Poverty and Education in politics on Thu, Mar 27. 2008
I suggest more poverty-base grants for the very poor B student to at least manage a community college associate degree,
so they can make $20 an hour job fixing cars or wiring houses instead of $7 an hour as cashier, which is the difference
between two 30-hour a week jobs where you can't pay the rent, and a 45-hour a week job where you can and even save a
little.
There's plenty of scholarships for good students, but that's not really the problem right now. I knew plenty of 'okay' students in high school. When I saw them again, ten years later, most of them, while not rich, had managed to do okay in the real world, and that seems to be where the system is falling down, because the very poor do not grow up to do 'okay' unless they were 'exceptional' students.
Which is all well and good for the exceptional students, but the others can't afford the community college, they can't afford to do anything but immediately enter the workforce with no skills and have to work so hard they never have the chance to learn any skills, and will be working at a cash register or assembly line their entire life.
Whereas non-poor moderately-good students became cash register installers and assembly line mechanics. Blue collar, yes, but not dirt-poor blue collar. They could afford an education and/or their parents could afford to support them as they learned a skill.
So while there's a lot of focus on tracking down and picking out highly intelligent poor and minority students, I think that making sure the average poor student got the same chances to...not 'exceed', but to get a vocation as average middle class students. Instead of a series of minimum wage jobs that means they'll never get ahead.
I.e., target the middle 60% instead of the top 20%. If we can give the middle 60% of the poor a chance to learn the same skills, to have the same gap between high school and entering the workforce that the middle class have, they will be much more valuable to the workforce and end up getting paid a lot more.
And, as a bonus, the highly intelligent that were missed in crappy high schools can use this time to, basically, bloom.
I'm not entirely sure how to accomplish this. We can't just hand 20 year-olds a big wad of cash, as they are not exactly the most responsibly people in the world. Some sort of official apprenticeship, plus the obvious grants for vocational colleges, maybe, but I'm just throwing the idea out there to make people think about the idea that we throw globs of cash at good students, but maybe a little more cash towards 'okay' ones is in order.
