents in those states receive a gimmick.

It’s not the case, of course, that there is no benefit to anyone from these tax holidays. But the cost is not in any way justified by the help provided. Putting more money into schools so parents don’t have to pony up for hundreds of dollars worth of school supplies would do more good over the long term than trying to boost pencil sales over one weekend ever will.

This April marked the 20^th anniversary of the Columbine school shooting. In the weeks following the anniversary, three deaths and numerous injuries were caused by two shootings on school campuses. Despite whatever fervor Columbine may have stirred 20 years ago to address school shootings, they have become a common part of the U.S. news cycle and school shooting drills a regular part of a student’s education. However, no matter how common these events are, safety drills and strategy have not adequately developed inclusive safety measures for students with disabilities.

This is not a trivial problem: 14 percent of students have a disability.

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The current approach regarding active shooter events is the “run, hide, fight” strategy, the response recommended by the Department of Homeland Security, which calls for running away when possible, hiding somewhere safe when you can’t run, and fighting the shooter if running or hiding are not options. For students with disabilities who may not be able to run, employment of the “hide” aspect of the “run, hide, fight” strategy often calls for waiting in areas such as libraries, bathrooms, and classrooms for response personnel to assist them — even if these areas aren’t very accessible or safe. The fight strategy is the last option, one that no parent or teacher wants a student, disabled or otherwise, to have to do, and a strategy that has left two young students dead in the last several weeks. However, if schools have not provided sufficient options for students to respond, they may be left with few other choices than to charge or thrown items at an attacker.

Plus, tools like door barricades and lockdown plans designed to keep children safe often ignore the needs of students with disabilities, who in addition to mobility disabilities may have adverse reactions to alarms that overwhelm senses, difficulty processing instructions, or an inability to remain still or quiet.

Using a classroom as a refuge area was the solution Katie’s school decided to use when she was in fifth grade. “I just (in theory) had to wait in a burning building until someone came to get me. Even at 10 years old, I knew this was a horrible plan and I was not a fan,” she said.

While Katie was raised in Michigan, these issues are national. A settlement in a Newark, New Jersey, high school district was reached in 2017 after it left at least one disabled student in the school when an unplanned alarm went off.  The school “did not have policies for evacuating students with disabilities,” according to federal officials. More than 20 years ago, the City of Alexandria, Virginia, school board was sued twice regarding evacuation and school safety of students. Despite laws and litigation establishing accessibility requirements that go back decades, much has remained the same in evacuation plans for students with disabilities.

When it comes to students with disabilities, organizations such as Safe and Sound Schools and the ALICE Training Institute recommend the use of Independent Emergency and Lockdown Plans, or IELPs. These protocols hook into Individualized Educational Plans (IEPs), a federal requirement for special education students, which are detailed and routinely updated plans to accommodate students with disabilities; or a student’s 504 Plan, which ensures access to certain accommodations, such as extra time on tests.

While IELPs can be a great way to address a child’s specific needs, learn the problem areas of the school, and connect with disabled students and their parents, it is a dangerous disservice to everyone on a school campus to relegate inclusive solutions to these problems to just one student and their specific IEP or 504 team. It does not seem feasible that a school administration could efficiently respond to the individual IELPs of each student and keep all students safe in the event of a real emergency.

Relying on individual plans also represents a missed opportunity for universal design and inclusion, which could benefit the campus as a whole. Universal design of safety plans would produce plans that are created with the flexibility and intention of being used by the largest number of students possible, based on a recognition of varied needs, rather than amended later for individual students as needed.  Additionally, IEPs and 504 Plans are a federal requirement that does not apply equally to private schools, which do not have a requirement to provide IEPs to students with disabilities.

In 2019, schools should be beyond a “separate but equal” approach to students with disabilities. Disabled students spend on average more than 60 percent of their time in a general classroom. It is dangerous and lazy not to integrate identified safety needs into school response plans, which should be accessible and account for the many needs of all children attending the school. For instance, investments in tools like noise canceling headphones, or cue cards for the classroom, may help students handle loud noises and follow the steps in a lockdown procedure.

The requirement for inclusion in the classroom and in emergency preparedness is not just fanciful suggestion, but the law. The Americans with Disabilities Act, passed in 1990, applies to places open to the public, governments, and schools. A recent ADA-based lawsuit against the New Rochelle, New York, school district, which failed to evacuate two students during a fire and did not include students using mobility aids in drills, ended in a payment of $26 million dollars to a student who uses a wheelchair.

With the innovation that has taken place in the last several decades, people like Katie often wonder why there haven’t been improvements to school emergency plans and why students continue to face dangers due to inaccessibility nearly 30 years after the ADA and hundreds of school shootings later.  While school safety has turned into a billion dollar industry, efforts such as metal detectors or adding police are not creating safer school campuses. Funds could be used for more comprehensive alarm systems, evacuation chairs, additional training and drills, and emergency elevator systems that will allow all students to be less passive in an emergency situation.

Inclusion is planning for everyone from the beginning. The onus for creating an effective response to an active shooter should not reside with the student, teachers, or parents, but with school systems using the knowledge and input of those parties. IELPs are a conversation we need to be having for K-12 students with disabilities, but they are only a beginning step for making our schools truly accessible and as safe as possible for anyone that may be on campus in an emergency. School districts have spent far too long avoiding true integration in school emergency plans, and it puts students’ lives at risk.

After years of funding cuts, the 2017-2018 school year culminated in a statewide teacher walk-out in protest of Arizona’s poor public school conditions and low educator pay. During the summer, supporters shifted their focus to Invest in Education, gathering 270,000 signatures in support of a ballot initiative that would increase income taxes for the wealthy and raise $690 million for public education. But in a recent decision by the Arizona Supreme Court, the Invest in Education initiative has been removed from the November ballot, effectively silencing educators and refusing Arizona residents the opportunity to vote to increase public school funding.

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The Arizona Supreme Court decision is not just a blow to the thousands of supporters who spent months protesting, organizing, and petitioning. It is a rejection of a literal phenomenon. The Arizona walk-out followed similar teacher protests in Oklahoma, Kentucky, and West Virginia, a movement resembling a wildfire that caught and took hold state by state. For six days last April, more than 1,000 public schools across Arizona closed and nearly one million students stayed home. An estimated 50,000 red-shirted supporters marched in Phoenix, with a throng of 300 music teachers forming an impromptu spirit band. In the last days of the walkout, as state lawmakers argued late into the night about the education budget, educators kept watch outside the State Capitol. Some slept on the floor of the lobby.

Only after Governor Doug Ducey signed a bill on May 3 to provide a gradual 19 percent salary increase for teachers did they agree to end their protest. Still, many worried that the budget couldn’t support the $600 million annual increase. State lawmakers partially funded the raises by creating a new car registration fee and raising property taxes in low-income school districts—both of which would shift the cost burden onto low-income people. Ducey also promised that nearly half of the funding would come from overly-optimistic projections of future economic growth, as well as surplus in the Medicaid budget due to low enrollment numbers.

To make sure the teacher raises and other education needs were fully funded through a dedicated source, educators turned their attention to the ballot initiative. If passed, the Invest in Education initiative would have raised the income tax rate by 3.46 percentage points for individuals earning more than $250,000 or households earning more than $500,000. For individuals earning more than $500,000 or households that earn more than $1 million, it would have raised income tax rates by 4.46 percentage points.

“We’re going to gather as many signatures as possible to qualify for the November ballot,” Marisol Garcia of the Arizona Education Association told CBS in June. “We’re going out to the zoo, we’re going to go to grocery stores, libraries, soccer games, we’re going to ask families, all of whom supported us during this movement, to join us.”

And they did. Organizers collected 120,000 more signatures than the state required. They did so even with the state’s new strict compliance law, which requires citizen ballot initiatives to be free of all technical errors, including using the correct font size on petitions, ensuring that voters sign their full names and don’t mark outside the designated signature box, and having identical wording in paper and online versions of petitions. Organizers across issues say such strict compliance regulations are unrealistic and inappropriately burdensome for grassroots-led efforts, effectively preventing citizens from being able to propose their own laws. Strict compliance was passed by conservative lawmakers after a citizen-led effort to increase the state minimum wage was passed overwhelmingly by voters in 2016.

In early August, an opposition group led and financed by the Arizona Chamber of Commerce argued in court that the 100-word description, which appeared at the top of the signatory page, did not reflect the full scope of the initiative. In addition to raising taxes on the wealthy, it would also “eliminate the indexing of income tax brackets to account for inflation.” The group also said the initiative description should have used the phrase “percentage point” instead of “percent” to describe the increase in tax rates. The judge ruled in favor of Invest in Education. But the opposition group appealed the decision and the case moved to the Arizona Supreme Court.

On August 29, just before the long Labor Day weekend, the Arizona Supreme Court voted to reverse the decision of the lower court and removed Invest in Education from the ballot. In the decision, Chief Justice Scott Bales wrote that the omission of the indexing explanation “creates a significant danger of confusion or unfairness.”

In response to the decision, many initiative supporters angrily decried the packing of the court by Governor Ducey. In 2016, he signed legislation to increase the number of Arizona Supreme Court Justices from five to seven, and has appointed three justices since taking office in 2015.  State Senator Martin Quezada Tweeted: “The @dougducey-stacked AZ Supreme Court just saved the 1% from the horror of having to pay their fair share for the education of our children.”

Teacher and co-chair of Invest in Ed Joshua Buckley said that voters would have supported the initiative—an opinion backed up by recent polling, which showed that 65 percent of surveyed Arizona voters supported it. “The politicians and those in power know that Invest in Ed was going to pass, that community members, that educators, that parents and faith leaders all know that we need to invest in our student’s education,” said Buckley. To Buckley’s credit, there is some real evidence that conservatives are trying to thwart ballot initiatives that they know are popular. A New York Times article from 2016 quotes a member of the Republican State Leadership Committee saying “ballot initiatives will not be the left’s mechanism for gaining power and advancing their agenda,” and asserting that conservatives need to “reject their efforts and promote our own.”

In these first weeks back to school, educators are both heartbroken and angry, but remain committed to the fight. Becky Graseck, a math teacher and #RedForEd organizer, was one of thousands of volunteers who collected signatures this summer, her infant daughter strapped to her chest in a carrier. When she heard about the decision to remove the initiative, Graseck says she was stunned, especially since it had passed so easily through the lower court.

Graseck says, “They are going to make us fight for every millimeter of ground, but the fight makes us stronger. It makes us that much more informed and knowledgeable and brings that many more people in. And it makes them angry and ready to work.”

For 20 miles, under a robin’s egg sky, teachers and public education supporters lined sidewalks and curbsides, parking lots and strip malls. They formed small seas of red shirts, hats, and beach umbrellas, and waved signs proclaiming “#RedForEd” and “Arizona education deserves more.” A school social worker walked along the road, wearing a full-body sign: “Best practice is 1 social worker to 250 students. I serve 942.”

One woman held a sign that read: “Arizona exports cotton, copper, and teachers,” a reference to the fact that teachers are leaving the state in droves.

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I traveled the entire route with my sons—20 miles to the east side where cheering teachers stood backdropped by the Rincon Mountains, and then 20 miles to downtown where teachers waved signs from overpasses and chanted through bullhorns. My sons—who, at ages 3 and 6, believe that teachers are superheroes—drank milkshakes in the backseat, watching the red unfold intersection after intersection, and cheered them on.

But Wednesday’s demonstration was just the beginning. On Thursday morning, tens of thousands of teachers across Arizona walked out of their classrooms. More than 110 school districts closed, affecting up to 840,000 students.

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Resentment among Arizona educators has been simmering for years, caused by repeated budget cuts, the misuse of sales tax monies intended for public education (as confirmed by an Arizona Supreme Court ruling in 2010), and related lengthy lawsuits between the state and its public schools seeking back payments. During the Recession, the Arizona state legislature cut $1.5 million from public schools, more than any other state, leaving Arizona schools more than $1 billion short of 2008 funding.

Arizona currently ranks 49th in the country for high school teacher pay and 50th for elementary school teacher pay. When adjusted for inflation, teacher wages have declined more than 10 percent since 2001. Per-student spending in Arizona amounts to $7,205, compared with the national average of $11,392. There are currently 3,400 classrooms in Arizona without trained or certified teachers, and the state has over 2,000 teacher vacancies.

Inspired by grassroots teachers movements in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Oklahoma, Arizona teachers are using their collective power to demand change. A newly mobilized coalition, Arizona Educators United, has partnered with the state’s teachers union, the Arizona Education Association, to organize and coordinate demands. Teachers have held organizing meetings and “walk-ins” over the past few weeks, gathering together before school hours in protest of low pay for teachers and support staff—many of whom rely on second or third jobs just to get by—as well as insufficient classroom materials and per-student spending well below the national average.

Teachers in Arizona are reporting leaky roofs, 25-year-old textbooks, rats in classrooms, and schools unable to afford toilet paper. That’s not right. We have to stand with them as they organize for more resources. #RedForEd

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) April 22, 2018

Last week, when the Arizona Education Association held a statewide vote, 78 percent of the 57,000 Arizona educators who voted supported walking out. The teachers’ demands include a 20 percent pay increase; a permanent salary structure with annual raises; education funding restored to 2008 levels; competitive pay for support staff; and “no new tax cuts until per-pupil funding reaches the national average.”

In response to the demands, Governor Doug Ducey (R) offered teachers a 20 percent pay raise by 2020. But teachers are wary of Ducey’s plan, saying he hasn’t released details about how it would be paid for. The plan also doesn’t include raising wages for support staff, whom teachers say play critical roles in serving students.

While 74 percent of registered Arizona voters say the state spends too little on K-12 education, not everyone supports the teacher walkout. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Diane Douglas threatened consequences for teachers participating in the action. “A walkout is a nice term for it. It is a strike, plain and simple,” Douglas said in an interview this week, referring to a 1971 opinion from the Arizona attorney general, which said that public employees could not legally strike. Douglas suggested that teachers could be investigated, referred to the Board of Education, or even stripped of their teaching certificate.

State Rep. Kelly Townsend (R) made headlines after she responded to an email from a constituent who asked that she and other legislators find a way to fund education and avoid a walkout. Townsend, who serves as Majority Whip, responded:

I’m sure we can take it from the correctional officers pay who make minimum wage in some cases, release some of the prison population, take it from the developmentally disabled and close adult homes from the disabled, freeze Alzheimer’s research, take it from Veteran’s services, dental services for the underserved, desperately needed road funds, the university funding, and put another freeze on Kids Care health insurance.

She has since become increasingly verbal in opposition to the walkout, even threatening a class action lawsuit.

But amid the backlash, many community groups have mobilized to support the teachers, including nonprofit organizations, youth centers, and churches offering free or low-cost camps and daycares for working parents in need of childcare during the walkout. And on Thursday, more than 50,000 teachers and supporters converged at the state capital in Phoenix.

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Yesterday morning in Tucson, I found hundreds of teachers, parents, and students demonstrating peacefully and passionately in front of the courthouse. Parents lifted toddlers onto their shoulders to wave at passing cars. A family spread out a picnic on a blanket in the shade. When a semi-truck drove by, honking in support, the crowd erupted into cheers. Some demonstrators planned to later join the masses in Phoenix; I overheard a lighthearted joke about the streams of teachers in their station wagons, obeying the speed limit all the way to the rally.

High school teacher Jeff Mann brought his two children to the Tucson rally. “It’s a chance for our kids to see what civic engagement is and how you fight for what matters—have your feet match your mouth,” he said. “It’s unfortunate that these are the steps we have to take, but we haven’t been given many choices. My hope is that I’m back teaching tomorrow, that the legislature comes to their senses, and that education is funded.”

A group of students from Tucson’s IDEA School stood together on a corner with their teacher, chanting and waving homemade signs. One 10-year-old in the group told me, “We’re not a public school, but we’re helping support all the public schools, because we want all the teachers to have more money and the kids to have more materials.”

On the same corner, seventh-grader Salome Arrieta and her mother Victoria stood together, holding #RedForEd signs. Salome said that despite her middle school receiving the prestigious A+ School of Excellence Award from the Arizona Education Foundation, there’s still a glaring lack of resources. “Whenever I go to my school and try to use the bathroom, there’s no toilet paper, there’s no soap, and our textbooks are like 15 years old,” she said.

Salome’s mother, Victoria, an elementary school special education teacher, said she walked out to support the kids. “Everyone needs a raise. Not just the teachers. When you’re a special education teacher, the support staff is an integral part of your job, and they need to be paid more, too.”

Across the street, second-grade teacher Sonya Rosales told me, “My kids are sitting on carpet from like 1976. Any activities that we do, whether it’s for Mother’s Day or Valentine’s Day, it comes out of our own pockets. We get 10 reams of paper per quarter, and once it’s out, that’s it.” She said learning materials are so outdated that she’s forced to make her own worksheets. “I make everything myself on my computer. I go to the Common Core standards, and every worksheet I make myself. I work two extra hours a day, unpaid.”

A teacher named Roberta who preferred not to give her last name said she’s been teaching for 35 years and spent more than $1,000 of her own money on materials for her classroom last year. “I do the very best that I can,” she said, “If it means me spending money out of my pocket, I do that because I’m a teacher and I care about my students, and I care about seeing my students walk across that stage.”

As she spoke, her eyes filled with tears. “I’m doing this for my students. I’m a Republican, but it doesn’t matter whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat. It’s about our students.”

Every teacher has at least one class that they need to watch at all times, and mine was fifth period English in 2011. They were the class that made substitutes cry, and that once knocked down the temporary wall separating my room from the one next door. One day, after I passed out pencils, I tried to put the extras down on the desk behind me without turning around. I missed and hit the edge of the desk, driving the freshly-sharpened tips straight into my own palm.

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I laughed when it happened. There was a hunk of graphite driven a quarter inch into my hand and a jagged flap of skin that I would later cut off with eyebrow scissors, and there was absolutely nothing I could do for the next sixty minutes. I stared straight into the bloody mess and let loose a cackle while the look on my students’ faces shifted from shock to horror. Then I put my thumb over the wound to stop the bleeding, and kept teaching.

In between that class period and the next one, I had four minutes to run to the bathroom. I stared at the sign above the sink warning me not to drink the water, and wondered if getting toxic water in an open cut was dangerous. That’s when I began to wonder what, exactly, I was doing with my life.

I hadn’t planned to be a teacher. But when I went home for Thanksgiving my senior year of college and told my grandmother my master plan—to write freelance for a local arts website while I volunteered with advocacy groups—it knocked the wind out of her. Then, for the first and only time in my life, she gave me clear instructions on what she expected me to do next. I needed to go to graduate school, she said. I needed to get a masters’ degree, and a stable job doing something that could actually support me.

Teaching was the most stable career I could think of. I got that masters’ degree, and a job outside of Washington, D.C. My professors had warned me that the first year would be hard, but what they hadn’t told me was that my brand new career was essentially a pressure cooker.

During my first faculty meeting, I found out that my new colleagues had not received a raise in three years. The administration gave the union a choice when the recession hit: either lay off teachers, or give up their raises for the foreseeable future. The union voted for the latter, not knowing that their wages would be frozen for the better part of a decade. Our school—one of the only low-income schools in an otherwise affluent district—was failing, and if we didn’t raise test scores people were going to start losing their jobs anyway. But the new principal had some big ideas, she told us, and we were going to do this together.

Her first idea was ending all out-of-class discipline. Research shows that students of color and students with disabilities are punished too often and too harshly, so we were going to stop as much punishment as we could. Any behavioral issues were to be addressed in the classroom, no matter how severe.

The next was to use lunch periods as extra tutoring time. Administrators called names in the cafeteria of any student with outstanding work or low test scores, and sent them back up to their teachers. Our lunches were at the same time, so we ate with students while they worked through assignments.

Then the school implemented a universal breakfast program. Most of our students already depended on school lunches, so offering breakfast doubled their chances to get something to eat. We didn’t have enough cafeteria staff to cover that, so breakfast happened in our classrooms too—our first-period students came in a half-hour earlier and ate in the rooms.

The new initiatives kept piling on: We added after-school tutoring, academic mentoring, and open office hours. Every single one of these ideas was good—every time we offered a new support, a few kids did a little bit better. But every single one of these ideas was also the sole responsibility of the teachers. By the end of the year I had students in my classroom for 12 hours a day, with no time to plan the next day’s lessons or grade papers until the last kid went home.

In theory, that type of schedule is exactly what a union is supposed to prevent. Our contract mandated breaks, planning periods, and additional staff in the classrooms to support students with disabilities. But our union was doing its best to keep its members employed in the face of a budget crunch—dealing with contract violations was a luxury. So our list of responsibilities kept growing until teachers buckled under the pressure.

The teacher across the hall from me didn’t even last through October. He quit in the middle of the week, and the rest of us took turns covering his schedule for two months while the district tried to find a replacement. That spring, the state was granted a waiver that exempted us from the punishments that we could have faced if the school didn’t make enough progress. Even so, a third of us didn’t come back the following year. Some, like me, switched careers. Others transferred schools, and some retired. The school administrators had the summer to scramble and fill all those open jobs—still for the same pay, because the salary freeze was entering its fourth year.

Seven years later, many teachers still haven’t gotten relief. Districts across the country are still struggling to recover from the housing crisis that wiped out their tax base. On top of this, federal spending for K-12 education has been cut by almost 20 percent since 2011, and states have struggled to make up the difference. Seven states—Arizona, Idaho, Kansas, Michigan, Mississippi, and Oklahoma—poured gas on the fire by enacting income tax cuts post-recession rather than restoring education funding. With the exception of Michigan, teacher salaries in these states are among the lowest in the nation.

Now, for the first time in a generation, schools are being closed with a series of wildcat strikes. Because of course they are. Teaching has always been difficult, but years of funding cuts are making it impossible. After pleading with lawmakers for support, striking is the only thing left that makes sense. That’s why West Virginia closed down every school in the state for 12 days, and it’s why Oklahoma might follow suit.

Given how normalized mass protests have become under the Trump administration, it’s worth remembering that this is genuinely radical: striking by public employees is forbidden by statute in 26 states. During the West Virginia strike, the state’s Attorney General made it clear that he believed the work stoppage was “unlawful,” though it seems superintendents have chosen not to punish participants.

That’s because superintendents know something lawmakers still haven’t grasped: Teachers make their living by getting people to pay attention. So when they say they can’t do their jobs anymore without more money and more support, and state legislators respond by jamming their fingers in their ears and passing yet another tax cut, teachers will do what it takes to be heard.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, children of color are significantly more likely to be referred to special education than white children. They are also more likely to be educated in segregated settings—away from nondisabled peers—and to be suspended from school. For example, in the 2013-14 school year, 6 percent of all public school children received at least one out-of-school suspension. This figure doubles to 12 percent for children with disabilities, and doubles again to approximately one quarter of black, Hispanic, multi-racial, and American Indian/Alaska Native boys with disabilities.

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That much time in segregated classrooms—or being out of class entirely—drags down students’ academic performance. Only 3 percent of black 4th graders in special education were proficient in reading; Hispanic and American Indian/Alaska Native students are 5 and 6 percent proficient, respectively. Since the overwhelming majority of children in special education can complete grade-level work with appropriate interventions and supports, these numbers point to something beyond student ability: an unequal education. Students in segregated classrooms are less likely to engage with effective educators and less likely to participate in enrichment activities. Decades of research clearly show that children with disabilities perform better academically when they are held to high expectations and have access to the general curriculum.

That’s all in addition to the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 60 years ago that “separate but equal” is inherently unequal.

When Congress passed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in 2004 to revamp special education, it tried to address this inequality through specific provisions about significant disproportionality. But more than a decade later, black students are still 40 percent more likely to be identified as needing special education and are twice as likely to be labeled as having an intellectual disability or emotional disturbance. Hispanic students are 40 percent more likely to be labeled as having a learning disability, and American Indian/Alaska Native students are 60 percent more likely to labeled as having an intellectual disability. At the school district level, the data can be even worse: Almost 800 school districts identified black students with emotional disturbance 300 percent more often than white students.

That’s in part because the IDEA doesn’t define “significant disproportionality.” The Department of Education originally gave states full discretion on how to identify school districts, so states created definitions that were almost impossible to meet—and let themselves off the hook when it came to addressing any problems. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), out of a total of more 15,000 school districts in the United States, only 356 school districts (approximately 2 percent) were flagged as having overrepresented students of color in special education.

In 2016, the Department of Education issued regulations requiring states to use a standard approach to identify significant disproportionality. It also established more effective ways to address the issue. This is the specific part of the law that the Trump administration wants to delay: the one with the potential to make it effective. More than one hundred civil rights and disability organizations have already expressed opposition to this roll-back.

According to the Trump administration, the rule might not address the problem. But since states are just beginning the appropriate analyses and are not required to comply with the rule until July 2018, they simply don’t have enough data to say that the rule doesn’t work. The administration also argues that states are in the best position to evaluate the problem, despite the decade of evidence proving otherwise.

Unfortunately, this appears to be part of a pattern of rolling back hard-won protections for children and adults with disabilities from the current administration. We know that Secretary Betsy DeVos is considering rescinding critical guidance protecting children of color and children with disabilities from unfair and illegal discipline practices. The Department of Justice recently rescinded a number of pieces of significant guidance regarding the civil rights of individuals with disabilities under the Americans with Disabilities Act. And, during her confirmation hearing and subsequently, Secretary DeVos has displayed a lack of clarity and purpose regarding enforcing the rights of children with disabilities and recently rescinded 72 pieces of guidance related to special education without sufficient explanation.

Under federal law, the public has 75 days to provide comment on this proposed rule. Children of color have already waited through Jim Crow and segregation, Supreme Court cases and legislation, for an equal public education. How much longer must they wait?

For more about this, listen to Michael Yudin on the February 2 episode of Off-Kilter. 

The study starts in the 1950s and 60s, when Sweden gradually rolled out high-quality, nutritious, free lunches to every child in its school system. Thanks to Sweden’s meticulous data collection, the authors were able to link detailed information about individual schoolchildren—including how many years they had access to free lunches—with decades of subsequent earnings, employment, and even medical data.

The economists discover that the school lunch program had tremendous positive effects, increasing adult earnings by about 0.35 percent for every year a student had access to the program, for a total of 3 percent—or $11,700 over the working years—for the average kid who was exposed throughout nine years of primary school.

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The program’s positive effects were nearly universal, with large gains for the students with family incomes in the bottom 75 percent. Even the richest students derived some benefit, though it was statistically insignificant. For the lowest-income children, the gains were particularly substantial: Kids in the bottom 25th percentile of family income increased their adult earnings by nearly 5.5 percent, for an average of $21,560 more in lifetime earnings.* That means the program’s benefits were seven times larger than the cost of the meals. And, since low-income students benefitted more than students in higher income groups, the program can actually be credited with decreasing inequality.

The study adds to abundant evidence that getting enough food helps kids succeed in school—and in life—with improved school performance, greater economic self-sufficiency, and better health.

Implementing a similar program in the United States would likely have an even larger effect than the one researchers observed in Sweden. In part, that’s because more students stand to gain. School lunches in the United States are typically free only to the lowest-income students—about 20 million kids last year—and experts say they have historically been underfunded and inadequately nutritious.

There’s also a dramatic difference in inequality between the two countries: Swedes have a much smaller income gap between the rich and the poor, and Swedish kids are only half as likely to grow up in poverty as American kids. As the authors note, “Food shortage and hunger was uncommon in Sweden during the 1950s and 1960s.” The program’s primary goal was to improve nutrition—similar to more recent U.S. changes like the School Meals Initiative for Healthy Children in 1994—rather than addressing a nationwide problem with childhood hunger.

By contrast, in the United States about 1 in 12 families with children experienced food insecurity in 2016, and our nutrition assistance benefits for families (like SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) are so modest that they can’t address the issue. That means school meals are all the more important for low-income American kids; it’s where they get as many as half of their calories. As a result, we’d likely have an even more significant proportion of students making the types of large income gains that Sweden observed with its poorest students.

The argument against such a program, of course, would be its cost. At $3.23 per meal, extending free school lunch to every American schoolchild would cost roughly $19.6 billion per year. ** That’s about 13 percent of what Trump and Republican lawmakers just spent on their monumentally unpopular tax bill. But unlike the tax plan, research shows that this would significantly boost an average worker’s earnings—and it’d be a lot more than the temporary bump of $1.50 per paycheck Paul Ryan boasted his tax law is bringing to workers.

Next week, the stakes are about to get much higher for kids when the Trump administration releases its fiscal year 2019 budget. Trump will likely propose deep cuts to nutrition assistance; last year’s budget cut SNAP benefits by nearly 30 percent. And despite opposition from two-thirds of Americans, congressional Republican lawmakers are already chomping at the bit to help. For kids whose families struggle to put food on the dinner table, that means the cafeteria lunch line may become a lifeline.

* Calculation is based on study’s report of a total real program cost per student of $3,080 over nine years, and an estimated benefit-cost ratio of seven compared to lifetime earnings (that is, earnings between ages 21 and 65) for students in the bottom quartile of household income. Figures representing dollar-value changes in lifetime earnings are based on the study’s calculations, which use the Swedish rather than the US distribution of income and earnings.

** In 2017, an average of 20 million students in primary and secondary schools received free lunch from the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) during each non-summer month. The total federal cost of the program was just over $13.6 billion, of which approximately $10.9 billion went toward reimbursements to schools for free lunches—an average per-participant cost of about $546 for the school year. If all 35.9 million additional schoolchildren in prekindergarten through twelfth grade at schools tracked by the National Center for Education Statistics (which captures all local public school systems and most private schools) were to participate in a newly offered free lunch program to the same extent as the current 20 million participants, the additional federal costs for reimbursements to schools would be about $19.6 billion per year. However, this likely represents an overestimate because many students prefer to bring lunch from home some or all of the time, and the newly eligible students—whose families tend to have higher incomes—may have more resources to do so.

But even with those words of encouragement, there were still times when I felt I was lacking, and that I stuck out like a sore thumb—beyond the difference in my race and skin color. I had my fair share of racist encounters: classmates asking if we were going to get shot by gang bangers on a school trip to see Watts Towers, and being bullied by boys who were universally kind to the white girls in my class. I also had my first experiences with classism, even at the age of 9.

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Classism—especially in a country where most people believe they are middle class—is subtle and implicit. It was there when my Spanish teacher didn’t realize some students might not be able to afford a camcorder to complete an assignment, until my mother called and asked for an alternative way for me to complete the project. It was there when the same teacher became inexplicably obsessed with my statement, during a class discussion, that I owned an armoire. She was concerned enough about my furniture to talk to my mother about it at a parent-teacher conference: “Loryn claims she has an armoire, but I really think she was trying to fit in with the wealthier kids,” she said.

Those moments were embarrassing, and that embarrassment kept me in my place (which is to say, quiet). Then the class gap started to steer entire curriculums. Like a lot of students, I struggled with math. But while other students had access to expensive tutors, I had to rely on the lessons in school or my parents helping me whenever they could. I often got answers wrong when I was called on, which led to the other kids teasing me. It got to a point where I didn’t even bother raising my hand to speak—I didn’t want to feel that embarrassment again.

In the classroom, we acted according to our status: The rich kids asked for attention, while I tried to be obedient. Research shows that’s typical: An Indiana University study concluded that social class leads to differences in how parents tell their kids to navigate school. More affluent parents tell their kids to ask questions and actively seek attention, while working class parents tell their kids that asking for extra help is disrespectful. And so, the divide between the haves and have-nots is multiplied.

This divide makes the current administration’s emphasis on “school choice” a hard sell. President Trump’s budget called for a $250 million increase in voucher programs, which would pay for more students to attend private schools. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has not provided many additional details, but she is an outspoken advocate for school choice programs, arguing that it focuses on the needs of the individual child. But more often than not, sending students to schools with more resources simply means they’re attending schools that are whiter and wealthier. And that comes with a culture shock.

A study by the Department of Education showed that test scores fell when students moved from public to private schools. Though there are a number of potential causes for the drop in performance, researchers suspect that the different behavioral expectations—just like the ones that plagued me—play the biggest role. And it doesn’t help that teachers have lower expectations for students of color and students from disadvantaged backgrounds—those expectations actually play a bigger role in student outcomes than a student’s own motivation or effort.

If you are convinced that private school vouchers are the answer to the country’s education woes, you will also need to be ready to prepare students who do not come from wealthy families for the classism and class differences they will face. This means training teachers and other faculty to be sensitive to how these differences affect the way kids learn—and yes, how to unlearn the assumptions they may make about poor students.

Growing up, I didn’t have video games or cable TV, but I had a yard where I could make mud pies. To my parents’ dismay, I once tried to dig a hole in that yard that went all the way to China. To my parents’ joy, I used that same yard to pick white daisies to demonstrate capillary action of water in plants. My project—adding color to the white flowers by sticking them in empty spaghetti sauce jars of food dye and water—won a blue ribbon in my fifth-grade science fair.

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There were times when I wished my Pro Wings shoes from Payless were Nikes, or my dollar store dolls were Barbies. But most of the time, I was happy. My childhood was filled with laughter, family dinners, and library books. I couldn’t afford to buy tickets to summer blockbusters, so I borrowed every Shirley Temple, Nancy Kwan, Rita Moreno, and Sidney Poitier VHS tape I could find at the public library. While other kids saw movies about mutants and robots, I reveled in Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers routines.

All of that fell away when I started writing admissions essays. I only had one thousand words to describe who I was and where I came from to the outside world, and it was not enough space for nuance. So, I simplified. I truncated the complexities of my existence into compound words. My neighborhood, with its cul-de-sacs of homes and organic gardens (before organic was a thing), became a “low-income community.” My friends and our families, with our love for weekend barbecues and 35-cent Thrifty Ice Cream cones, belonged to a “working class.” I tried as well as I could to reconcile how I saw myself—a B-average student with dreams to make a difference in this world—with how society labeled me—a statistic, a member of the free-lunch population, a poor child. It was an early exercise in translating poverty into terms people with economic privilege could understand.

The complexities of who I am, and where I am from, got lost in the translation. I am the daughter of Vietnamese “boat people” refugees. My mom worked in sweatshops and my dad was a day laborer. Even with all their love for books and knowledge, my parents never had the chance to finish high school. Their academic dreams were dashed by poverty and war. They couldn’t help me navigate the school system or study for the SAT because it was new for them, too. But that doesn’t mean their histories were an obstacle I had to overcome. They were a source of strength: They sheltered me, nurtured me, motivated me, and loved me.

My family and community may not have been financially wealthy, but that doesn’t mean we were less than. I didn’t feel downtrodden. I was not Oliver Twist.

We make a mistake when we assume poor children think of themselves as poor. Poverty as a label perpetuates false notions of identity—for those being labeled and for those making decisions on their behalf. It also flattens kids into stereotypes: Some are burdens to the society who aren’t expected to amount to anything, and others are grit-filled diamonds in the rough who only have luck to thank. People are tokenized, otherized, commercialized, criminalized, and even romanticized. We’re reduced to an “us” versus “them” and categorized as good or bad apples.

When it comes to poverty, there’s no such thing as “us” or “them.” Most Americans—4 out of 5 of us—will experience some kind of economic hardship in our lifetimes. But when that happens, we probably won’t think of ourselves as poor. We’ll be “down on our luck.” We’ll be “having a tough time.” That makes it harder for people to ask for the help they need—after all, food stamps are for “poor” people. And it makes it harder to admit it when you accept support, because we treat the narratives of “taxpayer” and “social service recipient” as if they’re mutually exclusive.

Those lines are designed to be blurred. I’m proof—a Head Start student that became an Ivy League graduate. Thanks to public schools and the National School Lunch Act, I received an education and never went hungry. Thanks to Medicaid, I had the dental and health care that I needed to thrive as a child. Thanks to Pell Grants, Stafford Loans, and Work-Study, I went to and finished college. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, I was insured when I was unemployed.

I didn’t realize I was poor for 18 years. Perhaps it was because of the combination of support I received from my family, our community, and the effective policies and programs that were in place when I needed them the most. Every library book, free lunch, and after-school activity I had mattered. With them, a curious kid became a public school teacher, now doctoral candidate. Without them, you wouldn’t be reading this today.

In the fall of 2015, the New York City Department of Education announced plans to redraw District 3’s attendance zones with the goal of making schools like P.S. 199 more economically integrated. The proposed changes would move several elementary school students from Public School 191—a neighboring, high-poverty, majority-minority school—into P.S. 199.

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Parents at the wealthy school were outraged, and the city’s first attempt to integrate the two schools failed amid the backlash. After contentious debates and heated protests, the city dropped the plan, stating it would need more time to devise a new approach that “reached consensus.”

The city resurrected its proposal the next year, and although the rezoning plan is still fraught with conflict, it somehow muscled its way through the dissension to reach a final vote last fall. District 3’s Community Education Council—a locally elected parent group that votes on zoning policies—had long been in favor of new zoning lines and approved the city’s plan on a 9-to-1 vote.

But parents who are opposed to the plan have continued to fight. Some are placing political pressure, threatening to campaign against any official who supports the new zones. Others have warned of enrolling their children in private school. Some have even hinted at taking legal action. Overall, the battles roiling P.S. 199 and P.S. 191’s elementary school campuses have proved that when it comes to school integration, change is no easy task.

One would think Americans are ready for school integration, though. In a new study released by me and my colleague, Ulrich Boser, we found that most Americans—more than 60 percent—report that school segregation is an important issue for them, and nearly 70 percent of Americans agree that more should be done to integrate low- and high-poverty schools.

These findings were a bit startling at first glance. After all, if most Americans are in favor of school integration, why aren’t diverse, integrated classrooms spreading across the country?

Historically, school integration has met intense resistance. But at least in principle, the general public seems to endorse it, and our poll may have tapped into the country’s sympathy for people living in poverty.

In fact, one 2012 poll found that 52 percent of Americans believe “helping the poor and needy is a top priority.” Another poll found that reducing poverty is “very” or “extremely” important to most Americans.

National support for school integration may also be due to the country’s increased attention on income inequality. More than three-quarters of adult Americans, for instance, believe “the rich just get richer while the poor get poorer.” Nearly 90 percent of Americans also believe they are “falling backward” in their finances. And a majority believe “the next generation has it even worse.”

Seeking to disrupt trends of economic inequality, Americans could be keen on helping children with low incomes have a fair shot at entering the middle class, and they see education as the best way to get there. But if there’s anything the desegregation battles in New York City prove, it’s that integration can leave both a sweet and bitter taste in Americans’ mouth. Americans might support integration in theory, but many have different reactions when it reaches their own backyards.

Research shows that reporting favorable views of integration can demonstrate a “superficial tolerance” of integration. But sending one’s own child to an integrating school is a much greater challenge: It requires a person to acknowledge—and maybe uproot—deep-seated stereotypes about families with low incomes and education.

Poverty is also racialized in the United States, and words like “low-income” in America can trigger other words like “black” and “brown.” Children of color, as young as five, are more likely to be perceived as violent and disruptive, which can stoke fears about integrating schools on both economic and racial lines.

But it may not be student diversity, per se, that is distressing to parents as is the thought of losing certain privileges. For affluent parents, they may feel territorial over the high-flying success of their school. And property values, neighborhood identity, and a sense of safety feel as though they are at stake.

“A school belongs to the neighborhood it resides,” said one parent at PS 199.

“It’s not that I don’t want my children to go to school in a mixed school … But at the same time we want the best for our children. We want the best for our property value,” said another.

And it’s not just wealthy parents who are afraid. Through our focus group sessions with diverse parents in the Baltimore and Washington, D.C., metro areas, we found that low-income parents were wary of integration, and they drew on their own life experiences as supporting evidence.

For instance, low-income white parents spoke of being looked down upon by the “rich kids.” As one parent put it: “They don’t want us there, so why should we go there?” They pictured affluent families throwing lavish birthday parties, showering the higher-income kids with fancy cars and expensive gifts, making their own children feel insecure.

Despite whatever frustrations may be brewing among high- and low-income parents, District 3’s rezoning plan will take full effect this fall. In the Upper West Side of Manhattan, children who used to live in two separate worlds will now read, write, learn, and play together.

Fortunately, it’s not the only plan to mark a real shift in school diversity for New York City. The New York City Department of Education recently unveiled its citywide plan for integration, pledging to increase diversity across their entire public schooling system.

These changes are promising. Despite rapidly changing demographics in this country, school diversity has barely kept pace, and research shows that all students perform better academically and socially when they learn in diverse classrooms.

Many Americans do believe the time is ripe for change, but it remains to be seen whether all Americans will embrace this change when it arrives in their own communities.

“We were very strictly monitored how each minute of our day was spent,” said Allyn, who asked me to use only her middle name. “I think we were in the spotlight so much from all the media that they were just super strict about how our day was supposed to go.”

The school gave kids three days of physical education a week, and built five minutes into Allyn’s schedule to do “indoor recess.” But the schedule didn’t include a real recess.

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Allyn said many of the kids had a lot of stress in their lives. Being stuck indoors doing school work with no time for free play was rough.

“I think there was a lot of acting out due to it,” she said. “Kids just shut down.”

Since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, recess has been a tricky subject at many schools. In 2008, the Center for Public Education (CPE), an initiative of the National School Boards Association, reported that 20 percent of school districts had reduced the time spent at recess over the previous six years, dropping kids’ time outside by 50 minutes per week on average. Comparable figures aren’t available for 2016, but the trend still shows total recess time ticking down: from 30.2 minutes a day in 2006 to 27 minutes in 2014, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The damage was particularly serious at schools serving poor kids. The CPE found that only 3 percent of U.S. elementary schools with moderate poverty rates offered no recess at all, but, at schools where more than three quarters of the kids receive free and reduced lunch, the figure was 18 percent.

For parents and child development experts alike, the value of recess is a no-brainer. The American Academy of Pediatrics notes that free play is crucial for children’s physical and social development, and also for their ability to do well in class. A slew of studies going back decades have found that students learn best if they get regular, unstructured breaks.

Dr. Jayme Mathias, a trustee of the Austin, Texas school district, explains that pressure to raise test scores can overrule the research.  “We have a culture of high-stakes testing, which, especially for struggling students, means there’s a lot of pressure on students and teachers and administrators to pass high-stakes tests,” she says. “A lot of students, particularly minority and disadvantaged students, were missing out on recess time.”

Up until this year, most elementary schools in the city’s low-income neighborhoods offered little or no recess time, while 80 percent of those in more affluent areas had recess every day, the Austin American Statesman reported.

Ken Zarifis, president of the local teachers’ union, Education Austin, said it’s clear that giving kids a break helps them learn—as well as simply being the decent thing to do. But he said teachers and administrators have been under intense pressure to improve test scores, under threat of having schools closed, and it has warped school cultures.

“We have about 20 years of standardized testing and ‘accountability’ that has made it hard to move away from anything but ‘keep kids in their seat, make them do another worksheet, and that’s going to get your numbers up,’” he said.

Since schools serving lower-income students face many complicated barriers to raising test scores, they tend to be under the most pressure. Some years, Zarifis said, he’s seen high-need Austin schools spending semesters focusing almost exclusively on “high dosage tutoring”—intensive academic help in small-group settings—to pump up their scores.

“It was just appalling,” he said. “It’s unconscionable that we would put seven, eight, nine, and 10-year-olds and stick them in a seat for eight hours.”

But recess advocates in the city have successfully pushed back against those kinds of practices. A new district policy that went into effect in January guarantees students through grade 5 at least 20 minutes of free play each day.

High-stakes testing isn’t the only reason lower-income schools are less likely to have recess. In some cases, schools don’t have appropriate playgrounds or equipment.

“I was always in schools that had no finances for physical education,” said Francesca Zavacky, a former public school teacher who’s now a project director with the physical educators’ group SHAPE America. “I would walk out at recess, and kids would just be milling around, or chasing each other and fighting.”

At that school, Zavacky said, the PTA ended up winning a grant to buy recess equipment.

Many schools could use better funding so they wouldn’t have to depend on parental expertise or internal resources to raise funds—especially since wealthy students are much more likely to have access to both revenue sources. But they also need new policies to make sure kids can get out and use the equipment if they have it. Zavacky said states should require schools to offer daily time for free play, a policy that exists in only 8 of the 50 states now, according to a SHAPE America report. She said it’s also important to stop schools from keeping kids in from recess for academic reasons, or as a punishment, which one study found nearly three-quarters of elementary schools do.

Some states have already made progress. Rhode Island passed a law last summer requiring schools to give kids 20 minutes of recess a day, and Virginia now mandates 100 minutes of physical activity a week, which can include recess.

Other states have been slower to catch up. Advocates in Florida, where Allyn’s school is located, have been pushing for a state recess mandate in that state. The state legislature is now considering the idea.

Allyn left the school this year. She knows it’s supposedly added recess to its schedule, but, at the same time, it’s extended the school day by another hour. That means kids are at school for eight hours with, at best, 20 minutes or so outdoors.

Still, these kinds of school-by-school policy changes are a start. And, regardless of the outcome at the legislative level, Florida’s recess advocates scored a victory in late May, when Marion County’s superintendent decided that the county’s 31 elementary schools will all have daily recess next year.

But the pregnancy was unplanned, too. So was the abuse from the father. So was him kicking us out in the middle of a particularly snowy winter in northwest Washington.

A few months before my daughter Mia’s first birthday, I worked with a friend, eagerly taking up the slack in his landscaping business. I crawled through flowerbeds and junipers and pulled weeds. By the time the season ended, Mia and I had an apartment paid for mostly by a housing grant. But I knew if I expected anyone to hire me for a job with benefits, I needed a degree.

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My parents didn’t raise me with an expectation that I would go to college. When I approached my dad with a list of schools I wanted to apply to during my junior year of high school, he said, “Who do you think’s gonna pay for that?” So I moved out of my parents’ house and went to work full-time for over a decade. That had seemed all right. Respectable, even. But now I needed a job that would do more than just barely pay the rent.

I was able to go to college, and get the degree I knew I needed, because of a grant the federal government provides to low-income students—the Pell Grant. It covered my entire tuition at my local community college, leaving me a few hundred bucks to live off of. I crept along that way. I found full-time work as a maid. I worked late at night, often past midnight, and through the weekends when my daughter was with her dad.

Transferring to a four-year college, for me, meant moving to a different state. I moved to the place I’d intended to go before I became a mom. I moved because, when I visited, I found a progressive community that’d be supportive of a single mom working her way through college. I moved because I needed to hold myself accountable to my dream of being a writer that I’d had since I was ten. I needed my daughter to see me pursue that dream, and not settle for anything less, because I never wanted her to think life wouldn’t afford her the same opportunity.

By that time, I paid for books and tuition with the Pell Grant and a scholarship created for survivors of domestic violence. I also took out the maximum amount of student loans to cover living expenses through the school year when I was only able to work part-time as a maid.  I lived off of a little over $1,000 a month, and my daughter bounced from preschool to the various homes of classmates when I worked or attended class. Neighbors watched her for free, and I rented the other bedroom of our apartment in exchange for help with child care.

Since I was juggling work and child care, I couldn’t take a full course load during the semesters. Instead, I took classes every summer. When the summer courses finished, I worked 10- to 12-hour days doing move-out cleans, landscaping gigs, and any other work I could find until the academic year began again.

A month before my daughter turned seven, she watched me walk across the stage to get my bachelor’s degree.

A year later, I was working full-time as a freelance writer. A year after that, I celebrated my first book deal for a memoir about my time in college, when I worked as a maid. We no longer need government assistance, but we only got here because it was there for us when we did need it. Especially the Pell Grant.

In his recent budget, President Trump proposed cutting the Pell Grant’s surplus funds by $3.9 billion.  That surplus was set aside, with bipartisan support, so that recipients can attend summer school like I did. Trump also wants to cut funds for the work study program and TRIO, which mentors, tutors, and finds resources for students in need—including low-income single moms.

Trump’s plan to cut this funding will diminish opportunities for first generation students, single parents, disabled students, and low-income populations to get an education.  All that does is keep the cycle of poverty spinning. It keeps people shut behind closed doors, with the belief that opportunities just aren’t available to them.  It hurts students who can’t get the support they need through their families—because their family has no money, or no one has ever gone to college, or no one expected them to go, either.

I write today as a success story, heartbroken that others won’t have the same opportunity I did. Decreasing funds for these programs puts up road blocks that stop people in poverty from ever setting foot on a college campus, all for the sake of tax breaks for the wealthy that leave the path of the privileged pristine.

As a young mother, this meant no play groups or coffee meet-ups with other moms. My children rarely experienced playgrounds or library story time. Instead, they caught chickens and climbed tractors. They played with sticks and covered themselves in mud down in the river.

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But once a month, the library bookmobile would park at the end of our property, on the shoulder of the road where the pavement turned to dirt. On those days, I would strap the baby to my chest and take my stepson’s hand, and we would walk down the road to the bookmobile. The converted bus was filled with books, DVDs, magazines, even a pillow in the children’s section for kids to prop on their elbows and read. It felt like a secret special world, curated just for us.

***

In the article “The Bookmobile: Defining the Information Poor,” MSU Philosophy writer Joshua Finnell notes that, while public libraries were created in the mid-1800s to offer equal access to information, they were primarily operated by the white, educated middle class. “Whether intentionally or not, library holdings, furnishings, programs, and even hours of operation all sent a powerful message about who controlled access to information in our society and provided the basis for defining the information rich and the information poor,” writes Finnell.

The non-white and the working poor were systemically left out of the public library structure, and due to the location of most libraries, rural residents also had limited access. In an effort to reach those communities, librarian Mary Titcomb created a horse-drawn wagon to haul books to post offices and stores at the beginning of the 20^th century—the first bookmobile.

By 1912, the horse-drawn library wagon was replaced by a motorized bookmobile. Bookmobiles became part of the larger literacy effort, transporting reading materials to rural communities, schools, and senior centers. In the 1950s and ’60s, bookmobiles reached over 30 million Americans living in rural communities, before fuel shortages in the 1970s and ’80s triggered a decline.

A little over a decade ago, the number of bookmobiles started growing again—according to the American Library Association, they increased by more than 10 percent between 2003 and 2005. Today there are approximately 660 bookmobiles in operation, according to the latest data from the Institute of Museum and Library Services survey.

Ann Plazek, president of the Association for Bookmobile and Outreach Services, says bookmobile numbers fell slightly in 2014 (with a loss of ten nationwide), but she expects that 2015 statistics, which have not yet been released, will reflect an increase.

“There were numerous library systems adding bookmobiles for the first time,” she says. “I think we’re going to see a turnaround —especially as they’re becoming greener and more economical. Some bookmobiles are installing solar panels, which cuts down on the need for generators, and that’s been a huge change.”

***

Judy Calhoun grew up 18 miles from town in rural Arkansas. Once a month, the bookmobile visited her community. “Everyone would come over,” she remembers. “I was a huge reader, and even though they had a rule that you could only check out five books at a time, the librarian would let me check out 30 books. In the summer, I could read one book a day.”

Calhoun grew up to become a librarian herself, managing a branch for 14 years, and currently serves as the president of the Association for Rural and Small Libraries. As the Director of the Southeast Arkansas Regional Library System, she oversees nine libraries in five counties in southeast Arkansas. “Eighty percent of libraries in the United States are small or rural,” she says. “So we’re actually the majority.”

Arkansas is one of the poorest states in the country—ranked 48th in 2016—with an overall poverty rate of 19.1%.  Most of the counties served by Calhoun’s library system have poverty rates more than double the state average, and she says libraries in these areas are especially linked to the well-being of their patrons.

“People are leaving these little communities,” she says. “They’re moving away to seek jobs. Once they lose their school, we see a decline in population. As a result, small and rural libraries are continually battling declining revenues. But there are still people here who can’t afford to move, or who won’t move away, because this is their home. So we keep working to serve those people.”

Recently, three of the smaller branch libraries in southeast Arkansas were forced to close. One was shut down completely because the building was in disrepair, and the other two were donated to the towns and are now being run by volunteers. “We even left the computers for them,” says Calhoun.

“For a lot of these little towns, they can’t afford the permanent site. You’ve got to pay the building fees, electricity, internet, phone. In a lot of these places, the buildings are getting unusable, and there aren’t resources to keep them safe. So we’re seeing a resurgence of bookmobiles,” says Calhoun. “As we should.”

***

Even though bookmobiles are regaining popularity, Plazek says she encounters people shocked that they still exist. “Some people think bookmobiles are these antiquated things,” she says, “But we still exist, and we’re still relevant.”

That’s because mobile and rural library services have adapted to serve as community hubs. My neighbors and I used to lean against our bookmobile’s counter to talk about all strides of our lives—pecan harvests and rainfall predictions, mountain lion sightings, an elderly neighbor in search of large-print mystery novels. We discussed lost dogs, the price of alfalfa, and the latest in the opposition to the high-voltage power lines slated to be built through our valley. The bookmobile was a place of gathering, of communion over the complexities and the intricacies of our lives, for passing time with one another in a tiny air-conditioned bus on the side of a dusty road.

Calhoun acknowledged this personal connection, too. “People love to tell us about their troubles, what’s going on in their lives, what they need. We’re kind of like a bartender. We get to know the people we’re serving in a different way.”

Part of that bond is because bookmobiles, and rural libraries more broadly, meet very real needs. Calhoun’s system doubles as a voter registration site, provides tax form assistance, maintains copy and computer centers, and even has an initiative to help combat hunger in the community. And Plazek notes that bookmobiles are often adjusted so they can cater to day cares, Amish populations, or seniors.

Even so, Calhoun admits: “We’re kind of modest. We don’t toot our own horns, and we’ve got to change that.” She says her job is to advocate for small and rural libraries, so she visits legislators at the state capitol, attends conferences, and talks to donors. “People will ask, ‘Are rural libraries really needed?’ And I just keep saying, ‘Come and see what we’re doing. We’re needed. We’re still so needed.’”

Growing up poor didn’t just mean that I entered college less academically up to speed than my peers. It also meant that my family had limited financial resources to help pay for college. So, I depended on student loans. I earned a bachelor’s degree—and $40,000 of debt to go with it. I managed to pay it off during my service in the military, so I went to graduate school. In record time, I earned a PhD—and another $100,000 of debt.

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I’m one of millions on the debt-dependent path to the American Dream. Our journey stands in stark contrast to those who had financial support. My colleague, for example, received her graduate degree from the same university that I attended—but she had help from family. She graduated without student debt, and started building home equity before she turned 25. She even had enough to spare that she was able to take advantage of employer retirement benefits, too. Her four kids will likely have their college paid for before they finish high school.

My colleague still had to work hard. She studied, saved, and scrimped when she had to. But her path was eased because wealth was passed down at critical stages along the way. For most Americans that just isn’t an option, and it contributes to growing economic inequality in our nation. It also undermines the oft-repeated promise that a college degree is a catalyst of economic mobility and equal opportunity.

Our current debt-based system widens the gap in educational attainment by race and class, reduces graduation rates among students who make it to college, distorts career choices, constrains entrepreneurship, delays people from buying homes and building families, reduces retirement savings and overall net worth, and lengthens the time it takes to reach median wealth in the United States. In short, it asks students to compromise their long-term economic well-being for a chance at a higher education that is supposed to safeguard them from poverty (with mixed results).

It wasn’t always like this. The GI Bill—signed into law after World War II—made higher education possible for millions of veterans. Returning veterans presented a crisis, because they needed a college education to be able to re-enter the workforce and contribute to the economy. The GI Bill was a policy pivot. It prioritized veterans’ long-term needs and reframed higher education as a broadly-shared good, rather than an exclusive purview of the privileged. Within eight years it returned every dollar invested nearly seven-fold.

Now it’s time for another pivot. We need a financial aid system that performs to the standards of our American values—where the effort we put in and the ability we possess determine our economic outcomes.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton proposed policies that would make college free for many low-income and middle class students. While those policies have been put on hold, another proposal that could move us in the right direction is creating Children’s Savings Accounts (CSAs) nationwide. Today, there are 42 CSA programs in 29 states that open accounts for children at birth or in kindergarten, endow them with an initial deposit (financed by public or philanthropic sources), and supplement families’ savings through matching grants.

A family’s CSA savings might be modest in total dollars, but they are significant nonetheless. For example, the average out-of-state cost of a four-year degree at a public university is about $34,000. Every student could accrue that sum by age 18 if they had a CSA that received an $8,400 deposit at birth invested in stock/bond portfolios, plus an additional deposit of $5 per month by the family. This would cost an estimated $34 billion annually—less than the $74 billion in government costs for student loan forgiveness projected for 2017.

CSAs are not a silver bullet for disparities in education writ large. Even so, they could help to build an accessible education pipeline that would make it possible for more people to make it through college without crippling debt. That can begin to even out the returns that two students—one poor and one privileged—get from the same credentials.

Our public school system has always been fundamental to that promise.

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Three weeks into the new administration, President Obama signed a law providing $100 billion in additional funding for education. While most of that money went to states to protect teaching jobs, support low-income and special needs students, and provide college grants, $5 billion was set aside to drive reform and innovation, and another $3 billion for turning around our lowest-performing schools. President Obama also made a number of significant investments over the course of his tenure, including increasing funding for Pell Grants by more than $50 billion and increasing investments in early childhood programs by more than $6 billion.

Today, much has changed for the better in American education. Others can decide how much change is due to our efforts, but America’s progress since 2008 is undeniable:

• Most states have higher learning standards and better assessments.
• We have more children in early learning programs.
• We have more high-quality school options available.
• We have countless examples of evidence-based innovation to learn from.
• Students enjoy greater protections from violence, discrimination, and inequity thanks to an invigorated Office of Civil Rights.
• Many more students have high-speed internet access.
• Test scores for the lower grades are up.
• We have cut “dropout factories” with unacceptably low graduation rates by 40%, and the nation’s high school graduation rate is at an all-time high of 83%.
• We have more young people in college and more college graduates from low-income families.
• Many of our community colleges are better aligned to the needs of local employers.
• All colleges—public, private, and for-profit—face more pressure to graduate their students instead of merely enrolling them and allowing them to drop out.

But, this is no “mission accomplished” moment. We still have many unmet challenges:

• Too many children show up in kindergarten behind their peers due to a lack of access to pre-K programs and other factors.
• Too many young people are still trapped in underperforming schools.
• Too many schools lack the needed resources to serve the growing low-income population.
• We still disproportionately suspend and expel students of color.
• Inequality persists in funding and access to rigorous college prep courses.
• High school test scores are mostly flat and many high school graduates are not ready for college or careers.
• We don’t do nearly enough to prepare young people in high school to go straight to work, if that’s what they want to do.
• Too many college students and graduates are struggling with student debt while too many low-income students are priced out of college altogether.

Congress and the President have helped lay a foundation to address some of these issues. We have a new federal education law that makes needed and important changes. For the first time, states must adopt challenging academic standards that are aligned with college entry requirements and career-ready standards, so it’s unlikely that states can retreat. The new law also acknowledges that learning starts at birth, and encourages investment in early learning programs.

The law moves us away from accountability based on a single test score to one based on multiple factors, like graduation rates. I have often said that the prior version of the law, known as No Child Left Behind, was “loose on goals but tight on means,” because it didn’t demand high standards and it was too prescriptive about how to improve. The new law flips that around and gives states more flexibility to implement reform and accountability.

Now it falls to the next administration to maintain a high bar, continue the progress, and stay focused on our national goals. These four goals are neither Democratic or Republican, left or right, liberal or conservative:

• Leading the world in early childhood education.
• Boosting high school graduation rates to 90% and beyond.
• Making sure 100% of high school graduates are truly college and career-ready.
• Leading the world in college completion.

While state and local governments will always play the predominant role in education, the new administration needs to understand the historic role that the federal government has played in driving equity, and promoting excellence and innovation.

Thanks to the federal government, we have a world-class system of public universities. Thanks to the G.I. Bill, we won the peace after World War II. Thanks to the federal government, millions of low-income students can go to college.

Thanks to the Supreme Court, segregation in public schools is no longer the law of the land. Thanks to the federal government, America protects the rights of students with disabilities and it dedicates funds for English-language learners, and homeless, migrant, and rural students.

Parents don’t care all that much which level of government pays for education, makes the rules, or holds the system accountable. They just want what’s best for their kids—and that’s what we should all want.

It’s a new day in Washington, and change can be perilous or promising. The perils are obvious: a retreat from accountability, an unwillingness to defend the most vulnerable, and a divided country that no longer views education as a shared opportunity to lift all boats. Instead, education is rationed to those with the means to acquire it—rather than extended to all those with the talent and the will to gain the most from it.

The promise, on the other hand, is infinite—a world where every child has the opportunity to rise from nothing to something, to fulfill his or her destiny and to realize the American dream. If we want to reduce income inequality and increase social mobility, the only way to do that is to give every child a world class education. It’s the best investment we can make.

As a citizen of the greatest country in the world, I always root for the success of those who serve, regardless of political affiliation. But, let’s remember that success in education is measured not by laws or rules, courtroom battles, political campaigns, or the size of the federal footprint, but by student outcomes.

Let’s keep our eyes on the prize.

Editor’s note: TalkPoverty presents this series in collaboration with the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality.

But evidence of the flaw in Trump’s plan was right in front of him. The charter school he was speaking at—the Cleveland Arts and Social Sciences Academy—is not doing well. The state of Ohio gives the school a grade of D for its students’ test performance.

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School choice is not a new concept. For decades, states have been trying to encourage competition among different school models. That has led to an explosion in the number of charter schools, which are publicly funded but operate outside of the control of local school districts. The trouble is, researchers have found that these schools have mixed effects. In some cases charters improve test scores, while in others students do significantly worse than they would in neighborhood schools. Some districts have also tried giving students vouchers to go to private schools—which Trump has also called for—and have had similarly mixed results.

Many public school advocates argue that even the best charter schools can cause problems, because they drain money from other schools. That raises a big question about Trump’s plan, which would redirect $20 billion in federal funds to let students choose different schools. If that comes from the Department of Education budget, as some analysts expect, it would likely come from the two big buckets of federal money that go to K-12 schools now: $15.5 billion in Title 1 funds for schools with low-income populations and $12 billion for special education. Using that money for vouchers could mean decimating before- and after-school programs, tutoring in reading and math, and other supports for students facing the most serious academic challenges. The plan would also encourage states to dig money out of their own education spending for school choice.

Though his plan is misguided, the education crisis Trump points to is real—and really serious. There’s a huge and growing gap between the academic achievement levels of rich and poor kids. Today, students from wealthy families outscore their low-income counterparts by nearly 400 points on the SATs and are far more likely to graduate from high school.

One of the most successful ways to help low-income kids do better is to reduce income segregation, which has grown by 40% since 1990. That has a serious impact: One eye-popping study found that students from lower-income, less-educated families who attend school with wealthier peers are 68% more likely to attend a four-year college than those who go to an income-segregated school with peers from similar backgrounds.

The study’s author, Gregory Palardy of the University of California at Riverside, said segregation is the single biggest way that U.S. schools shortchange low-income students. Schools serving poor children tend to get less funding, hire less-skilled teachers, and offer fewer advanced courses than their counterparts in wealthier areas. And, Palardy said, poor kids simply have a harder time succeeding when their peers are all facing similar disadvantages. He said lower-income kids are far more likely to succeed if they go to school with more affluent peers who know a lot about college and expect, as a matter of course, that they’ll continue their education beyond high school.

“They rub off on you and your view of the world,” he said.

One of the arguments behind school choice is that it would reduce segregation by letting parents send their kids to schools that are more diverse than their neighborhoods. But studies have found that the proliferation of charter schools has led to greater economic—as well as racial—segregation. There are essentially two sets of charter schools. One enrolls predominantly privileged white students—often pulling them from more diverse neighborhood schools—while another serves mainly poor black and Latino communities.

The importance of integration hasn’t gone unnoticed in education policy circles. Across the country, some school districts are working to reduce economic segregation, and earlier this year President Obama proposed a $120 million grant program to support these efforts. But all these plans depend on higher-income parents’ voluntarily participation, which isn’t always easy to achieve.

Dr. Catherine Cushinberry, executive director of the national organization Parents for Public Schools (PPS), said that richer, white parents may want to keep their children out of poorer, more heavily minority schools because they mistakenly worry that these schools won’t be good for their kids. But, she said, it’s often possible to convince them that a more diverse school has advantages. That’s part of PPS’s mission.

“The source of our beginning, really, is in Jackson, Mississippi in the early ’90s,” Cushinberry said. “It was around this notion of white flight. We’re still dealing with similar issues as we did in 1991.”

Today, PPS supports parent activists in school systems from the Deep South to San Francisco, where rapid gentrification is raising new questions about school segregation. In addition to encouraging school integration, the organization works to get parents involved in improving the schools.

One recent, hopeful story comes from Oktibbeha County, Mississippi. Two low-income, mostly African-American high schools were closed, and the students moved to the more affluent Starkville High. Fearing that wealthier white families would pull their kids from the school, members of PPS Starkville worked with the state legislature, Mississippi State University, and other local groups to help smooth the transition. They found ways to get new funding for computers, books, buses and equipment, and to open new programs—including a pre-K. In the end there was no white flight. A number of white students actually left private schools for the new, more integrated district.

As far as Trump’s plan to increase school choice goes, Cushinberry said there just aren’t enough details available yet for her to comment. But, she said, in the wake of the election, she’s been thinking about how Americans can work together across social divisions.

“Certainly one way to unify communities is around bringing together strong, quality schools,” she said.

There’s no doubt that these cities, and their schools, face serious problems that deserve our attention. But a set of very different communities are virtually invisible in narratives about education and poverty in America. These are mostly stories about white children in rural, isolated communities from Alabama to Virginia—in Appalachia. As The New York Times reported in its series on the 50^th anniversary of the War on Poverty, Appalachia is one of the only corners of our country that was virtually untouched by that massive effort. And it shows.

This region has long been among the poorest in the country, and it was hit hard in recent decades by job losses in manufacturing and coal mining. Because those industries, along with agriculture, formed the backbone of Appalachian economies, higher education was a low priority—and that attitude hasn’t changed with the new economy.

Fortunately, new strategies are emerging to improve the prospects of children and families in these communities.

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One of the most pervasive barriers in Appalachia is the isolation.  Towns and homes are far from one another, roads can be treacherous, and public transportation is virtually non-existent. In the northeast corner of Tennessee, Unicoi County High School Principal Chris Bogart describes the challenges of delivering the tutoring, mentoring, and enrichment activities that his students need.

“[One new staff member] suggested just giving the kids bus tokens to get home from afterschool activities, like in her prior district. Sure, I said, that would be great if Unicoi had buses,” Bogart said.

As a way to work around the lack of afterschool transportation, the school piloted an hour-long lunch.   Students eat wherever they want, which gives them the opportunity to visit the media center, get help with math homework, or rehearse a skit with their fine arts teacher, among other activities.  The faculty—who had been skeptical about the change—reports that their relationships with students, and the school climate, improved noticeably.

Isolation and a lack of transportation options also mean that many children—and adults—have never traveled beyond their immediate area. During one Unicoi High School class trip to Nashville—the first time most students had left the region—one student’s parents were so worried that they drove alongside the bus for the entire five hours. Staff at Unicoi are now researching grant possibilities to fund similar trips—including to college campuses and Washington, D.C.—so that their students have a better sense of the world and its possibilities.

According to the teachers, school board members, and social workers whom I spoke with, this kind of exposure is critical to getting their students “across the finish line” in high school and thinking seriously about college. They recounted the challenge of their own relatives having less-than-positive reactions to their declarations that they wanted to be the first in the family to go to college.  “You’re getting above your raisin’,” was one common response.

Just 22 percent of adults in Appalachia have bachelors’ degrees—fewer than in any other area of the country—because working in factories, railroads, and coalmines was the norm. The widespread loss of these employers—including the abrupt shuttering of CSX’s Erwin, TN terminal in October—is devastating Appalachian communities.  And yet, according to several Erwin community leaders I spoke with, many parents still view post-secondary education as unnecessary or even a sign of snobbery.

But educators across Appalachia are trying to change this mindset. At last month’s Appalachian Higher Education Network conference, there was a focus on helping schools create a college-going culture. Innovative ideas include annual trips—beginning as early as elementary school—to both community and four-year colleges; and partnerships that allow students to accrue college credit in their high schools, at a local college, or online. A growing number of schools host college and career festivals where teachers and principals offer testimonials about overcoming their own fears of being the first in their families to make it past high school.

When new strategies like these are bolstered by a higher education institution that is working to address the region’s needs, the impact can be even greater.

Berea College, a small liberal arts school in Kentucky, enrolls only “academically promising” students from low-income families—mostly from Appalachia—who attend entirely tuition-free. It is also home to Partners for Education (PfE), where dozens of outreach and support staff—many of whom are Berea graduates themselves—provide students and their families with a range of supports, such as Skype mentors for at-risk students who are physically isolated, mailing books to students and online book clubs to avert summer learning loss, college preparatory services, and targeted professional development for teachers.  These are exactly the kinds of activities that Unicoi and other schools seek as part of creating a college-going culture.

All of these services are reinforced by smart state policies. Thanks to a well-funded state early childhood education  initiative, one-fourth of Kentucky’s 4-year-olds attend high-quality pre-k programs (compared to fewer than one-fifth in neighboring Virginia, where programs are also of lower quality).  And the 1990 Kentucky Education Reform Act created Family Resource and Youth Services Centers (FRYSC) across the state to advance the goal of “removing nonacademic barriers to learning” through physical, mental health, academic, and family support services tailored to each community’s needs. For example, the FRYSC in Berea offers afterschool and summer enrichment activities as well as crisis counseling.

All of this creative work and community engagement is paying off. A recent study of the 26-county region served by Berea documented key steps toward making college a reality for many more students: better quality among early childhood education providers, more children participating in arts and tutoring programs, teachers receiving strong professional development, and math and reading scores that are rising faster than the state average.

Unique, place-based challenges require innovative policy solutions. Berea and Unicoi are showing us what some of those solutions look like.  Maybe fifty years from now if journalists return to this region, they will report on this moment, when new policies began to change the prospects of children and their families.

The rising cost of tuition over the past few decades has been well-documented, and all students, particularly those from low-income families, are increasingly unable to pay. But as analysts at the Wisconsin HOPE Lab have pointed out many times in recent years, tuition costs alone don’t reveal the full picture of how expensive it has become to get an education. In fact, tuition is only about one-third to two-thirds of the cost of a college degree, and students continue to be nickel and dimed even after they’ve paid their tuition bill. As the many facets of postsecondary education get pricier, the average low-income student is faced with expenses that exceed any financial aid they may receive. At a public four-year institution, this gap is about $12,000. At a private nonprofit four-year school, it’s $19,520.

Take housing. At over $10,000 a year, on-campus housing comprises anywhere from 24 to 42 percent of total student budgets. Meanwhile, the cost of off-campus housing surrounding universities tends to be higher than standard market rent. These steep costs have consequences. One survey conducted by the City University of New York found that 42 percent of their undergraduate students had experienced housing insecurity within the past year.

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In many cases, housing insecurity is coupled with food insecurity. In one study, 59 percent of students at a four-year university in Oregon experienced food insecurity, compared to only 14.9 percent of the general population. And it makes sense: on college campuses, affordable options are often limited. At my own school, the University of Maryland, the average meal plan costs $2,185.39 a year. In a 15-week semester, this amounts to $145.69 a week, or roughly the same amount as the average monthly Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefit. Yet despite high levels of food insecurity, college students have a hard time accessing SNAP at all.

In addition, the academic supplies that students need, such as textbooks and other supplemental course materials, can increase a student’s annual bill significantly. The University of Maryland estimates a student will pay an extra $1,130 a year for books and supplies. And prices are only going up. The average cost of a new textbook increased $22 between 2007 and 2013.

Finally, couple these expenses with the fees associated with student organizations, whose costs are unpredictable and can fall anywhere between $10 and somewhere in the quadruple digits. Texas A&M University lists that dues for certain sports clubs could be as high as $2,500. At some schools, Greek life is the primary vehicle for student involvement and can cost close to an additional $10,000 a year.

Given the changing demographics of the student population, these kinds of financial sacrifices should not be viewed nonchalantly. Between 1982 and 2012, the proportion of low-income students attending college jumped by 18.1 percentage points, compared to just 10 points for high-income students. The rate of first-generation students and students of color—who are far more likely to come from low-income families—is growing and is projected to continue to do so.

There has been considerable political momentum among progressives in favor of reduced or even free college tuition, which would enable students to channel more resources into necessities like housing, food, and textbooks. But until that’s achieved, we should seek to improve programs that are currently available. For example, most college students attending at least half-time are not eligible for SNAP unless they work at least 20 hours per week, take part in a work-study program, have young children, or meet certain other requirements. However, working 20 hours a week has been shown to lengthen the time it takes to graduate, increase college costs, and heighten the risk of dropping out. As suggested by the Wisconsin HOPE Lab, aligning SNAP with needs-based student financial aid and making it more accessible to students is key to combating campus food insecurity.

Policymakers also need to pay more attention to housing instability among undergraduates. There is currently no standard method for determining cost of living allowances, which can impact how much assistance off-campus students receive. Low-ball estimates of living costs can also hinder students’ ability to plan financially, making them more susceptible to hardship. In fact, fully 30 percent of two-year institutions have set their allowances at more than $3,000 below the actual living cost. If campuses were to use a consistent measure across the board to estimate housing costs—for example, the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) suggests its Fair Market Rent data—they could more effectively tailor efforts to meet their students’ actual needs.

Finally, in order to better serve students, the government should remove counterproductive red tape within its programs. Federal student loan regulations prevent schools from disbursing Direct Loan aid to first-year, first-time borrowers until 30 days after the first day of classes. This policy makes it extremely difficult for students to secure off-campus housing before the school year begins, as many properties require a substantial security deposit as well as first- and last-month’s rent. Moreover, HUD should revise its eligibility criteria for subsidized housing, which treats means-tested student financial assistance for fees, books, supplies, and other essential education expenses as income, thereby forcing some students to turn down additional aid in favor of loans to remain eligible.

Ultimately, we have to shed the assumption that all students are immune to financial burdens because they have unlimited access to their parents’ bank accounts. In the midst of encouraging everyone to attend college, we haven’t considered how students are expected to excel in their studies if they can’t purchase the necessary course materials or meet basic needs. Every student deserves to feel the pride in standing in front of their families, friends, and peers to receive their diploma. And yet, writing that $150 check for a cap and gown is sometimes just one more unanticipated barrier on the way toward getting a college education.

This article has been updated since the original post.

Three years before the tornado, CJ Huff, the superintendent of nearby Eldon, Missouri, was hired to lead Joplin’s 18 schools. His main charge was to raise the district’s graduation rate, which at the time hovered just above 73 percent. It quickly became apparent to Huff that the growing rate of child poverty stood in the way of reaching that goal as well as his broader aspirations to prepare students for college, careers, and active participation in a democratic society.

The Joplin school team conducted nine months of face-to-face talks with parents, teachers, and the community’s faith, business, and human services agency leaders in order to assess the school district’s needs.  They discussed everything from the transition between elementary and middle school, to mental health, to mentorship.  The plan they ended up with—called “Bright Futures”—is now a blueprint for school transformation in dozens of districts across the South and Midwest. Seven years later, Joplin’s graduation rate has risen to 87 percent.  Here’s how Huff and the Joplin community did it.

Meeting every child’s basic needs within 24 hours

As a former principal and teacher, Huff knew how difficult it is to teach effectively when students are too hungry to focus, lack needed eyeglasses, are stressed out from spending the night in a homeless shelter, or, worse, can’t make it to class because they are in the ER dealing with a preventable asthma attack. Indeed, children living in poverty in the United States are more than twice as likely as their more affluent peers to miss at least two weeks of school and thus fall behind, largely because health concerns go unaddressed.

But how would a poor and relatively small city like Joplin succeed in addressing these and other unmet needs? Huff’s team drew on all available resources. They established partnerships with local health clinics, hospitals, and individual doctors to secure physical and mental health care, so kids were in school and ready to learn. Local doctors provided physicals so students could participate in sports activities, dentists volunteered to provide emergency dental services to children whose families couldn’t afford it, and kids were referred to mental health providers free of charge as needed. Hospitals and health clinics likewise stepped up to serve students’ health care needs.

In addition, the team reached out to drug stores, grocery stores, and other businesses to assemble a pantry that school social workers could use to immediately meet basic needs such as food and clothing. They hosted a back-to-school resource fair that called upon families and local stores to help all kids start the year well-stocked with school supplies. And they built up a Bright Futures Facebook page that enabled any resident to respond to more unusual requests—like size 13 steel-toed work boots (which cost more than $100), so a homeless high school student could enroll in the technical school welding program.  (This Facebook page became popular with neighboring communities, including nearby Carl Junction School District, which in 2010 became the first Bright Futures affiliate.)

Developing local leadership and community support for long-term success

Huff knew that superintendents come and go, especially in struggling school districts. And Joplin’s mayor wouldn’t necessarily be around long either. If the schools were to improve—and also sustain and grow that improvement—locally-nurtured leaders would need to take the helm in promoting good policy.

This kind of leadership development wasn’t an easy task in a city where many families didn’t view high school graduation—let alone college admission—as a top priority.  Residents also didn’t have a clear vision of the interrelatedness of the city’s many assets and how they were all critical to the school district’s success. A key step therefore was to establish an advisory board comprised of needed allies from the city’s many institutions, including faith-based organizations to provide volunteer support, human service agencies to respond to non-academic needs, and business partners to supplement the resources that families were able to provide, as well as parents.  A second step was for each school in the district to develop its own council that would work with teachers and principals to identify and address classroom-level needs and also support and train emerging, local leaders.

Embedding service learning in classrooms, even among the youngest pupils

Huff and his team believed service learning was a natural fit for the district, but that it would require a different mindset for teachers who had long understood raising test scores to be their main objective, and who might not see the connection between service learning projects and broader learning objectives.

Service learning provides hands-on, curriculum-based opportunities for children to give back to the communities that support their education. It is intentionally designed to help students develop advanced cognitive skills while also building a sense of self-worth. Finally, it provides an opportunity for the teaching staff to showcase their talents and those of the students to the community.  In Huff’s words:

“We want the students to understand their power to give and to help all kids feel like they are a part of something bigger than themselves. Finding needs they can address, like organizing drives for the soup kitchen or, for older students, assessing water quality to support the local agency, is empowering. And it helps them grow into the engaged citizens our country needs more of.”

The same kinds of challenges that Joplin faces limit the futures of millions of students in rural, suburban, and inner-city school districts across the country. But the Joplin experience shows us that the learning needs of young people can be addressed, and that the right actions will substantially brighten their futures.

While student debt may not intuitively register as something that plagues the poor, student debt delinquency and defaults are concentrated in low-income areas, even though lower-income borrowers also tend to have much smaller debts. Defaults and delinquencies among low-income Americans escalated following the Great Recession of 2008, a period when many states disinvested from public colleges and universities. The result was higher costs of college, which has led to larger loans.

Low-income students are often left at a dramatic academic disadvantage in the first place. For example, students who work full-time on top of college classes can’t cover the cost of tuition or living expenses, and working while in school can actually shrink the chance of graduating altogether. Moreover, these students are less likely to have access to career counseling or outside financial resources to help them pay for school, making the payoff negligible at best.

The inequity is so crushing that an alarming number of these students—predominantly students of color—are dropping out of school altogether. One-third of low-income student borrowers at public four-year schools drop out, a rate 10 percent higher than the rest of student borrowers overall.

When it comes to for-profit colleges, the story gets even worse. These institutions often target prospective students who are low-income while falsely assuring positive job and economic prospects upon graduating. Many students do end up dropping out, and even those who do graduate do not always receive a quality education that leaves them prepared for success—or with an income that matches up with their monthly loan payments. Their degrees too often cannot compete in the job market, leaving many of these students jobless.

This confluence of factors explains why borrowers who owe the least tend to be lower-income, and are the most likely to fall behind or default on their monthly payments. As the Mapping Student Debt project has found, people with more debt are less likely to default on their loan payments because they have the most access to wealth, whether through family money or financial assets or educational degrees. And it’s not hard to connect the dots. The biggest borrowers tend to be the biggest earners, so those who take out large loans to pay for graduate or professional school are less likely to default or fall behind because they’re in high-earning jobs. The Department of Education estimated that 7 percent of graduate borrowers default, versus 22 percent of those who only borrow for undergraduate studies. Default can actually lead to an increase in student loan debt because of late fees and interest, as well as a major decline in credit, ineligibility for additional student aid, and even wage garnishment at the request of the federal government.

Fortunately, there are solutions already in place that can help borrowers get out of default and back on their feet.  For borrowers with federal loans, the Department of Education has a number of income-driven repayment programs (IDR) that cap a borrower’s monthly payment to as low as 10 percent of their discretionary income. Rather than being saddled with debt and an income that doesn’t realistically allow for repayment, borrowers can take advantage of programs such as PAYE, REPAYE, and Income-Based-Repayment to make their monthly loan payments proportional to their income. And some low-income borrowers might even qualify to pay nothing at all if they fall beneath certain income levels.

These plans won’t just help borrowers with high debt balances.  IDR is especially helpful for borrowers with smaller balances because it reduces the monthly burden while keeping more money in pockets to cover expenses for food, housing, and other basic needs that borrowers must choose between in the face of overwhelming monthly payments.

Yet woefully few borrowers are aware of these plans that have the potential to make sure low-income borrowers aren’t paying more than they can afford. Fully 51 percent of student loan borrowers nationwide are eligible for these programs but only 15 percent are enrolled.

A dream of a higher education shouldn’t be a sentence to years—or an entire lifetime—of poverty. With federal IDR programs, the process of paying back any amount of student debt can be much less draining of an obligation, especially for our most vulnerable citizens. It’s on all of us to make sure those who can benefit the most from IDR are aware of it.

These proposed cuts to the safety net will devastate the lives of millions of Americans like me. As a single mother of three, I have spent much of my life pulling myself up by my proverbial bootstraps. I have weathered spells of unemployment, food insecurity, homelessness, and domestic violence.

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But in spite of my struggles, I obtained a four-year college degree. Were it not for federal and California state programs, I would not have been able to balance the many challenges of higher education with my familial obligations. CalWorks, the income assistance program in my state, helped me to identify a cognitive disability that otherwise would have gone undiagnosed, and then helped me to secure the accommodations I needed to finish my education. Medicaid gave my children health insurance––which helped me sleep better at night. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and WIC helped me afford groceries and feed my family. With the help of this vital assistance, I graduated with a degree in public policy in 2007. I am living proof that the safety net can work—but only when it’s adequately funded.

Since my graduation, I have continued to pursue my passion for social justice and political advocacy by working with a legal services agency. I connect low-income individuals with state and federal resources that help them keep their heads above water. The clients I work with are not “takers.” They are people who are trying to find affordable housing and nutrition assistance for their families so that they can escape abusive relationships, find a better-paying job, heal from an illness or injury, or overcome  addiction. And perhaps they, too, will one day be able to connect others with these vital programs.

But in recent years, I have noticed that these programs have become harder to access. When I first started at this job, the majority of my caseloads were approved with almost no issues. Now, as block grants and “work first” reforms have hacked away at many of the programs that were so crucial to my success, more and more people are seeing their applications denied. For example, today just 23 of every 100 families with children living in poverty benefit from cash assistance through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, compared to 68 in 1996. In my experience, a lot of the clients who come to our agency for help have trouble keeping up with the intrusive and needlessly complicated applications, reauthorizations, and verification forms required to receive benefits. Just one missed deadline, and you can be cut off with no warning. The wait to get back into the system can be over a month long.

These realities are deeply misunderstood by many legislators. Indeed, conservatives—who seek cuts to the very programs that have served as a lifeline for me and my three daughters—peddle an oversimplified and inaccurate notion of poverty. Instead of raising wages or increasing access to affordable housing, these legislators work to further stigmatize low-income people through instituting drug testing requirements, even though very few recipients test positive for drug use, or by banning the use of SNAP benefits to purchase lobster. These frivolous “solutions” in search of a problem underscore how, unlike me, they have never had to strategize about which food pantry to get bread from, or which public restroom to wash up in, or which shelter to spend the night in with three children.

Lawmakers have an obligation to pass a budget that invests in all Americans. They have an obligation to recognize the struggles that people in poverty endure every day—not shame them for those struggles.  They have an obligation to strengthen the safety net, not unravel it. It’s not just people living in poverty who need these key federal investments. Every American who believes government can make a fundamental difference in people’s lives has an inherent interest in protecting public assistance programs.

Although we have seen a dramatic decrease in the number of teen pregnancies, the United States still experiences higher rates of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections (including HIV) than other Western countries. Despite this fact, current conservative proposals would cut funding for TPPI by nearly 90 percent. This critical program, which represents one of the two major federal funding streams for comprehensive sex education, works to reduce the number of unplanned teen pregnancies through increasing access to medically-accurate and age-appropriate evidence-based programs, contraception, and reproductive health care services. But instead of backing this successful model, Congress would increase funding for Abstinence Only Until Marriage programs (AOUM) by $10 million, despite the fact that states with abstinence-only education have the highest teen birth rates.

Many AOUM programs (also known by the misleading term “Sexual Risk Avoidance” programs) advance deeply problematic gender expectations and generally ignore the needs of LGBTQ youth or stigmatize homosexuality. They also often provide medically inaccurate information, undermining students’ ability to make safe and informed choices.

This misguided effort by conservatives to gut TPPI fails to address the immediate causes of teen pregnancy. The U.S. has high rates of unplanned pregnancy and STIs relative to other nations likely because we have lower rates of contraceptive use. By contrast, comprehensive sex education, which TPPI helps to provide, increases contraception usage and particularly benefits teens, who are disproportionately likely to experience unplanned pregnancies.

Unlike abstinence-only programs, TPPI also works to address racial disparities in access to comprehensive sex education by specifically focusing on the African American and Hispanic communities. These communities are less likely to receive comprehensive sex education—if any at all—and face higher rates of poverty. Economic deprivation is known to make it more difficult for teens of color to access contraception and other sexual health services. The result is that Hispanic and black youth have the highest teen pregnancy rates—more than double that of white youth—and are disproportionately likely to contract STIs.

The facts clearly show that it is counterproductive for Congress to slash funding for evidenced-based programs while pouring more resources into programs that we know are ineffective. Moreover, it is inequitable, as cutting TPPI funds would specifically harm the students who already face limited access to comprehensive sex education and reproductive health care services.

But while the correlations between poverty, race, and teen pregnancy are undeniable, we have to avoid treating teen pregnancy prevention as a silver-bullet solution to ending poverty. A 30-year study from the University of Pennsylvania that followed 300 teen mothers from Baltimore found that teen childbirth was not the major cause of their economic difficulties. This finding has been supported by Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine who also note that, “teen birth itself does not appear to have much direct economic consequence.” Rather, women who grow up in poverty are likely to live in poverty their entire lives regardless of whether or not they have a baby as a teen or wait until they are older.

But regardless of its effectiveness as an anti-poverty measure, the work of TPPI to reduce the prevalence of STIs and unplanned pregnancy is valuable. The program promotes equality among teenagers and increases students’ agency. Moreover, TPPI is ushering in an important paradigm shift by funding comprehensive sex education aimed at empowering young people to parent when they decide they are ready; this contrasts with the dangerous notion of using contraceptives to reduce the number of poor children, an idea popular among some moderate and conservative politicians that brings to mind a dark history of forced sterilizations and state control over the bodies of low-income women.

Instead of gutting effective programs, our elected leaders should adopt a broad strategy to ensure young people can reach their full potential. While programs like TPPI that fund comprehensive sex education are a central part of this work, the government must also invest in jobs and adopt strong anti-poverty policies in order to bring about more opportunities for social mobility.

The clock is ticking for Congress to act. We need politicians that will fight for the sexual health and empowerment of teenagers, not contest the very existence of the institution they serve.

The Labor, Health and Human Services (HHS), and Education bill cuts these programs by $3.7 billion below last year’s level.  Moreover, these cuts would compound years of flat or shrinking funding, due largely to the tight funding cap on non-defense discretionary spending of the 2011 Budget Control Act (BCA), so that total funding for programs in this bill would fall to roughly one-sixth below its 2010 value, adjusted for inflation.

Major cuts include the following:

• Education: The bill cuts federal education programs, many of which serve low- and moderate-income students, by $2.5 billion. In particular, funding for elementary, secondary, and preschool education programs would fall to one-fifth below its 2010 inflation-adjusted level.  The bill would eliminate more than two dozen education programs, including Preschool Development Grants, which give states money to build or expand high-quality preschool programs in high-need communities, and School Improvement Grants, which provide grant funding to boost student achievement in low-performing schools.

• The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS): The bill cuts CMS funding by $649 million, or roughly one-sixth. CMS operates Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and it implements many aspects of health reform, including the federally run health insurance marketplaces and health reform’s consumer protections. That cut, along with language that would stop HHS from implementing most of health reform, would effectively block most assistance that helps low- and moderate-income people ; it could also hamper Medicare operations.  All told, CMS would have less funding than in 2010, before health reform took effect — and that’s before adjusting for inflation or Medicare’s growing numbers of beneficiaries.

• Job training: The bill cuts job training funding by $135 million which, after years of deep cuts, brings funding to 23 percent below its 2010 level, adjusted for inflation. The bill’s main job training cut comes from reducing by two-thirds funding that provides extra help in responding to large disruptions such as plant closings, mass layoffs, and natural disasters, as well as to support demonstration projects and technical assistance.

• “Title X” family planning: The bill eliminates all funding, which totaled $286 million in 2015, for Title X, which supports clinics that offer family planning and related preventive health services, such as screenings for cancer and sexually transmitted infections. The funding is a key source of revenue for these clinics, which reduce or eliminate charges for low-income patients (many of them uninsured). The clinics served more than 4.5 million patients, according to HHS, and helped avert an estimated 870,000 unintended pregnancies in 2013.

• The Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS): The bill cuts CNCS funding by $367 million, or more than one-third. The cuts primarily target AmeriCorps, which provides funding for public service jobs, frequently in economically disadvantaged areas. These cuts would shrink the number of AmeriCorps positions and threaten the modest educational stipend that AmeriCorps workers receive after completing a year of public service work.

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The bill does include some much-needed increases in key investments, such as medical research and special education funding.  But, given the bill’s reduced funding levels overall, those increases are only possible because of the damaging cuts it makes to other areas.

The President and congressional Democrats have pushed to raise the BCA’s caps for both non-defense and defense spending, offset by a mix of other cuts and revenue increases.  But congressional Republicans — who run both the House and Senate — have stuck to these tight caps in this year’s budget process for non-defense programs (while using a gimmick to evade the cap on defense).  With the existing cap on appropriations for non-defense programs in place, there’s little chance of adequately funding key investments in labor, health, and education programs in 2016.

No kidding, Mr. President.

This isn’t news to anyone. For most people, the Internet is key to basic life functions: correspondence; applications for jobs, college, and benefits; Facebook stalking your friends’ friends’ friends, expressing yourself with 90’s TV show gifs; and participating in the oh-so-enlightened conversations occurring on message boards everywhere.

Although I jest, lack of Internet access is a serious barrier for many low-income families, and its consequences are very real: students who have broadband at home achieve higher graduation rates than those who do not; high speed Internet access is strongly associated with greater economic development for communities; and the Internet is a critical prerequisite for accessing a huge proportion of job applications. I spent the past year studying how these folks use public computing resources in Chicago, and I can tell you that having access at home, work, school, or a public center really changes what opportunities are available to you.

But none of this matters because everyone has smartphones now, right? Problem solved. Except that you can’t write essays, craft a resume, do your taxes, or animate, analyze, and code anything worthwhile on your phone. And sure enough, the effects of these limitations show: mobile-only Internet users have lower digital skill levels than people with access to desktops.

And although the proportion of people who do not have Internet in some capacity at home or work has been reduced to an all-time low, the consequences for those who remain excluded have multiplied because the vast majority of institutions provide services in a way that assumes online access. This is very bad news for the quarter of Americans who don’t have decent broadband at home.

All this being said, the ConnectHome initiative, while great for the 275,000 families it serves, won’t even make a dent in the approximately 95 million people who need it. If we’re going to have a national conversation about digital skills and Internet access, then let’s recognize that while ConnectHome and mobile Internet access play important roles in filling the critical gaps in services for our most vulnerable families, the overwhelming need for Internet, devices, support, and training in underserved communities requires a broader strategy.

We’ve been here before: policymakers did attempt to address these digital disparities in the Recovery Act after the 2008 recession. The Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) invested $4.7 billion dollars in broadband access and adoption, including $201 million in Public Computer Center grants to fund 3,500 new and upgraded public computer centers across the country.

For a lot of communities, these types of public computer labs are where low-income individuals who lack Internet go to get the technology and training they need. Labs are located in public housing, senior centers, schools, health clinics, community technology centers, and most importantly, public libraries, who are the real MVPs of Internet access in America, despite the massive cuts many systems have faced.

These public computer centers are heavily relied upon: for example, my research suggests that half of their 80,000 weekly users in Chicago—more than one-third of whom have incomes of under $10,000—use public computer centers every day. And, the most recent available data clocked the average wait time in about two-thirds of Chicago Public Libraries at more than three hours. And that’s a problem for users, especially low-income households, who don’t have that kind of time to wait around to access basic services. And, centers and their support staffs are doing so much more than providing Internet and computers: they’re teachers, curators of learning resources, amateur social service referrers, homework helpers, and job search coaches.

The value of public computer centers goes beyond technology itself. For teenage users in Chicago, 88 percent reported that they performed better in school through center use and one-third reported that the computer centers made them feel safer because they were off the streets. For Chicago adult users, 58 percent were looking for jobs and 37 percent of all respondents said the Chicago centers had helped them find a job, due in part to staff assistance.

These centers were dealt a huge setback when BTOP’s funding ended in 2013. Now, without a dedicated source of funding, every budget year is a battle to prevent cuts or underfunding. And, when we fail to invest in libraries and public computer centers, they are forced to cut staff and training programs or close altogether. Until the next generation of wireless provision produces better, cheaper alternatives, it’s critical that we financially support these libraries and public computer centers on a far broader scale than ConnectHome.

It’s time to think seriously and creatively about how to fund systemic, sustainable changes to get low-income households connected to the resources they need—in every community.

Millions of American families are working multiple jobs to make ends meet but are still living paycheck to paycheck.

Millions more who are undocumented can’t plan for their futures because they fear la migra (the immigration police) will haul them and their loved ones away at any time.

And still others, who have served often excessive sentences for past transgressions struggle to find work when they are released from prison.

In total, about 106 million people live on the brink, fighting to overcome the barriers to success that keep them living in marginalized communities or in such chaos that financial stability is out of reach.

Yet what are the chances that their struggles will be addressed in any meaningful way during the first Republican presidential debate hosted by Fox News on Thursday?

What are the chances the Fox News moderators will ask candidates about their agenda to address the needs of neighborhoods facing high unemployment and low wages?

What is the likelihood that the candidates will be asked to outline plans to improve the lives of the working families who live in forgotten communities where there is little investment in infrastructure and jobs?

If the most recent presidential elections are any indication, the chances that these issues will be raised are slim to none. While there was plenty of rhetoric about the dwindling middle class, the last presidential election was noticeably devoid of any references to Americans living in poverty. In fact, The Nation reported that from 2008 to 2012, at least five consecutive presidential or vice presidential debates went without a single question about poverty.

This first debate of the 2016 election is an opportunity for the leading Republican candidates to go on the record about the issues that matter most to working families.

So in an effort to help the candidates and the Fox team find their way, here’s a roadmap. We asked four Americans struggling to make ends meet about what they want to hear on Thursday:

Rachael Collyer, 22, Cleveland Heights, Ohio:

Rachael graduated from The Ohio State University with a major in Spanish and English. She works as a bartender with a fluctuating income that on a good day nets up to $14 an hour and on soft days earns her the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

She also has almost $26,000 in student loan debt.

Rachael can’t afford her own apartment, so after she graduated, she moved back home with her parents in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. She’s a volunteer organizer now for the Ohio Student Association because mounting debt is holding too many students and their families back. The state has decreased its college grants to students, she says, even though more than half of all jobs in Ohio will require a college education by 2020. It is no wonder then that about 68% of Ohio’s college graduates have an average of $29,000 in debt.

“We are like frogs in boiling water,” she says. “College debt has been going up and going up and suddenly we’ve reached this point where we yell, ‘How did this happen?’ “

Rachael wants the Fox News moderators to ask the candidates: Given the cost of attending college, most students work while they are in school. And, in Ohio, if a student works 40 hours a week at a minimum wage job, they won’t earn enough to cover the average cost of attending Ohio State. How do you propose addressing the wage needs of recent college graduates and current students so that paying for their college education is not a barrier to success?

Duane Edwards, 34, Fredericksburg, VA:

Duane’s life changed drastically when he was 14 years old. His father, an Army veteran, was killed in a car crash, leaving behind a wife and three children. At that moment, Duane told himself he had to find a way to earn money so he wouldn’t be a burden on his mother. So he secretly began selling marijuana.

He was eventually caught on a drug charge and sentenced to community-based probation. His mother tried hard to keep him straight, but she had to work to maintain the family and he took advantage of her absence. He says there were few mentors or teachers who looked at him and saw any potential. Without a job and no prospects, Duane eventually landed in prison and served a three-year sentence.

“Being incarcerated made me grow up,” he says. While behind bars, he earned an associate’s degree in childhood education, and he tutored other inmates who were trying to get their GEDs. He wanted to make good on his life when he got out.

So when he was released in December 2006, he had high hopes that he would turn around the troubled life he once lived. But it was dependent on him finding work. In the first six months alone, he applied to more than 40 jobs. None would hire him because of his record. Since he’s been out, Duane has applied to more than 120 jobs and has received call backs for just 15 of them, with most offering low-wage work washing or loading trucks.

Today, the married father of two girls, who are three and four years old, has a bachelor’s degree in theology and is a pastor at a local church. It’s taken him almost nine years since he got out, but he finally has a full-time job driving a truck, making $14.50 an hour. He says he’s grateful for the job, but says it’s still hard to make ends meet.

“I would like an opportunity at a good job so I can take care of my family,” he says.

He wants to ask the candidates: Given that the school to prison pipeline starts early, particularly for young black men, and there is a decided lack of opportunity for young African Americans, what is your plan to invest in schools in marginalized communities made up primarily of people of color so that the outcomes of the students in those schools are the same as in wealthier, predominantly white neighborhoods?

Patrice Mack, 45, Euclid, Ohio:

Patrice is the single mother of a 24-year-old daughter and three boys, a 14-year-old and 11-year-old twins. She owns her own home and has a college degree in business administration. Earlier this year, she left a job that paid her so little that her sons were eligible for government health insurance because she couldn’t afford the company’s insurance.

“You can have a degree and still struggle to survive,” she says. “I’m a paycheck away from poverty.”

Patrice is tapping into her retirement savings in order to get by until she finds a job. She is looking for work, but opportunities for good jobs have dwindled. And due to unpredictable, constantly shifting schedules, and a lack of paid leave and paid sick days, many jobs make it impossible to balance work and caregiving responsibilities.

She wants to ask the candidates: The minimum wage is at a level where working families can’t survive unless they work multiple jobs. So how do you propose we do a better job of parenting our children and being there for them, while at the same time earning enough income to provide for our families? And how do you think employers can incorporate paid leave or paid sick days?

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Astrid Silva, 27, Las Vegas, NV:

Astrid grew up most of her life under the tinsel and lights of Las Vegas. As a young person, she was a standout student and graduated at the top of her class in her magnet high school. She’s earned associate degrees in arts and political science and is working on a bachelor’s degree. Astrid could be a poster child for today’s diverse and civic-minded millennial generation.

She’s also an undocumented immigrant.

At the age of four, Astrid rode a tire raft with her mother and crossed the Rio Grande. She wore black patent leather shoes and the “biggest poofiest white dress with purple flowers and a purple sash.” Her mother had wanted her to look pretty when they met her father in the States.

“As a young person, you understand,” she says. “I understood there was something different about us.”

She says their status affected her family in big and small ways. Neither she nor her mother were able to drive because they couldn’t get driver’s licenses. They wouldn’t go to certain areas, or leave Nevada, because they were worried they would get picked up by immigration authorities. And unlike other people in their neighborhood, they couldn’t leave the country and visit Mexico. She remembers the pain and sadness that overwhelmed her family when her grandmother died in 2009. Her father couldn’t leave and see his mother one last time because they feared he wouldn’t be able to return.

Their biggest fear came true in 2011. Her father was arrested and given deportation orders. He’s since been granted a stay, which he has to apply for every year, and Astrid says she doesn’t know how long it will last.

Since then, she has become a vocal advocate for immigration reform. President Obama even mentioned her in a speech where he deplored our “broken” immigration system.

Thanks to an executive order signed by President Obama that allows undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children to remain in the country, Astrid has a stay until 2017.

But she says that too may end after Obama’s term ends.

“I’m trying to figure out how to keep my family together here,” she says. “This is not a political strategy. For us, it’s real.”

Her question for the candidates is: Given that there are 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, what kind of concrete plan do you have for immigration reform? Not one that dismantles what the President has done or that focuses only on border security, but that offers real solutions for issues such as family reunification; the ban on re-entry to the U.S. by undocumented immigrants that spans three to ten years; or the rights of asylum for undocumented immigrants?

Despite these constant shifts, Brandy was able to stay in the same school because of a federal law, the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, which among other things paved the way for the hiring of two school “homeless liaisons.” These liaisons helped her travel to and from school, made sure she had something to eat during the day, clothes to wear, and encouraged her to aspire and thrive. This law and the support she received in school proved critical to Brandy’s success in high school and later in college.

As a civil legal aid attorney with Columbia Legal Services, I help homeless students and their families address barriers to their enrollment and participation in school. I use a variety of tools such as community education about McKinney-Vento, data and policy analysis, and individual and legislative advocacy.

McKinney-Vento recognizes and provides strong protections that promote education continuity. It gives homeless students the right to transportation to and from school; the right to enroll in school immediately (even without registration records); and the right to have a district-level homeless liaison that helps out with whatever a student may need for academic success. Those protections make McKinney-Vento one of the strongest education laws and, when enforced, it has done a great deal to assist students like Brandy. But far too few students are afforded these crucial legal rights. Take Brandy’s sister, Felicity. She did not receive the support of a homeless liaison. With each move, she lost credits, friends, and the opportunity to receive a basic education. She repeated the ninth grade four times.

Felicity’s story is unjust and all too common. In Washington State alone, we have 32,000 homeless students, which represents an 82 percent increase from the 2006-2007 school year. That’s enough to fill half of the seats in the Seattle Seahawks’ enormous football stadium. It’s particularly disturbing because children are estimated to lose four to six months in academic progress each time they move during the school year.

Children and youth who are of color, LGBT, who have limited English proficiency or disabilities are more likely to be homeless than their peers. We also know that homeless students struggle in school when compared to their housed peers; in fact, they are less than half as likely to be proficient in math, with similar gaps in other subjects. These disparities also hurt local communities and society generally, since these students are about half as likely to graduate as their housed peers and more likely to end up in the criminal justice system. It makes sense because imagine trying to focus in school when you have moved five times during the school year because your family could not find an affordable place to stay; or trying to study for an important math test in a crammed one-bedroom apartment where seven other people live.

This crisis of student homelessness comes fourteen years after the passage of McKinney-Vento. While the federal government provides grants to help schools fulfill their obligations under the legislation, these dollars are extremely limited. For example, in Washington, only 34 of 295 school districts received McKinney-Vento grants last year. That means most schools don’t have a homeless liaison, and when they do, they are juggling multiple job positions and can only devote a few hours a week to serving the needs of homeless students. As a result, students suffer and the spirit of the legislation is undermined.

The fact is that we need to increase funding for McKinney-Vento. But we can’t stop there. We must also provide housing subsidies to families experiencing homelessness. A recent study, by the Department of Housing and Urban Development found that families are more likely to maintain stable housing if provided with a permanent housing subsidy.

With this idea in mind, Columbia Legal Services is working to provide stable housing for homeless students and their families by engaging in state-level advocacy. In 2014, we helped pass the Homeless Children Education Act (HCEA) that required the state to provide comprehensive data on homeless student graduation rates. This data-driven approach is already helping advocacy groups and policy makers develop a better picture of how homeless students fare academically compared to their housed peers and which education reforms are needed to better support homeless students.

The McKinney-Vento Act alone cannot guarantee education continuity. The few schools that are able to hire full-time liaisons cannot fully address the biggest need of homeless students: safe and stable housing.  When the bell rings, kids should be concerned about homework, not working to find a home.

While we often discuss Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders as one demographic group, it is important to acknowledge that experiences vary greatly within this community, particularly when it comes to economic wellbeing. For example, while Japanese Americans have a poverty rate of 8.4 percent—nearly half the national average—Cambodian Americans and Hmong Americans have much higher poverty rates at 18.8 percent and 24 percent, respectively. This is why Asian American and Pacific Islanders can be viewed as having relatively high household income, while also being one of the fastest-growing populations in poverty since the Great Recession.

One contributing factor to the differences between AAPI groups is English proficiency, as adults with limited English skills tend to have higher rates of unemployment and lower wages. This is critical as Asian Americans are among the most likely to have limited English proficiency, and one in five Asian households in the U.S. is considered “linguistically isolated,” where no one in the household over the age of 14 speaks English “very well.” And the language barrier impacts Asian Americans regardless of birth place. In fact, nearly 1 out of 10 U.S.-born Asian Americans has limited English proficiency.

English proficiency among parents is also critical when it comes to accessing the knowledge and resources necessary to help children navigate classrooms, health facilities, and even the juvenile justice system. Further, higher proficiency in English among parents is associated with better academic and economic outcomes for their children. On top of this, English language learner students—students whose native language is not English or who come from environments where English is not the dominant language—are more likely to attend high-poverty schools where resources are limited. Moreover, they must acquire language skills while studying the same content areas as their English-speaking peers, essentially doing double the work.

Given the fact that English proficiency impacts employment outcomes, family responsibilities, and a child’s academic success, the language barrier can create a poverty trap for families and a loss of human capital for communities.

As the number of immigrants continues to increase, one of the most significant ways communities can respond to this influx is by ensuring greater access to English language instruction to ensure that all families can fully participate in society. In a recent report titled “The Case for a Two-Generation Approach for Educating English Language Learners,” I outline how communities should support strategies that engage parents and children and improve the academic and economic well-being of both generations. These strategies include adopting a community school model—meaning schools provide critical wraparound services for students and families.

In my hometown of Oakland, California, half the students speak a language other than English, with Spanish and Cantonese being the most common. Recently, the school district chose to move towards the community school model and provide a wide spectrum of wraparound services for all students, including: physical and mental health services, nutrition, housing, employment, parenting, and language acquisition courses. In addition, the district’s Family Literacy program provides parents with English as a second language and computer literacy courses. These classes are integrated into the child’s school, giving parents the opportunity to use the same resources as their children and gain a greater understanding of what their children are learning.

“You need to look longitudinally,” Sue Pon, director of adult education for Oakland, told Fusion. “We are empowering a family and a community, not just a child.”

Given the fact that the majority of labor-force growth in the United States over the next four decades is projected to come from immigrants and their children, investing in these two populations is critical to the success of not only these families but also the U.S. economy.

There’s a long shadow cast over Baltimore’s children. Like young people across America, they know that the ability to get a good-paying job depends on college. As teens, many of them finish high school, fill out college applications, and complete financial aid forms.  But then they find out the truth: college is unaffordable.

There is a lot of talk about elite universities offering “no loans” promises and sending letters to low-income families across the country urging their children to apply.  But that effort is relevant to a tiny few. Most people who attend college go to institutions that are far from free.

Despite massive public investment in financial aid, students from families like Kayla’s who earn less than $20,000 a year are now required to pay at least $8,000 for a year of community college and more than $12,000 a year at a public university. That “net price” is what researchers like me have found to be the real bill that students and their families face after all grants (including the federal Pell and state and institutional grants) are subtracted from the sticker price of attending college. This price has gone up substantially over time, particularly since the Great Recession.  It’s climbed as real family income for most has fallen. Worse, it may well be under-stated.

College education is central to the American Dream. But the ladder people must climb to get there has eroded, and a critical rung fell off.  After a semester or two, even the most talented students from the bottom half of the income distribution find that the price of college is more than they can afford.  They have enough money to register for classes, but they cannot pay the bills long enough to graduate.  

The young people of Baltimore know this.  Researchers tracked a set of the city’s children beginning in 1982, when the kids were in 1^st grade.  A decade and a half later, almost two-thirds enrolled in college. But by age 28, just 17 percent had earned an associates or bachelor’s degree, with another 13 percent earning a certificate.  Nearly half who grew up poor, ended up poor, especially if they were black.

It wasn’t for lack of trying. Researchers like Stefanie DeLuca, who met Kayla while doing research on young people from Baltimore’s highest poverty neighborhoods, confirm that a strong work ethic is omnipresent there. But enrolling in college exacerbates their poverty: working two or three jobs while also taking on federal and private loans takes a heavy toll. Growing numbers of undergraduates find themselves living without sufficient food or adequate housing even as they try and focus on school.

When college is unaffordable, hope is lost.  Without degrees, young people are returning to the streets with debt, disillusioned and fearful for their futures.

Today colleges and state governments set most college prices. They are failing at this job. The opportunity to get a college education is distributed in highly inequitable ways.  Rather than promoting mobility, the broken college financing system is ensuring that economic and racial inequality gets passed down – and worsened – from one generation to the next.  Americans deserve better.

Last year, Republican Governor Bill Haslam began to restore hope in Tennessee by offering tuition-free community college.  The predecessor to the Tennessee Promise, Knox Achieves, is proving effective at helping young people who would have otherwise never experienced even a 13^th year of education earn college credits.  Helping those students complete a 14^th year, and attain a credential, may require more investment, along the lines of America’s College Promise proposed by President Barack Obama.

The initiatives of Haslam and Obama were preceded by wisdom and a smart initiative in New York. In 1969, large numbers of African Americans and Puerto Ricans demanded that the City University of New York become a place that they could enter to pursue better lives.  University administrators responded by instituting an open admissions policy to complement a very low price.  An evaluation conducted over the next 30 years revealed that while the new policy did not wipe out disadvantages due to race or class (or high school academic record), it more than doubled the proportion of black women who would attain degrees. That finding is consistent with more recent studies that raise sharp questions about the contention that “college isn’t for everyone.”

National leaders need to provide hope to young adults in Baltimore and cities like it.  Federal policy must change. Simply providing financial aid isn’t getting the job done, as it requires too little from those who establish college costs.  Instead, we need a national conversation about what it means to provide a high-quality 13^th and 14^th year of public education to everyone, and then we need to pay for it. New taxes are an option – but we can also simply stop spending where investments aren’t pay off. Ending subsidies to for-profit universities is a good place to start.

There is much to do to provide hope, dignity, and a chance at a better life to America’s poor urban youth. Part of the solution must include making college affordable.

Over the last few years, for-profit colleges have come under fire from the Senate HELP committee, several federal agencies, and 37 state attorneys, with good reason. The for-profit education business model provides no incentive for schools to produce successful, educated college graduates. As a result, over half of the students who attend these schools fail to obtain a degree and struggle with mounting student loan debt. Those students fortunate enough to graduate have a hard time securing employment, as employers increasingly turn away candidates with degrees from for-profit schools.

For-profit colleges use a variety of unethical and sometimes illegal practices to persuade students to attend their schools. Some schools get leads on potential students through fake job postings on websites like craigslist or monster.com. Recent reports show a few top for-profit colleges utilize fake online health insurance and food stamp applications to collect information on potential students. Individuals who fall victim to phishing schemes like these are subsequently harassed with calls from for-profit schools until they speak with admissions representatives. Students report being called up to twenty times in a single morning, or as late as 11 p.m. When students finally succumb to the pressure and speak with a representative, they are subjected to recruitment tactics that are far more abusive.

 An example of training materials for recruiters at a for-profit college

Admissions representatives at several large for-profit schools say management promotes a variety of exploitative practices to secure enrollment. These tactics include asking callers—many of whom are low-income or people of color—to imagine what they will buy when they make six-figures, or how their family will feel when they no longer rely on a minimum wage job. Many representatives go as far as telling callers how worthless they are with just a high school diploma. Many students who were actively recruited in this manner were unable to afford—or clearly incapable of completing—the program. Some students even struggled with a range of disabilities such as brain damage and learning disorders. In one particularly high profile case, a Corporal for the U.S. Marines was enrolled at a large for-profit college, but was so severely impaired by a traumatic brain injury that he could not remember what classes he was taking.

Students who enroll as a result of this kind of manipulation often sign themselves into financial ruin. However, as long as the students attend classes, the school turns a profit. The entire business model of for-profit schools relies on cheating victims out of their dollars and dreams, which ultimately increases their reliance on safety net programs.

In contrast, community college provides crucial alternatives for those most frequently victimized by for-profit schools—people with low-incomes and people of color. Students with low-incomes are disproportionately affected by social factors (financial instability, health issues, transportation issues) that discourage investing financial resources in brick-and-mortar schools, in deference to online education. For-profit schools take advantage of this instability, promising increased upward mobility coupled with the flexibility of online schooling. As a result, low-income students enroll in for-profit schools at nearly four times the rate of other students.

 An example of student “profiles” targeted by recruiters at a for-profit college

By providing low-income students with the opportunity to attend community college at no cost, President Obama’s plan virtually eliminates the consumer base of these profit-seeking colleges, ending their large-scale fraud. Under President Obama’s plan, students receive full tuition funding if they are enrolled at least half-time at community college and are earning above a 2.5 GPA. The proposal is also beneficial because it permits students to receive Pell grants while they are at community college; this policy would help families afford living expenses while the primary caretaker focuses on school.

Obama’s initiative encourages low-income, at-risk students to consider local community colleges before for-profit schools, thereby increasing their potential economic mobility and financial wellbeing. Current estimates suggest that as many as 9 million students would benefit from the initiative.

While Obama’s proposal is not a blank check, it provides much more flexibility for students with low-incomes. More importantly, the plan could prevent millions of our country’s most disadvantaged people from enrolling in schools that prove far better at exploiting students than educating them.

TalkPoverty had the opportunity to speak with Kavitha about her work.  The interview is cross-posted at BillMoyers.com.

Greg Kaufmann: Do you consider yourself solely an education reporter, or a poverty reporter as well?

Kavitha Cardoza: I think you can’t separate the two. When I first started it was strictly education and it was like test scores, test scores, test scores—and then the more I spoke to people who were actually in the classroom doing the work, it was clear these kids have a lot of challenges that are coming from their outside lives.  And then I realized a lot of it was related to poverty. So I asked my news director to broaden the beat to education and poverty because you can’t separate the one from the other.

Greg: So was this a realization you made here in DC, or in a previous gig?

Kavitha: Here.  But having said that I was very familiar with poverty because I grew up in India and knew a ton of people who were poor. And the one thing I noticed was how easy it was to be separate in the U.S. In India, you would hear these stories all the time: my husband doesn’t pay for the children. I can’t pay for my kid’s school fees. I don’t have a car and the bus didn’t come. I hear these stories here too but the difference is that here it’s really hidden.  If you live in a nice neighborhood you are not likely to see poverty. Office cleaners come overnight. When you go to a McDonald’s or any place paying a minimum wage, people are wearing uniforms. We’ve sanitized poverty. And so when I report, I overwhelmingly get listeners who say, ‘Oh my god, I never knew that was happening.’

Greg: You have been on the beat for four years now.  Is it striking to you that people continue to react to your work in this way—like God, I never knew?

Kavitha: I don’t blame listeners, or viewers, for being surprised. I don’t think we’ve done a very good job as journalists. We are very reactive over here. We cover Katrina, and then how many stories do you find about New Orleans and poverty after that? I heard former Washington Post reporter Katherine Boo talking once—she said we have a tendency to tie everything up with a little bow at the end of a poverty story, and she said poverty reporters do a disservice to readers by doing that. And I think she’s right—because life isn’t like that.

Greg: And so how do you avoid that trap?

Kavitha: I have really good relationships with a lot of schools, and principals, and guidance counselors, social workers, teachers, nonprofits…So when I first started they would say, ‘Oh, the media twists things.’ And I would say, ‘Look at my body of work.’  And I would send them examples of my work or ask them to sit in on interviews, I have nothing to hide.  So now it’s easier because I’ve built up some trust that my story is not going to be, ‘Oh, how pathetic these kids’ lives are,’ and it’s not going to be, ‘They are all angels.’ No, there is a range of people within this beat just like any other.  You have to show that range. Otherwise, it doesn’t seem real, and it’s not real. I think what I try to do is get to the why.

Greg: Tell me more about that.

Kavitha: For example, I saw a line in the newspaper once, it said about a third of crime committed on the Metro is done by teenagers. And I remember thinking, ‘Wow, I should interview some kids to see what’s going on behind the statistics.’  I interviewed this 11-year-old boy. And he talked to me about how he robbed someone’s wallet. As we continued chatting he told me he was wearing his school uniform and did it right outside of his school. And he looks like a little baby at 11—he was like a small, little boy. And not bragging or anything, very innocently telling me about it.  And so I started asking questions—what was going on? And he said, ‘It was getting dark and I didn’t have a way to go home. So I saw this person, and I thought, he can afford like 100,000 bus passes.  And so my friend said just go and take his.’  And the guy identified the boy the next day in school.  So I said, ‘What did your mother say?’  And he said, ‘She was very upset. She said why didn’t you call me? And I said, with what phone and what money?’ And he said she never spoke about it again. So it’s never simple. There’s so much going on, and I think just getting to the why is the best I can do.

Greg: And what are some other powerful moments that really stand out for you and say a lot about your beat?

Kavitha: The more time I’ve spent in schools, the more I see what kids deal with—just a lot of issues: scared to come to school because of gangs, or feeling that they don’t have the right clothes to wear. Like one of the kids told me his mom used to shop for him at Payless and Walmart, and those were not the cool clothes, and so he was always teased… So when people say, for example, ‘poor people—how come they have nice clothes?’ It’s because they don’t want to show that they’re poor. Because the stigma is so great here. It’s such an American story, right? You can make it happen, you can do anything if you believe, you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps. And so if you’re poor, it means you haven’t tried hard enough. That’s the underlying narrative that people know and [so] they want to hide.

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Or, one of the kids in [my] Beating the Odds series—her parents were immigrants, and she was living a very comfortable lifestyle. Her dad was a lawyer and then he was caught for fraud and deported. They spent all of their money on his trial. Overnight, she had nothing. She said they had to decide whether to have food, or electricity and water. They chose food. So they had to go to the Chik-fil-A nearby to wash up and brush their teeth and use the bathroom. The mother and the three kids slept in the basement on one bed because it was the coolest place in the house. And I think that’s another thing we don’t think about enough, how fluid poverty can be—people are middle class, and then low-income. It’s not like these rigid structures that people often think it is.

Greg: Do you often find when you go after a story about poverty, you end up getting something completely different than what you expected?

Kavitha:  Always.  There is so much going on inside of people and their backstories.  I remember interviewing an elderly lady when the DC plastic bag tax took effect and she didn’t like it.  And I said, ‘But it’s only 5 cents.’  And she said, ‘If I save up some of those 5 cents I can buy an egg.’  And I remember just stopping and thinking, ‘Oh my lord, this is just a whole different scale we’re talking about here.’

Greg: In addition to ‘getting to the why’, are there other fundamentals to good poverty reporting that you think about?

Kavitha:  I’m always interested in how poverty plays out in very specific, day-to-day ways. You want those specific details where you are like, ‘Oh, I had no idea’—both for you, and your audience.  Like when I did my Yesterday’s Dropouts documentary series [for Breaking Ground], literally every person I interviewed was telling me ‘I forgot my glasses.’  And suddenly I was like, ‘Wait a sec, what’s the glasses deal?’  And so I asked this woman, ‘It’s not your glasses, right?  You can’t read?’  And she said, ‘No, I can’t.’  And so once I realized people are hiding it I started asking, ‘What are the different ways in which you hide it?’  Looking at colors on medicine bottles; or colors on skim and whole milk.  I remember one guy telling me he was sent to buy grits, but that the picture on Quaker Oats and Grits is the same, and so he brought home the wrong thing, and that’s when his wife realized he can’t read.  Lots of people keep it from their spouse.  And I thought, ‘God, how alone must you feel, right?  How invisible and full of shame and sadness.’

And with children I think it’s even harder because they are so small.  So when they talk about like violence, or—things that even adults would have a hard time comprehending—you have to really develop a level of trust.… Like one boy who hadn’t graduated and he was talking about running with street gangs, and he totally accepted that he was making poor choices.  But at the same time he was very proud—in middle school he used to make honor roll, his teachers loved him… And so we got to talking further and I asked, ‘So what happened?’  His twin brother was shot in front of him.  And then it’s like of course he didn’t stick around in high school.   What would I do?  Or thinking about that kid who [robbed] the bus pass—I remember leaving that interview and thinking, ‘What would I have done if I was 11 years old and it was getting dark and I didn’t have a way to go home?’

Greg:  As you have put together this body of work, and have gotten to know so many children and families living in poverty—are there things that you feel like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe as a country we are doing A or B, or failing to do C?’

Kavitha: As a reporter I really believe it’s up to the community to decide what kind of community they want, and what kind of world they want to live in. Personally, yes, to see the amount of poverty, especially in DC, and to see what these children have to deal with—and yet we say, ‘Oh, why don’t they succeed?’  When I hear that I just feel [like] people are operating without all the facts.  And so that’s where I think my role comes in—I will show you a different side that you are not seeing.  I will present people and voices.  Any time you say, ‘People are lazy,’ I’ll show you someone who’s working really, really hard, and it’s just—incredibly hard.  And listen to those stories too.  So in the mix of all of the stories you hear about all of these different viewpoints and policy debates, I want you to think of a person—a mother, a child, a parent who doesn’t have the skills or the training, or is paid low wages…

Greg:  When it comes to the intersection of poverty and education, are there things that you think are missing from the current debate about education reform?

Kavitha: When people talk about education reform—we should have implemented reforms a long time ago.  Because it’s clear our kids are not learning. But the reality is that poverty does affect these kids. And I remember someone said to me many years ago, ‘Well in D.C., we have a social worker and we have a guidance counselor and serve breakfast in school.’  Yes, except you’ve got one social worker for 200 children.  There are a lot of poverty issues that spill into the schools—whether it’s violence, teen pregnancy, hunger, stress of things they see at home, substance abuse, homelessness, obesity. I did a series on obesity, and teachers were talking about how it’s hard to schedule classes. If a class is on the third floor, some kids can’t walk up to the third floor. Suddenly, they have to rearrange classes. Or, I remember this little child saying, ‘I need to go to the bathroom often.’ Because his belly is so big, it pushes down on his bladder. And the teacher is like, ‘No, you can’t go. What is this? You keep going to the bathroom.’ And so there are these kinds of misunderstandings. That’s the challenge of poverty reporting—there is no simple A to B to C line.

Greg: As a DC resident and as a reporter, what’s most stunning to you about the economic divide and the lack of awareness about what people are experiencing?

Kavitha: I think that the lack of awareness goes both ways. A lot of the kids I speak to have no idea that people care west of the [Anacostia] River, or want them to do well in school. I remember once, ‘Beating the Odds’ listeners had called and offered money to help a student. And when I told the student she said, ‘Why would a white person care about me?’  I remember another white lady called me and she said, ‘You know, this story really touched me because I went to Georgetown University, and I met my husband there, and he was living in his car.’ And when I told that to a student I was interviewing she said, ‘That can’t be possible. White people don’t live in cars.’  So there are all these kinds of misconceptions.

But telling these stories through children [results in] tons of listeners calling up and saying, ‘We want to help.’ They want to donate money, time, or volunteer.  After that kid who robbed the wallet for a bus pass, several people called up and said, ‘We want to donate bus passes to him so he can get home.’ Homeless college kids, people are like, ‘We want to invite them for Thanksgiving so they have a place to stay’ or ‘For summer, I want them to have my basement apartment.’ The divide comes when people ascribe fault. I remember doing a story on two kids—one was homeless, lived in a shelter and was doing really well, and talked about how he had to pack up all the time and it was so hard.  A ton of people reached out to help, to give him money for school.  But then the other boy talked about how [in the past] he had assaulted someone, did drugs, went to jail.  He was like 19 or 20 now and had really turned his life around and was mentoring other kids. No one called about him.

Greg: As we enter 2016, potential presidential candidates are already talking about poverty and it looks like it will be a campaign issue.  What are your hopes and fears for how the media might cover it?

Kavitha: I hope that poverty is covered in terms of real people, not just in a theoretical way in terms of policies. I hope people who have solutions and programs that work are highlighted, so people don’t think this is an issue that cannot be tackled. I hope the diversity of poverty is covered, and I don’t mean that it affects all races. But how does poverty play out differently in the suburbs? What is it like for the newly poor versus the generationally poor? The elderly versus children? The working poor? There are just so many aspects to get at this issue.

Greg: Thanks for all of your great work and for talking to us.

You can follow Kavitha Cardoza @KavithaCardoza.  The next Breaking Ground will be out later this year and you can check out previous pieces at breakingground.wamu.org.

If only this were true.

The average out of pocket cost facing community college students from low-income families ranges from $8,000-$11,000 per year. That is after all grant aid is taken into account, and it represents the amount that students must borrow and earn in order to make college possible. The situation facing moderate-income families is not much better—and they are often in a more difficult situation since they have little disposable income and yet cannot access the federal Pell Grant.

Thirty years ago, high schools were focused on helping more students envision college as part of their future. Two decades ago they began really focusing on academic preparation for college. But today, ambitious, academically prepared high school graduates are attending college and leaving without degrees because they cannot afford to be there. Among the academically prepared, more than one in five high school graduates from low-income families forgoes college entirely, and about 30 percent who start at a two-year college never complete any degree. These non-completion rates signal talent loss, and things have gotten worse over the last decade.

As an education scholar and researcher who has published extensively on the topic of college affordability, I’m troubled by the response of many progressives and scholars who criticize President Obama’s free community college proposal for not being “narrowly targeted.” The implication is that only a plan that exclusively serves low-income students, and no one else, can meet their needs. This is a false narrative, capable of sowing confusion and killing the prospects of legislation that could do real good.

The truth is that low-income students stand to benefit from free community college in real and measurable ways that will increase their access, boost their persistence, and raise their graduation rates. Since the president’s plan is a “first-dollar” plan, low-income students would receive the greatest subsidies. Students would not have to give up their Pell grants; instead, because tuition would be free, Pell grant funding could be used to meet costs other than tuition. Thus, I predict that low-income and moderate-income students would realize greater gains than their more affluent classmates. The clear and inclusive signal created by “free community college” coupled with the progressive distribution of monetary benefits makes this effective “targeting within universalism.”

Rigorous studies have shown that reducing the cost of community college by even $1,000 a year results in substantial increases across the board. More low-income students enroll directly from high school. More low-income students enroll who would not otherwise have enrolled at all. More low-income students transfer to four-year colleges. And the students who would not have enrolled—except for the fact that community college became more affordable—are more than 20 percent more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree within eight years of high school graduation. All that for a $1,000 discount? Imagine what those numbers would be if the first two years of community college—or any college, as Senator Bernie Sanders recently proposed—were made free.

To help advance a greater understanding of the value and mechanics of making the first two years of college free, I’ve written a response to questions many people have about the president’s proposal. In addition, I’ll be participating in a public discussion with economist Steven Durlauf on the topic that will be held March 12 on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and televised in the state and online via Wisconsin Eye. Our national dialogue on the merits of making postsecondary education available to everyone—and affordable—is, finally, beginning.

While President Obama pronounced education equality as “the civil rights issue of our time,” Alexander’s proposal turns back the clock and perpetuates existing inequities in education. Here are 5 reasons Alexander’s bill fails disadvantaged students:

1) Opens the door to drastic budget cuts: The bill eliminates the “maintenance of effort” (MOE) provision, which requires districts receiving Title I funding – extra money for schools serving low-income students – to maintain state spending on education at roughly the same level as the previous year. The MOE provision is important because it keeps states honest. It ensures that federal dollars intended to better educate poor children are used for that purpose, instead of displacing general revenue.

2) Diverts funding away from students who need it most: Alexander’s bill allows states to opt out of the current Title I formula and send money out on the basis of the percentage of poor students. The current formula, while problematic for many reasons, targets Title I funding to schools with concentrations of poor students.  Alexander’s proposal would significantly dilute the funding, sending it to schools with higher income populations and limiting the ability of the funds to reach students who need it most.

3) Lowers academic standards: After graduating, students will enter a global economy. But will they be prepared to compete? Alexander’s bill requires states to establish a different (read: lower) set of standards for students who aren’t planning to go to college and abolishes the requirement that standards for students who do intend to go to college be internationally benchmarked. By creating a two-track system, Alexander’s bill will limit the life prospects for students living in poverty and in low-income communities. By lowering standards – and allowing states free reign to set them wherever they want – his bill threatens our nation’s future economic competitiveness. A risk that we can’t afford to take when we are 26^th in the world in math.

4) Rolls back school accountability: What happens when schools are consistently and chronically failing students? According to the Alexander bill, not a whole lot.  The bill all but eliminates school accountability. While states must develop an accountability system, there are no requirements for these systems, leaving states free to ignore underperforming students and deny them their best hope of breaking the cycle of poverty and rising to the middle class: a good education.

5) Denies parents vital information about student performance: For parents looking to determine where to send their child to school, the Alexander bill takes away one of the most useful sources of data: comparable student achievement results. The bill provides two options for testing – and both options leave parents in the wilderness. The first option allows states total flexibility to decide when and where to assess student progress. The second option retains annual student assessments but allows them to vary by district. This approach would make it difficult, if not impossible, to meaningfully compare student performance across districts. These provisions would also lead to decreased accountability and allow underperforming students to fly under the radar.

Just as important as what is in Senator Alexander’s bill is what is not. We know that the Title I formula is wildly unjust and unequal, providing more than three times as much per pupil spending for poor students in Wyoming than in neighboring Utah, for example. Yet Alexander’s proposal does nothing to more fairly allocate limited federal funds, leaving the overly complex and not well-targeted formulas in place.  We also know that high-quality early childhood education is one of the greatest resources for improving long-term outcomes for children living in poverty. Quality early childhood programs have been linked with improvements in employment rates and earnings, reduced dependency on public assistance and crime, and even elevated family well-being. Yet Senator Alexander failed to provide any additional investments in early childhood.

So, how could we improve Sen. Alexander’s ESEA reauthorization bill? To start, an effective reauthorization must include college-and career-ready standards, statewide annual assessments that lead to better, fairer, and fewer tests, meaningful statewide accountability systems, measures that make funding practices fair and efficient, and a substantial investment in high-quality early childhood education. These provisions will help ensure that all students have an opportunity for success.

Earlier this week, the House took a step in the right direction by passing a bill to reauthorize the Child Care and Development Block Grant, which is the primary source of funding to help subsidize child care costs for low-income families. Given that the Senate passed a similar bill last spring, it’s likely to see the President’s desk soon. The program—last modified in 1996 as part of welfare reform—is badly in need of updating to reflect that child care is not only a work support, but also plays an important role in preparing children for school.

The bill makes important changes to the child care system, requiring minimum health and safety standards, background checks for providers, regular monitoring visits, and information to parents so they are aware of past violations. Such changes are long overdue: a number of children have died or sustained serious injuries in child care programs because basic health and safety measures were not in place. Child care standards are also embarrassingly low when compared to service industries like beauty salons and even pet grooming. The bill will apply mostly to children in publicly subsidized child care, but is likely to help raise minimum health and safety standards at all child care facilities and prevent taxpayer dollars from supporting unsafe child care.

In addition, the bill provides some stability by allowing children to remain in the program for a year. Under the current system, families often receive child care assistance for a few months at a time because of a small change in income or job schedule, or job loss. These changes will promote continuous access to early childhood programs for children, thereby helping parents sustain employment.

Child care reauthorization also reflects bipartisan support for early childhood programs—a rarity, given today’s gridlock. With just a week left before Congress adjourns for campaign season, the fact that Republicans and Democrats worked together—and across both houses of Congress—signals that early childhood education and promoting safety and quality is a priority for both parties.

While this bill marks an important step forward, there is still much work to do in order to provide affordable access to high-quality child care. The current child care subsidy program reaches just one in six eligible children. And while this bill puts minimum health and safety standards in place that will cost money to implement, there is no funding to defray costs for states. That means that improvements will come out of states’ block grant funds and reduce the number of children they can serve.  If we really want to expand the number of children who receive quality child care, we need to increase funding and tie those increases to high-quality programs.

Without additional funding, states also cannot raise the assistance amounts for families. Current levels are typically too low to support access to high-quality programs that effectively prepare children for school. With the average annual cost of a child care center ranging from $4,000 to $16,000 per year and rising, we run the risk of families turning to the unregulated and sometimes illegal child care market, which is of questionable quality.

It’s also time to move the child care conversation past health and safety standards and consider how to help families access high-quality child care—child care that goes beyond safe, custodial care to support children’s development and school readiness.

We often talk about early learning in the context of efforts to expand access to preschool. However, after decades of brain research, we know that children begin learning from birth. For better or worse, children are absorbing their environment and learning from their experiences immediately. Child care programs that are safe but fail to provide nurturing relationships with providers and enriching environments for establishing cognitive and socio-emotional skills will undermine our collective investment in child care assistance and efforts to promote future social mobility.

Given that most children spend a good deal of time in child care programs before they enter kindergarten, failing to provide a quality early learning environment is a missed opportunity. Children (and parents) don’t care if a program is called child care, Head Start, preschool, or school. To artificially talk about preschool and child care in different veins at the federal policy level is a disservice to the 12 million children who spend much of their days in child care programs. It’s also a disservice to families that would like to attend programs like state preschool and Head Start, but have work schedules that don’t allow for part-day early childhood programs.

Hopefully we’ll get another opportunity to reauthorize CCDBG before another 18 years passes. And next time around, we’ll be ready to have a discussion about how federal funds can support early learning and working families in high-quality child care programs.

During the school year, school districts around the country provide 22 million students with free or reduced-price school lunches. This essential nutrition service helps underprivileged kids to stay focused and competitive during the school day. But once school lets out for the year, only 1 in 7 of these children continues to receive free or reduced-price lunches in the summer. That leaves millions of kids in America hungry during lunchtime over their entire summer vacation. In New York, my home state, 1.7 million children receive free or reduced-price school lunches during the school year; in the summer, only 27 percent of them will get the nutrition they need.

We have to do better.

A problem of this proportion – millions of students going hungry during the summer because they don’t have access to a nutritious lunch – is unacceptable. This is a crisis we should all feel compelled to solve. I recently stood at the Booker T. Washington Community Center in Auburn, New York, and announced the introduction of the Summer Meals Act – a bipartisan bill that would enhance the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Summer Food Service Program.

Our Summer Meals Act has four goals. First, the bill would expand which communities are eligible to participate in the Summer Food Service Program. Right now, to be eligible for summer meals, a community must have 50 percent of its children eligible for free or reduced-price school lunches during the school year in order to receive meal assistance in the summer. Our bill would drop this to a much fairer 40 percent, opening up the Summer Food Service Program to many more communities.

Second, the Summer Meals Act would reduce red tape for public-private partnerships. Right now, it’s too burdensome for non-school organizations to supply much-needed meals to hungry children. Our bill would make it much easier for organizations like the local food bank or youth center to give kids the nutrition that they need.

Third, the Summer Meals Act would increase access to summer meals in hard-to-reach rural areas. Hunger is by no means just an urban problem; for many kids in underserved areas who don’t have access to healthy food, a formidable barrier is just getting to the summer meal site. Our bill would give kids new transportation options to reach their meal sites.

Fourth, the Summer Meals Act would lift the burden on hardworking parents who have to stay at their workplaces during dinnertime. Our bill would give kids the option of receiving two daily meals and a snack from the Summer Food Service Program, or even three meals, if they need them.

No child in America in 2014 should have to wake up every day wondering if he or she is going to have enough to eat before bedtime. The Summer Meals Act is a critically important bill that would seriously reduce child hunger in America. Every kid in America deserves a summer vacation that’s free of hunger.

In addition to growing poverty, we can see how much ground we have lost since the 1960s and 1970s in desegregating our schools. They’re intensely racially segregated not only in former Jim Crow states like Mississippi, but in New York, which now has the most segregated schools in the entire country—as measured by students’ exposure to peers of other races.

What is most critical, however, is how racial and income segregation interact with one another. Indeed, William Julius Wilson’s seminal 1967 book, The Truly Disadvantaged, jumpstarted an entire body of research on this issue. Recently, Richard Rothstein and Patrick Sharkey discussed both neighborhood- and school-level links between segregation, poverty, and related factors that particularly harm black and brown families and children. Their work prompted the Economic Policy Institute and Broader Bolder Approach to Education to explore what that interaction looks like for kids who are starting school now; our new paper uses data from US children who entered kindergarten in the 2010-2011 school year.

Our findings affirm those of Wilson, Rothstein, and Sharkey: due to racial segregation, minority status conveys multiple disadvantages. Chief among them, black and Hispanic kindergartners are disproportionately in schools in which the majority of their peers are poor. (The definition of poverty in this paper is that used by many policymakers to establish eligibility for many government supports – 200% of the federal poverty line, or less than about $37,000 annually for a family of three.

If our kindergarten classrooms were not economically and racially segregated, we would expect most students to be in classes in which about a quarter of their peers were low-income; since overall, about 25 percent of all kindergartners are from low-income households. But in our segregated society classrooms don’t look like that at all: Three in five white students are in classrooms in which just over 10 percent of their classmates are poor. This means that they are likely to be in schools that do not face obstacles like classmates whose lack of preparation demand extra teacher attention, or peers whose hunger and toothaches prompt them to act out and disrupt class. They are less likely to suffer from shuttered school libraries, counselors that must each support 1000 students, or a lack of nurses to treat ordinary and emergency medical needs – things that are increasingly common in low-income and heavily minority schools.

For black and brown students, the story is flipped: Only 11 percent of Hispanic and 7 percent of black students make it into such low-poverty kindergarten classrooms; most are in classrooms in which at least 75 percent of their peers are minorities, and the majority of those peers are poor. More than 56 percent of black students, and more than 55 percent of Hispanic students, enter kindergarten classes in which half of the kids are poor. Moreover, one-third of their classmates do not speak English at home, and the percentage of their peers’ mothers who have at least a bachelor’s degree is in the single digits. Less than 5 percent of white kindergartners attend schools facing these multiple disadvantages.

This pattern of concentrating black and Hispanic children in our poorest schools poses major obstacles to attaining the integrated schools and equal access to opportunity that our democracy demands. Reducing child poverty must be our ultimate goal, but if today’s students are to reap the benefits of schools with a diverse mix of peers, we must immediately enact education policies focused on deconcentrating poverty.

Revamping “choice” to incentivize integration by promoting socioeconomically mixed schools – at the federal, state, and local levels – would be a good start. For example, laws that authorize and evaluate charter schools could make socioeconomic integration a key metric, and districts that encourage choice among schools should also establish integration as a criterion for students who want to move out of their neighborhoods. At least one example suggests it’s good policy all around: students in Chicago’s non-selective magnet schools – which tend to integrate rather than further segregate students – see larger test score gains than their charter school peers.  Finally, the obsessive focus on test scores as a measure not only of student, but of school success, has exacerbated segregation by unfairly weakening and stigmatizing schools. Dialing that pressure back in federal and state policies would also promote integration. Policies such as these would help ensure that all schools are well-resourced, attractive options for parents, and conducive spaces for children to learn.

While student debt is an issue that impacts Americans from all income brackets, races, ages, and from every part of the country, low-income Americans face unique challenges:

Student debt has a greater impact on low-income borrowers than other Americans. In fact, borrowers in the least affluent one-fifth of American households faced education debt that averaged 24 percent of their income in 2010. The average for all households was 6 percent.

Grant aid is not nearly enough to cover the cost of college for low-income families. Even after factoring in grant aid, a family in the lowest quintile—with an average income of $17,011—would have to pay more than 70 percent of their income to cover college costs.

When starting out, students from low- and middle-income households already face a higher burden. They are less likely to have family assistance and more likely to have other pressures, such as a part-time job or family caretaking role in addition to classes. And many low-income students avoid applying to college altogether, citing the cost. This has resulted in a shrinking economic diversity at schools.

Low-income Americans have become a target of private lenders and for-profit colleges. Some private lenders have even manipulated financially unsophisticated borrowers in an effort to profit.

What’s more, for-profit colleges often target and take advantage of low-income individuals and people of color, leaving them with high levels of debt that they are later unable to pay off. Investigations into these corporate education giants have found deceptive and misleading practices to recruit students and more than half of students at for-profit colleges drop out within a few years.

Despite numerous investigations highlighting the deceptive nature of the for-profit college industry, this issue has ballooned. More students are enrolling in for-profit institutions, more students are dropping out before receiving a degree, and CEOs of these education corporations continue to make millions.

Mane Lavadenz knows firsthand about what a bad deal for-profit colleges are for many students.  After the real estate market collapsed, it was difficult for her to earn a living and support herself. She enrolled in some courses at UEI College, a for-profit school. Advisors there assured her, she says, that her student debt would be manageable and that she would have no trouble finding a job after graduating.

But that simply wasn’t the case: Like many of her classmates, Lavadenz graduated without any job prospects and, she says, UEI did nothing to help her. Lavadenz was stuck with $9,000 in student loans, which has now accrued to $10,000. Her experience is hardly unique. Former students of for-profit schools have found that their schools overpromised on the kinds of jobs they would land after earning a degree.

Further, for-profit colleges charge their students over 3.5 times more than public institutions, but they spend far less per student on instructional costs than public colleges and universities. In the 2008-2009 school year, for-profit schools spent $2,659 per student on instructional costs; by comparison, public universities spent an average of $9,418 per student and private non-profit universities spent $15,289.

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Now is the time to make student loan debt a top priority in our nation. That is why, earlier this year, Generation Progress and dozens of our progressive allies launched the Higher Ed, Not Debt campaign—a coordinated effort to address the existing $1.2 trillion in student loan debt, caused in part by the predatory practices of the for-profit industry.

More than 60 organizations have already signed on to the campaign, including: the American Federation of Teachers, Demos, Jobs with Justice, One Wisconsin Now, SEIU, Scholarship America, Student Veterans of America, Working Families Organization, and the Young Invincibles.

While for-profit colleges are a main focus of the campaign, we’re utilizing this broad reach to focus on four key elements: college accessibility and affordability; addressing the existing $1.2 trillion in debt; civic engagement; and educating the public about the role of Wall Street in the privatization of higher education. In partnership with Higher Ed, Not Debt, Generation Progress will continue to advance long-term policy solutions, like holding private institutions accountable for bad lending practices and giving borrowers the ability to refinance student loans.

Student loan debt has severe and visible impacts on the American economy. Borrowers with tens of thousands of dollars in debt are unable to purchase homes, start families, obtain employment in certain fields, and save for retirement. It’s time to address this problem in full force. I encourage others to join in the fight to create long-term solutions to protect current and future borrowers from the economically crippling effects of student loan debt.

Still, there is much to be proud of—like the Center for Environmental Transformation, creating urban gardens; The Neighborhood Center—a city staple with programming for people of all ages as well as emergency services; and, experiencing a resurgence, Pyne Poynt Little League which is molding young men, and I Dare to Care which focuses on empowering girls.

And then there are kids like Athena.

She is smart, gritty, and a loyal friend if you earn her trust. She will not let life in Camden defeat her—she dares to dream in a city where poverty produces way too many nightmares.   She is determined to take advantage of opportunities that empower her and fuel her passions, and she’ll readily dismiss any nonbelievers. But she was not always this confident in herself and her direction.

I met Athena in 2008 through my role as director of a new bold and ambitious initiative established at Rutgers University, the Rutgers Future Scholars (RFS) program.  RFS is a multifaceted college access, success, and scholarship program designed to empower students like Athena in areas of academics, culture, and finances.

In 2007, the year before we launched RFS, less than 10 Camden City public school graduates enrolled at Rutgers-Camden. The fact that only 7% of Camden residents have earned a college degree even though there is a top-notch university in their backyard is shameful…on Rutgers. What civic responsibility do we bear as a member of the community? Universities are only as good as the communities they call home.  One of our responses was launching RFS.

Each year, RFS introduces 200 first-generation, low-income and academically promising middle school students from school districts in our four campus communities of New Brunswick, Piscataway, Newark, and Camden to the promise and opportunities of a college education. Beginning in the summer preceding 8th grade, Scholars become part of a unique pre-college culture of university programming, events, support, and mentoring that continues through their high school years, and eventually college.

For students who successfully complete the pre-college part of the program and earn admission to Rutgers, we provide full tuition funding through scholarships and federal grants. In short, the Rutgers Future Scholars offers both hope and opportunity.

To date, we serve 1200 Scholars in grades 8 through their freshman year of college. Ninety-seven percent graduated high school and 96% enrolled in college. In our first class of 183 Scholars—projected to graduate in 2017—nearly 100 enrolled at Rutgers University. Scholars at our local community colleges can also earn a full-tuition scholarships to complete their bachelor’s degree at Rutgers.

Athena has successfully completed her first year at the Rutgers School of Nursing and boasts a strong GPA.  She also has embraced a leadership role on campus.

“Future Scholars has given me the support system I needed to succeed,” says Athena.  “When things got rough, they pushed me and never let me give up on my education. They are my family.”

The reality is this: America has hundreds of Camdens and hundreds of thousands of Athenas. Children are being awakened too early from the American dream. Meritocracy doesn’t seem to have room for everyone here—some may argue it’s purposely so. An opportunity gap widens the division between those relying on just hope and those who have real opportunities. Serving communities that are typically out of sight and out of mind—with a focused intentionality—will benefit all of us.

The future of America—and the solutions to many of our nation’s problems—lie within the untapped talents and aspirations of children like Athena.  Rutgers Future Scholars and other community-focused programs are attempting to transform our nation by investing in human potential.

Every kid deserves a fair shot in life and that starts with a quality education, early on. So how are we doing?

The short and immediate, look-just-beyond-your nose answer is: not good. Last year, for the first time in a decade, fewer 4-year-olds had access to pre-K than the year before – a modest nationwide decline of 9,000 kids in all, according to the 2013 State Preschool Yearbook, published by the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University.

But the long-term forecast is a good deal rosier. In state after state, legislators are waking up to more favorable fiscal outlooks at the same time that new coalitions of educators, social scientists, law enforcement officials, pediatricians, nurses and others are singing the praises of early intervention.

The list of states that have made progress in establishing pre-K is growing longer: Alabama. Arizona. Georgia. Illinois. Maryland. Oklahoma. In other places, like Pennsylvania, the debate is raging. Pollsters Celinda Lake and Christine Matthews recently outlined the debate in an op-ed published in Pennsylvania:

“What we are seeing around the country in the campaigns of many candidates this election season is broad support for access to high-quality pre-k. It was a central issue in the recent New York City mayor’s race, and it’s a simmering one in the hotly contested race for governor in Texas. Why now? And why in such very different political environments?

“Voters strongly value education and believe that pre-K education helps children arrive to Kindergarten (and beyond) ready to learn. Voters believe pre-K can improve a child’s social skills, which helps them through grade school. They see the long-term benefits in terms of better test scores, graduation rates, and lifetime earnings and employment.

“They overwhelmingly agree that the more kids who have access to high-quality pre-k, the better it is for ALL students in kindergarten classrooms, so teachers aren’t stretched doing remediation and classrooms aren’t disrupted.”

Politically, the issue seems to have resonance for two reasons. First, at the local level, education historically has not been viewed as a partisan issue. In fact, if you look at the three states with the highest enrollment of 4-year-olds in pre-K, one state is decidedly red (Oklahoma), one state is decidedly blue (Vermont), and one state is decidedly mixed (Florida).

Second, bipartisan support has emerged – and is strengthening – for pre-K. Again we turn to Lake and Matthews:

“Why does this seem to be a political moment for pre-k? The political will to invest in high-quality pre-k around the nation may also reflect what our research in Pennsylvania tells us: there is broad bi-partisan support for pre-k.

“Eighty-three (83) percent of Democrats, 61 percent of Independents, and 56 percent of Republicans favor ensuring every 3 and 4 year old in Pennsylvania has access to voluntary, high quality pre-K programs. In fact a majority of Pennsylvania voters see the benefit as so clear that they support increased state funding for such programs (59 percent) – Pennsylvania voters, like those in many other states, recognize the results justify the investment.”

So how do we bring this home and make universal pre-K a reality in the U.S.? It is only going to happen through a combination of public education and individual empowerment. The public education is happening – we see it in the letters to the editor and op-eds that, with increased regularity, are appearing in publications across the country.

The individual empowerment will happen as a result of neighbor talking to neighbor and groups that are fighting for pre-K (like Fair Share Education Fund) providing ordinary Americans with a platform to demand action. And it will happen when Americans realize that the benefits of pre-K go well beyond childhood education – they’re good for families and good for the economy.

Just ask Jill McCain Santiago, a lawyer and mother of two who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Massachusetts Fair Share recruited McCain Santiago to tell her story of how pre-K allowed her to go back to work, expand her law practice and hire additional employees. “We’re so thankful to have both boys in safe, caring learning environments that are helping them prepare for kindergarten and beyond,” McCain Santiago said. “This has allowed me to grow my business … I’ve been able to hire two employees and serve more families.  I strongly believe that all families deserve the fair shot that we have been lucky enough to get.”

There were initial integration gains following Brown, especially in the South, but these stalled after courts stopped enforcing desegregation in the 1980s. Low-income black children are more racially and socioeconomically isolated now than then. Segregation persists as a central feature of American schooling.

Certainly, African American student achievement has improved dramatically in recent decades, although politically popular and conventional commentary ignores this. We don’t have reliable achievement measures from 1954, but have good recent data from the federal sampled test of math and reading, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. It shows, for example, that on average, black fourth-graders now do math as well as or better than whites did only a generation ago. Yet because white achievement has also improved, the black-white gap remains, making the Brown litigants’ hopes for equal employment qualification a distant goal. Average black students still perform better than only about 25 percent of whites.

Schools for black children had enormous resource shortages in 1954, especially in the South. Inequalities still exist, there and nationwide, but are relatively small overall. We now understand, however, that equality is itself insufficient; disadvantaged students require many more resources than middle class whites to prepare for school success.

Children with less literate parents are read to less frequently. Compensation requires high-quality early childhood programs, from birth. Public discussion has barely acknowledged this, mostly supporting prekindergarten classes beginning only at ages 3 or 4. Early childhood programs, as well as nurse home-visiting services that support more effective maternal caregiving, are necessary, but expensive.

The most important predictor of later academic success is young children’s general background knowledge. Having visited a zoo predicts reading ability better than knowing how to sound-out letters that spell animal names. For older youth, participation is necessary in after-school and summer programs that don’t stop at academic remediation and homework help, but include organized athletics, field trips, club activity and music, art, and dance, comparable to what middle-class children take for granted. This, too, is costly.

For young minority children from lower-social-class backgrounds, smaller classes can boost achievement, because in them, children get more adult attention. Class size reduction is also costly. So is ensuring that disadvantaged children have teachers more skilled (and with different skills) than typical, well-qualified teachers of middle-class children.

Racially isolated communities typically have fewer primary care physicians, so children receive less routine and preventive health care (even with Medicaid or private health insurance), contributing to greater absenteeism. They also have unique health problems contributing to lower achievement—for example, iron-deficiency anemia and lead poisoning, or asthma from living in less healthy environments. They tend not to get corrective lenses for vision problems. Putting full-service health clinics, with pediatric nurse practitioners, optometrists, dentists and dental hygienists, in schools serving disadvantaged students is an added component of narrowed achievement gaps.

All these added resources – early childhood care and education, after school and summer programs, smaller classes, better teachers, full service clinics – are expensive, yet even in the unlikely event we were prepared to make these investments, students will rarely be successful in racially and economically isolated schools where learning is disrupted because families’ unstable housing leads to frequent moves, disrupting learning; where involvement of more-educated parents is absent; and where students lack adult and peer models of educational success. When a few children in a classroom come from homes with less literacy, a skilled teacher can give those children special attention. But when most children have these disadvantages, the average instructional level must decline. When most or even many children are sorely stressed, having endured life in a violent neighborhood, teachers must devote more time to discipline, less to learning.

Schools remain segregated today because neighborhoods in which they are located are segregated. Raising achievement of low-income black children requires residential integration, from which school integration can follow.

What few, even among sophisticated policymakers, realize is that the segregation of our major metropolitan areas was the product of explicit public policy. These housing policies were as unconstitutional as separate-but-equal education, yet have never been remedied. Congress adopted the 1949 Housing Act, subsidizing public housing construction nationwide, only after voting to permit racial segregation of the projects. As a result, projects for African Americans were placed only in neighborhoods where the black population could be concentrated, while projects for middle class whites were placed outside the ghetto. With the black population increasingly encircled in central cities, federal policy complemented public housing for blacks with suburban single family homes for whites. This was also explicit policy. When the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration guaranteed construction loans for mass production suburban builders, an explicit condition was attached that no homes be sold to black families. Iconic developments like the Levittowns on the East Coast, Daly City south of San Francisco, and Lakewood south of Los Angeles received federal guarantees on condition that they be white-only. Similar racially homogenous suburbs were created by federal policy in many, perhaps most other metropolitan areas between the two coasts.

This history is not easily undone. White working class families that moved to these suburbs in the late 1940s and 1950s subsequently benefited from equity appreciation and used that equity to send children to college and to secure their places in the middle class. Working class African Americans not only lost the opportunity to gain housing wealth in the postwar boom, but were also excluded from job opportunities as industry moved to the suburbs in this period.

It will require public policy as aggressive to integrate suburbs as it was aggressive to segregate them. But Federal requirements that communities pursue residential integration have been unenforced, and federal programs to subsidize movement of low-income families to middle-class communities have been weak and ineffective. In most states, landlords are permitted to refuse rentals to families with housing vouchers, ensuring that those families typically remain in high poverty neighborhoods. Many suburbs have zoning ordinances that prohibit apartment or moderate income housing, effectively barring all but the most affluent families. Inadequate transportation infrastructure reinforces racial isolation because low income families who could move to middle class communities would then be without access to jobs.

Education policy is housing policy. In some small cities, or in some racial borderline areas where mostly black and mostly white neighborhoods touch, school integration can be accomplished with attendance zone modifications, magnet schools, or controlled choice programs. But most disadvantaged black children now live too far from middle class suburbs for such programs to do the job on their own. It will be difficult, if not impossible, to substantially narrow the black-white achievement gap without mobility programs that permit disadvantaged families locked in urban ghettos to integrate with the broader suburban population.

If we make sure that every child entering pre-kindergarten has been properly screened for significant health conditions, we can treat and manage some of the conditions – like asthma and vision problems – that, unrecognized or under-treated, can jeopardize a child’s likelihood of succeeding in school.

There may be a broad assumption that every child gets a complete medical assessment as a requirement for school entry – but this is far from reality.  The fact is that millions of children are educationally at-risk because of a host of medical challenges that are easily treated.

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If standardized health screening and follow-up are mandated in any new universal pre-k legislation, educators and health providers – in partnership – can dramatically improve the education and health trajectories of students.

President Obama has placed expansion of pre-K programs at the center of his social policy agenda in successive State of the Union addresses – and his focus on this issue is already making a difference.  The budget deal reached by Congress in December ensures that Early Head Start and Head Start will receive a $1 billion increase on top of a restoration of sequestration cuts. Funding was also added for competitive grants to states to help them expand pre-K programs. Thirty states have now chosen to expand access to universal pre-k through state run programs.

In November 2013, Senator Tom Harkin, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions introduced the Strong Start for America’s Children bill. A marginally bipartisan companion bill has also been introduced on the House side. With billions in new funding to states, Strong Start proposes the expansion of comprehensive, high-quality pre-K programs that include health screenings and referrals for vision, oral and mental health conditions. These provisions stand solidly on the preponderance of research which demonstrates a correlation between persistent health-related barriers to education and poor performance in the classroom.

Still, the provisions to identify important health conditions among young children entering school don’t go far enough.  We also need to make sure that children are not educationally impaired by other conditions like chronic anemia, hearing deficiencies, behavioral problems and so on. And beyond identifying these health barriers, it is essential to provide guidance and resources to do follow-up and management of identified medical challenges.

Federal, state and local governments have an opportunity to pass early education laws that mandate a focus on health care, as well as access to education.  Maybe Congress will put aside partisan and political grandstanding and pass a popular bill that funds universal, comprehensive pre-K for all children as well as screening for and management of health-related barriers to learning—it would be a major step forward in definitively addressing chronic poverty.

The research shows that it clearly does.  Decades of studies, including the most recent Head Start Impact Study, have found that at the end of Head Start, prior to kindergarten, the program shows wide-ranging positive effects on children and families from language and pre-reading abilities to parenting skills.  And even though Head Start dates back to 1965, the latest research has proven its creators right about many basic principles.

Since its inception, Head Start’s core has been a comprehensive approach to high-quality early education and a focus on the whole child—recognizing the importance of social, emotional, physical and cognitive development. Head Start children receive medical and developmental screenings and subsequent treatment for identified concerns. They receive regular medical and dental care. And their families receive parenting education, health education and support services connecting them to education and jobs. Current research tells us that this full array of services is what early education programs should offer to have a positive effect on vulnerable children.

But it’s not just the comprehensive approach that makes Head Start a leader.  Head Start’s rigorous quality standards and monitoring processes, commitment to serving children with disabilities, and leadership in serving children from diverse backgrounds all make it a model of a high-quality program and a foundational component of our early learning system.

Head Start’s history of evaluation, innovation, and self-improvement is just as extraordinary. It has been the subject of intensive research for five decades and much of what has been learned has been incorporated into the program through quality improvement.

Head Start has evolved over time in various ways to meet families’ needs for full-day or year-round programs or to respond to local community needs with innovative models. Program standards, monitoring, and professional development have all been revised based on research and evaluation. Most notably, the 2007 Congressional reauthorization of Head Start increased the focus on school readiness for children and established higher educational requirements for teachers. New assessment procedures require a review of teacher-child interactions, a critical component of any early education experience.

Drawing on this history, researchers have taken a careful look at what about Head Start works and what can be improved based on the findings of the recent national impact study and the broader Head Start research.

So why is there any debate at all regarding the effectiveness of Head Start?

The answer is simple—the impact study has been selectively mined for talking points.  The study found that right after leaving Head Start, children did better than their peers. It also found cognitive gains disappeared during the early elementary years. There are many possible reasons, including uneven quality in Head Start programs, uneven quality in elementary schools that poor children enter after Head Start, and the need for higher-intensity interventions than the 9-month Head Start program tested in the study. There is also much more to learn about how to sustain immediate gains for poor children over time.

Importantly, the study results do not necessarily mean that children won’t benefit later from Head Start. A robust body of research finds that while children in Head Start and other high-quality early education programs may lose immediate gains, they still experience improved outcomes later in life.  This is important:  the large payoffs to early education that researchers have found for high-quality programs in the form of increased education, employment, and earnings can happen even when there is no immediate evidence that children are doing better in school. Here too, we have more to learn.

As we deepen our understanding of the complexities of high-quality early education and its impacts, Head Start should continue its legacy of continuous quality improvement to respond to the needs of poor children. As with any program intended to advance outcomes for our children, we should learn and adapt as new research expands our knowledge base. But labeling the intervention a failure based on one study is neither sensible nor advantageous to preparing poor children for school, a goal that benefits everyone in the country.

But the biggest problem with the simplistic talking points framing the Head Start debate isn’t a selective reading of the research.  It is the distraction from what matters most:  the persistence of child poverty, which affects a quarter of our youngest children. The immediate impacts of Head Start are clear. We shouldn’t ignore or reject decades of reputable research.  Whether Head Start works isn’t close to the right question.  Instead, we should ask why only a fraction of eligible children are being served. Why, when we know what works, can we not make a significant investment to put a generation of young children in poverty on a better and brighter path?

It is our public will that we must question.

On nearly every indicator that we use in the United States to measure progress, people of color are falling further behind. And it starts early.

A recent report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, “Race for Results: Building a Path to Opportunity for All Children,” provides a national and state scorecard for how we are providing opportunities for children of color, using 12 indicators, such as percentage of children enrolled in preschool, high-schoolers who graduate on time, and number of children who live in low-poverty areas. There isn’t one minority group that’s meeting all of these benchmarks, and even middle-class families of color have a very tenuous hold on their economic status.

In addition, the recent data from the Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection show that we are exacerbating these disparities by essentially sending our children of color to schools that are not providing them with a high-quality education. For many of our children, schools become a pipeline into the criminal justice system. According to the data, Black students are suspended at much higher rates than White students, and the problem has become so pervasive and insidious that it extends to preschool. Despite representing just 18 percent of preschool children, Black children make up nearly half of all out-of-school suspensions in preschool.

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This school-to-prison pipeline – one in which African Americans and Latinos are grossly over-represented – is in stark contrast to their under-representation in the higher education system, where the non-Hispanic White population is well ahead of other groups in ultimately attaining a college degree or more.

The economic inequalities we see resulting from these educational inequalities are frightening. The unemployment data released earlier this month by the Department of Labor – revealing continued job growth but stagnant wages – still show that Black and Brown people are having the hardest time riding out this lengthy economic recovery. The official unemployment rate for African Americans is more than double the unemployment rate for non-Hispanic Whites. The rate for Hispanics is lagging behind, too.

When the numbers of under-employed and discouraged workers are factored in, the crisis is even more severe for workers from every background.

With the foreclosure crisis, the financial crash, and the great recession, the inequalities of wealth have actually increased. As the Urban Institute reports, Non-Hispanic White families before the recession had about four times the wealth as non-White families, a figure that jumped to six times by 2010. Hispanic families lost 44 percent of their wealth – and Black families lost 31 percent of theirs – between 2007 and 2010. By contrast, White families lost just 11 percent of their wealth over the same period.

This broadening racial wealth gap is scary, as is the school-to-prison pipeline, and it won’t be solved overnight. But we can start by reinvesting in our nation’s children, who all deserve equal access to a quality education – one that doesn’t leave their economic future imperiled. The federal government has a number of options that it can pursue to address this crisis, including taking on a more robust role in guaranteeing the right to education; greater and more equitable investment of resources in the public school system; and tougher enforcement of existing civil rights laws. Taken together, such actions would do much to improve the lives of our children, both now and in the future.

Sixty years after Brown, it’s the least we can do.

Until recently, my son attended a childcare program that he and I loved.  He was given instruction and pushed to learn more.  He attended the same program his sister did and has been there since shortly after birth.  Being at the same center gave my son a sense of stability and security that allowed him to excel.  I am a proud mother and I love to talk about how smart my kids are.  I believe that is partly a result of the quality of the care and instruction they have received starting at an early age.

Unfortunately, due to financial reasons, Tasir had to leave his childcare center at the end of the fall.  I lost my job and had to rely on cash assistance to make ends meet but I lost my subsidy that helped to pay for childcare.  It broke my heart to have to move my son from the care he loved and relied on simply because I could not afford it.  Losing my job and then my subsidy not only cost me but it has cost my son.

I have seen the benefits of high quality childcare in the education of my daughter.  Asyiah is a smart girl. She wants to learn and do well at school.  I believe this is a result of the instruction and stable care she received in the first years of life.  She has a strong foundation to build upon.

Since losing our childcare subsidy, my son, Tasir, has had nowhere to go. For four months I have been piecing together care with a network of relatives and neighbors while I looked for work.  I know I am lucky to have people to care for my son – otherwise I have no idea how I would be able to find work again.  The loss of the childcare subsidy is not only a snowball effect from a lost job, but it is also an obstacle to getting any other job.  Without care for my son how am I able to find a new job?  It is a vicious cycle that too many families are stuck in.

While I am grateful that Tasir is safe and fed with my relatives and friends, this is not the stable care he was accustomed to and he’s not learning anything.  At his old childcare center, Tasir engaged with children his age and learned new things each day.  Now I am just focused on making sure he is safe.  I want him to excel but right now our situation is not giving him any tools to help him prepare for school next year.   My son cannot redo these last few months. They will always be a time of lost potential.

I know the importance of early education.  I did not benefit from such programs and I do not want my kids to ever fall behind, or feel left behind.  No child should miss the opportunity to learn because his or her parents lack the money to afford it.  My daughter or son could be a doctor, lawyer, or even the next president of the United States, but without education, without a strong foundation, I fear they will not get there.  That my struggles could impact my children’s future keeps me up at night.

Today, I am happy to say that I have a new job.  Ironically I am now working at a childcare center.  With my new job I am hopeful that I will be able to get my subsidy back and be able to afford care for my son.  But there is no guarantee that I can get my son back in the same program, meaning this disruption in his life might be permanent.

No child should be prevented from reaching his or her potential because the caregiver lacks the funding.  I hope that by sharing my story, I can show the need for high-quality, affordable childcare for all families. Asyiah, Tasir and all children deserve the opportunity to reach their potential.

I’ve worked on the school meals programs for over 35 years, starting when I was in charge of the federal food assistance programs in the Agriculture Department during the Carter Administration.  They have long served a vital role and have continued to improve over the years with healthier meals and greater efficiency.

Under community eligibility, schools in which at least 40 percent of students are eligible for free school meals automatically, without submitting an application, can serve free meals to all students.  Students are approved without an application if they have been identified by another program (such as SNAP) as being low-income, or if they are at risk of hunger (for example, because they are homeless).

The option has been phasing in since 2011, and now, for the first time, will become available nationwide for the 2014-2015 school year.  The lists of eligible schools in all states are available here.  But schools have only until June 30 to opt in, so school districts need to move quickly to embrace this opportunity.

Community eligibility has led to a striking increase in the number of children in high-poverty areas eating school breakfast and lunch.  In schools in Illinois, Kentucky, and Michigan that have used the option for two years, lunch participation rose by 13 percent and breakfast participation rose by 25 percent, with 29,000 more low-income children eating breakfast daily.

This model of connecting low-income children to assistance is effective for several reasons:

• It’s targeted.  School meals have always been available free of charge to low-income children, but community eligibility expands the school meals programs’ reach in communities with high concentrations of poverty.  Over 80 percent of the students participating in community eligibility schools in its first two years had been approved for free or reduced-price meals the prior year.
• It’s administratively simple.  Community eligibility not only connects more low-income children to nutritious food, but also cuts red tape.  Families don’t have to complete applications or provide information on their income, and schools don’t have to process those applications or have a cashier figure out whether to provide a free or reduced-price meal every time a child goes through the lunch line.  A related benefit is that students can eat in the cafeteria without worrying about any stigma from receiving a free meal. Moreover, schools that have adopted community eligibility report administrative savings from streamlining their meals programs.  Those savings, combined with the drop in per-meal costs when more children eat, help to cover the costs of providing meals to more students.
• It promotes opportunity.  Eating breakfast and lunch helps children start the school day ready to learn and remain focused throughout the day.  Schools that have taken steps to increase school breakfast participation, for example, report that discipline referrals and behavior problems went down and student attentiveness and attendance went up.

The national debate on poverty will continue, but let’s take this practical next step right now:  encourage the schools and districts in your state that are eligible for community eligibility to take the option.

Connecting low-income children to good nutrition to help them grow, learn, and thrive is something we all ought to be able to agree on.

At Mercy Education Project for women and girls, Sharon talked to me about her secret: she had never told her husband or three daughters that she never graduated from high school. She fought through mental illness and worked hard to keep her family together, but she could not compete in an economy without a GED.

Sharon had a nightshift job, but could not advance unless she had a graduation certificate. It was her reading that was tripping her up. She had a learning disability and never learned how to compensate for it. As a result, she had come to dread school and the failure she associated with it.

Because of the needs of her family, Sharon came to Mercy Education and discovered that she was very capable. She entered Mercy’s welcoming community, improved her reading and math skills, and earned her GED.

The next day Sharon went to her employer with her diploma in hand and he said, “Today is your lucky day!” Just that morning, a worker had left so there was an opening on the day shift. Sharon moved into that new position with increased pay. All of her hard work was beneficial for herself, her family and her employer.

On the other side of Detroit I met Kristine, whose flashing eyes and ready smile are a magnetic attraction for anyone who walks within ten feet of her. She wrestled with dyslexia all of her life.  Although her mom was a champion for her needs, it wasn’t until she was an adult and went to the Dominican Literacy Center that she received the individualized attention that she needed. At the Center, she learned how to compensate for her disability.

With her new skills and engaging personality Kristine became a part-time mentor at the Center. This eventually led to a full-time position. She is now truly at the heart of the mentoring program, encouraging and supporting other adults as they strive to gain essential skills.

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Marcella, for example, came for tutoring and said she didn’t talk to anyone until Kristine talked with her. Then she began to share her story and her struggles with reading and math. The tutoring made all of the difference for Marcella as she gained confidence in her skills. She became a mentor to adults who were new to the Center. Marcella is now proficient with computers, has enrolled in a QuickBooks programing project, and continues to serve as an individual mentor. She delights that she is now “giving back” to others.

Another woman at the Dominican Center, Elizabeth, also said that Kristine helped her as she struggled to stay off drugs and learn to read. Kristine encouraged her to create a flyer for a cleaning business that Elizabeth wanted to start. Because of that flyer, Elizabeth is now employed and celebrating her steps into the labor force. Elizabeth and her employer take pride in Elizabeth’s personal growth and the contribution she is making to the business with her improved reading and math skills.

Finally, Antonio told me that Kristine was the person who encouraged him to first come to the Center. He had always been a good kid in school, but was extremely shy and afraid to speak up when he didn’t understand what was going on, and he could not read. He got passed along from grade to grade but had severe dyslexia. Although he received his high school diploma he had been afraid to tell anyone about his struggles. Because of Dominican, Antonio now spoke to me with confidence about how much he had learned and where he was headed.

The Mercy Education Program and Dominican Center—both started and sponsored by Catholic Sisters—are geared to addressing income disparities in our nation. Through individual tutoring and small classes they are making a difference as adults wrestle with lifelong limitations. But what is often missed is that they both use some government funding to pay for their programs. They combine government money with donations, grants and volunteers—a public-private partnership that is making change happen. But it is only one step in many that are necessary to change the face of poverty in our society.

We need more centers, not fewer. We need more employment, not less. We need better wages so that work does pay. We need to restructure some of our educational programs so that students do not get lost or discouraged. All of the people I met in Detroit were invested in making a difference in their city. They were not seeking a “welfare state” – they were looking for a “just state,” and they are well on their way to making something new in their city.

Pope Francis is right. We are all needed to further the quest for the common good. That is what is happening in parts of Detroit. May it be realized in our entire nation.