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I wish it were true that "trillions of dollars" have been spent on the War on Poverty. Indeed, I would settle for a small fraction of the trillions of dollars we spent on the military in the 1980 s. In fact, the money we spend per-capita on programs for the poor in America is trivial in comparison with per-capita expenditures for the poor in western Europe. As I pointed out in When Work Disappears, the most rapid growth in expenditures for U.
S. welfare programs has been in universal entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare -- programs whose elderly recipients tend to be members of the working and middle classes. In western European countries, where services such as medical care are considered basic collective goods, the poor tend to be covered by the same comprehensive programs as the working and middle classes. In the United States, programs for the poor such as Food Stamps, Medicaid, and the Supplemental Security Income program (SSI) do provide some relief, but as currently designed, they have virtually no effect on the continuing poverty rate among the non-elderly. In short, targeted programs for the poor in the United States do not even begin to address inequities in the social class system. Instead of helping to integrate the recipients into the broader economic and social life of mainstream society -- to "capitalize" them into a different educational or residential stratum, as the GI bill and the postwar federal mortgage programs did for working- and middle-class whites -- they tend to stigmatize and separate them.
I am particularly concerned about the education of the poor in large urban cities. What measures do you think need to be taken to change the quality of education within urban areas? What or whom do you feel is to blame for the bad shape that schools are in today? As I argued in When Work Disappears, a commitment to a system of national performance standards for every public school in the United States would be an important first step in addressing the huge gap in educational performance between the schools in advantaged and disadvantaged neighborhoods -- including schools in poor urban neighborhoods. This assumes that standard-setting -- as a meaningful route to reform -- will be designed to address the current inequalities in the public school system. Accordingly, a system of national performance standards should include the kind of support that would enable schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods to meet the standards that are set.
State government, with federal support, not only would have to create equity in local school funding and develop programs that would foster teacher development (through scholarships and forgivable loans for teacher education to attract more high-quality teachers, through increased supports for teacher training in schools of education, and through reforms in teacher certification and licensing) but would also have to ensure that highly qualified teachers are distributed in local school districts in ways that provide all students with access to excellent instruction. In some cases this would require greater flexibility in the public school system, not only to attract and hire qualified teachers, but also to displace those who perform poorly in the classroom and lack a dedication to teaching. Local education agencies and state education departments should be helped to identify schools that need support in curriculum development and assessment, teacher development, educational and material resources, and so on. As far as who is to blame for the bad shape of many of our urban schools, let me say that the problem is related to the way in which public education is organized in the United States.
In our country, the quality of local public schools in is in large measure related to the resources of local governments (e. g. , local property taxes have been traditionally used to finance education). In Europe, where strong central governments have exerted a good deal of control over population movements, education and urban developments, the quality of local public schools is far less determined by the resources of local governments and therefore the association between schooling and residence is not nearly as strong. Bibliography:
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