Memphis has almost 170,000 youths and half of them are living in poverty, but only about 30,000 to 40,000 are touched by the programs with the highest profiles for providing interventions with proven success rates.
The major metric that matters for the programs we’re thinking of is college graduation, and these proven programs’ participants have graduation rates of 90% and more. That compares to the 67% graduation rate for Shelby County Schools, which hopes to get to 90% in 10 years, but then again, the rates have been stubbornly unimproved in recent years.
But, for us, this doesn’t mean that teachers aren’t doing their jobs. It means that teachers alone can’t turn around the lives of children who have formidable obstacles to their future. More to the point, it tells us that teachers plus interventions are needed to give young people their best chances in life.
It’s worth remembering that about 15% of students in Memphis schools move every year. In essence, teachers are doing their best, but it’s often about trying to teach moving targets. Families in poverty move about five times in the first five years of their children’s lives (the average middle income family doesn’t move once).
Paying for More Successes
In response to this problem, one principal in Memphis met with parents who were forced to move and she gave them a list of all the temporary housing available in the school’s attendance zone so their children would not have to change teachers and schools. It was an idea she did on her own and it helped.
And don’t even get us started about the way that all the rhetoric about the importance of early child development falls short when it comes to translating it into actions that make sure that every child is ready for the classroom.
While it’s a sin that the richest country in the history of the world has about 15 million children living in poverty, it’s also a moral, social, and economic shortcoming that almost one in every two children here are living in poverty in a city that manages to give the police department a billion dollars over four years to prevent crime. Surely, between its city and county government, money could be found to give every child the opportunities for interventions that are making a difference in the lives of 30,000 to 40,000.
Many of the most high profile programs are aimed at after school interventions, and three of the most successful are Memphis Athletic Ministries, Streets Ministry, and Boys and Girls Club. Their yearly programs cost about $11 million a year, and using them as a benchmark, a very rough order of magnitude for touching every child in poverty is about $25 million more – or 10% of the Memphis Police Department budget.
Fighting Crime with All City Services
It is a curious fact of life for in the universe of cities’ efficiency plans that they often list crime reduction as a top priority but then recommend cuts in services such as libraries, community centers, and parks as ways to reduce expenses. In truth, the programs and services by these departments are also crucial to addressing crime.
That’s why cuts in the hours of libraries and community centers may look smart in reducing expenditures in departmental budgets but they are in fact false economies because young people are denied positive ways to spend their free time. More to the point, libraries and community centers need money for programming and more computers.
Today, community centers often seem as if adults think that children are only interested in playing basketball, not engaging in arts and crafts or music or anything else. Operable computers are few and far between in community centers, and even the library with its 600 computers could use more, and the hours cut several years ago for branch libraries still need to be restored (although City Council thought it did it two years ago). Meanwhile, school gymnasiums are sitting empty while nonprofit organizations offering interventions are spending money to build their own facilities when we’d rather they spend it to expand their services.
Once upon a time, Memphis was the city that gave birth to the Women, Infants, and Children program, which became a nationwide federal program. Surely, concern for children’s futures isn’t a thing of the past and that we could create a brand as the city that cares for its children.
Small Investments for Big Savings
As the Children’s Defense Fund has pointed out, poverty is a dream killer for too many children. With a child poverty rate second only to Romania among the industrialized countries, the U.S.’s poverty creates cognitive gaps in babies, produces toxic stress that can impact brain functioning for life, hunger jeopardizes children’s health and the ability to learn, worse health outcomes, lower graduation rates, and substantial economic costs, the children’s think tank said.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The ultimate answer is in economic security, or economic resilience, so that families in poverty don’t have their lives turned upside down if their cars need repairs. One study found that children in low-income families that received an additional $3,000 a year between the child’s prenatal year and fifth birthday earned an average 17% more as adults than children whose families didn’t receive the added income.
A big solution in providing this additional income is to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit, which kept 3.2 million children out of poverty in the U.S. Increasing the maximum credit would get one million more children out of poverty. That said, a big first step in Memphis would be to get every family qualified for Earned Income Tax Credit to apply for it. Here, as much as $70 million is being left on the table, and in some areas of concentrated poverty, it is estimated that only about one-third of the families who are eligible apply.
We Can Dream, Can’t We?
Other Children’s Defense Fund recommendations for reducing child poverty are to increase the minimum wage so it is inflation-adjusted, to provide a subsidized jobs program, to expand the child care subsidy and the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, to increase the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), to expand the Child Tax Credit, and to expand housing subsidies. The recommendations would reduce the child poverty rate by 60%.
CDF said the costs of these improvements could be paid from the closing of tax loopholes, taxing capital gains at the same rate as wages, scrapping the F-35 fighter jet program, and reducing military spending by 14% (the U.S. has 5% of the world’s population but spends 37% of the world’s military spending).
These recommendations would provide the funding that would reduce the child poverty rate by 60%.
But back to Memphis, while we can hope and pray that the U.S. Congress could get reasonable about the need to solve the poverty problem for our country – and without its bromides these days about how jobs are all that is needed to end poverty (generally accompanied by tax breaks for the “job creators”).
Walking Point
More than anything, we should be the place that shows that the link between poverty and race can be broken. While it is of course the right thing to do, it’s also in our enlightened self-interest.
The Urban Institute’s new mapping project estimates that population growth in Memphis will be slow between now and 2030, and during that time, the African American population of Memphis will experience the most growth. While many of our peer cities will be coping with rapid growth, we’ll still be dealing with too many Memphians living in poverty unless we capitalize on our opportunity to be a laboratory on this most serious of urban issues.
As we have said often, the Memphis MSA is the first region with more than one million people that is majority African American, and while those cities that become majority minority after us may be Latino rather than African American majorities, we have the opportunity to prove what policies and strategies work and which ones don’t. That’s why the Blueprint for Prosperity is a crucial experiment in our laboratory. Ultimately, the goal is lifelong learning for residents of all neighborhoods with connections to jobs, childhood development programs, and wraparound human services that give families in poverty better choices for the future.
That’s the audacious goal, but it could begin today by scaling existing programs that have proven successful to make sure that every child in Memphis can participate in them. Between them, Memphis and Shelby County Government budgets are more than $2 billion a year. Surely, there is enough money to invest a small amount of it in interventions for our children.
You’ve packed a lot in your commentary today. There could be a high level conference on this and other thoughts you’ve had about child poverty and the outcomes.
I was particularly struck by the following paragraph:
“As the Children’s Defense Fund has pointed out, poverty is a dream killer for too many children. With a child poverty rate second only to Romania among the industrialized countries, the U.S.’s poverty creates cognitive gaps in babies, produces toxic stress that can impact brain functioning for life, hunger jeopardizes children’s health and the ability to learn, worse health outcomes, lower graduation rates, and substantial economic costs, the children’s think tank said.”
We have licensed day care that varies in its level of care (quality) for babies and children until they go to school. Then we have before and after school care. Are we putting enough resources into these entities? What is the coverage on prenatal care? Is it enough? Do we have good data on any of this? If so, then at least we could see the level of the problem and plan accordingly.
I would like to see more attention given to prenatal to age 3 since you and others say this is the most critical time for brain development.
Doesn’t Memphis still have one of the highest rates of infant mortality in the US?
Sadly, the U.S.’s infant mortality rate is higher than 25 industrialized nations,another indicators of how much more attention the health and wealth of children is needed. As for Memphis, the infant mortality rate is still too high, but it has fallen 25% in five years.