So yeah, I just read the the NJ Real Cost of Living Index (NJRCL). Forgive me, but somehow I didn’t make it to the endnotes - oops. But that was fun, in a really sobering, unfun sort of way. And as I was keeping this in mind, while reflecting on some of the poor and working class families from Annette Lareau’s book “Unequal Childhoods,” I think it might have hit me a little more just the sheer impact that poverty has on people, and families in particular. I mean, honestly, the closest i’ve ever come to poverty is a couple year stretch when my brother and I were living with our dad in a small apartment, and sometimes no idea where the money was going to come from for rent or food. But even so, I don’t think we ever approached even as low as 200-300% of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL), which, by the way, if you’d like my opinion, and that of any other intelligent being on the planet, needs to be scrapped, and now. Honestly, when you have state government agencies in New Jersey (such as WIC (Women, Infants, and Children), Food Stamps, Medicaid, SCHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program), the list goes on) defining who can participate in these poverty-assistance programs based on multiples of the FPL - 200, 300, even 350% FPL, I think that it’s time that maybe the Federal Poverty Level could MAYBE be updated to, oh, I don’t know, actually reflect the level below which a person can be considered to be living in poverty in this country. As it is, I think it maybe might be accurate to measure the poverty level of like Somolia or some other third-world country.
But I digress. So I was trying to think of families encountered in Lareau’s book that were either working class or in poverty - the families of Tyrec Taylor, Katie Brindle, Harold McAllister, Wendy Driver, and Billy Yanelli. And so while I was reading the book, for the most part, I was able to maintain a sense of clinical detachment. Not to say that I didn’t sympathize with the plight of some of these families, but I must admit that sometimes, I am just dense, and it takes a while for things to fully sink in. When I then perused (ok, so I perused the charts - skimmed was more what I did with some of the redundant text) the NJRCL, however, it sorta clicked for me. Especially when I consider the single-parent (or at least adult) families (the Taylors & Brindles) that we have read about, I can only imagine how they could manage to skimp by in a place like Essex county, New Jersey, where with only 2 children, an annual income of about $40,000 is needed just to reach self-sufficiency status. The Taylor household includes three children. These families are not bringing in anywhere near that number with a single parent supporting the family. Granted, there is some semblance of child support for these families, but still, there is absolutely no way for families such as these to survive without public support in the regions around us. Indeed, many of these families are, as the NJRCL points out, living at a mere fraction of a self-sufficiency wage. Those poor and working class families with two working adults are obviously going to be better off, but then they run the risk, as in the Driver household, of no longer qualifying for public assistance despite not earning quite enough for self-sufficiency. The NJRCL actually points out that at a certain income level, a family actually makes less of the fraction of a living wage than does a family with less income coming in. This is due to the fact that many public assistance programs have a distinct cutoff point, where assistance simply stops. This is, of course, retarded.
This leads me to LSNJ's reports Not Enough to Live On and A Desperate and Widening Divide, the latter of which suggests that these public assistance programs are very harmful in that respect, and instead should be such that these benefits are provided in a tapering off manner, such that assistance decreases, but does not completely drop off a cliff as family income rises. This makes good sense to me, because, if you think about it, with the current system, what incentive is there for adult workers making the top amount possible to still be eligible for state and federal assistance to try to move up the pay scale only to be actually hurt for making an extra dollar an hour? Not Enough to Live On also points out that inequality and discrimination in employment is still alive and well. Specifically, for our families from Lareau who are headed by single women (that is, Taylor & Brindle again) would be even further hurt economically than would their single father counterparts. (for those of you wondering if such a thing actually exists, I assure you that there are single fathers raising children alone - they are just few and far between) So these women tend to make less money for doing the same jobs simply because of their gender. Likewise, minorities also make less than their white counterparts. If this is news to anyone, I applaud you for having found a rock that large to hide under all these years. But my point is that this double-standard is just one more thing to make the lives of working class and poor families that much harder. Furthermore, for the whole of our lower income families from Lareau, looking at the Widening Divide report, had these families had the misfortune to live in Essex County, NJ, they’d be even worse off, because about half - that’s 50% - of those living in poverty in NJ are living in extreme poverty. So the moral of the story I guess is that if you’re going to be poor, don’t be poor in New Jersey, with an extremely high cost of living and an incredible amount of severe poverty.
So bringing this all back home, what does this mean for me? As a future urban educator, I know that a good portion of my future students will be coming from poorer families, and with New Jersey’s high cost of living, I think I’ll need to be cognizant of that fact. I need to realize that, according to Lareau, many of these students will know full well that there are financial pressures at home, and so very likely they will be bringing some of these stresses with them into the classroom, whether this is obvious or not. I need to keep in mind as I assign things that some of my students will be from families that struggle to buy groceries, so I need to make sure that I am not assigning things that require the students to buy supplies that they might not be able to afford. And more than anything, I think that I will need to file these sort of economic issues away in my brain, and add them to my lens through which I see the school world. This so that I will be able to effectively and sympathetically deal with those situations that I cannot even foresee at this moment. Oh well, I guess we’ll see how it goes.
