How Kids Learn Resilience
In 2013, for the first time, a majority of public-school students in this country—51 percent, to be precise—fell below the federal government’s low-income cutoff, meaning they were eligible for a free or subsidized school lunch. It was a powerful symbolic moment—an inescapable reminder that the challenge of teaching low-income children has become the central issue in American education.
The truth, as many American teachers know firsthand, is that low-income children can be harder to educate than children from more-comfortable backgrounds. Educators often struggle to motivate them, to calm them down, to connect with them. This doesn’t mean they’re impossible to teach, of course; plenty of kids who grow up in poverty are thriving in the classroom. But two decades of national attention have done little or nothing to close the achievement gap between poor students and their better-off peers.
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APN Statewide Poverty Report: History Of Poverty Chapter
There are as many ways to think about what poverty is as there are to chronicle its historical roots. For many of the 47 million Americans currently living with incomes below the federal poverty line, being poor is working poverty—they manage low-wage, often contingent work, or see their incomes fall temporarily below the official line while struggling through a career transition, a divorce or a serious illness. For every poor person or family, poverty represents a deprivation of key resources that is accompanied by a loss of power over how to reclaim them. For persistently poor …
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The Rich Live Longer Everywhere. For The Poor, Geography Matters
For poor Americans, the place they call home can be a matter of life or death.
The poor in some cities — big ones like New York and Los Angeles, and also quite a few smaller ones like Birmingham, Ala. — live nearly as long as their middle-class neighbors or have seen rising life expectancy in the 21st century. But in some other parts of the country, adults with the lowest incomes die on average as young as people in much poorer nations like Rwanda, and their life spans are getting shorter.
In those differences, documented in sweeping new research, lies an optimistic message: The right mix of steps to improve habits and public health could help people live longer, regardless of how much money they make.
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Successful Public Scholarship
Presented April 8, 2016 as part of the Equity and Opportunity Studies Fellowship writing seminar series, a partnership between CLiME at the Rutgers Law School, and the Graduate School at Rutgers University-Newark.
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Understanding Institutional Obligations To Children Experiencing Trauma II: New Jersey State Law On School-Based Responsibilities
This memo is the second in a series of documents prepared as part of the Center on Law, Inequality & Metropolitan Equity's (CLiME) Trauma, Schools, and Poverty project. The classroom, as the centerpiece of a child’s daily life, is one place where theneeds of childhood trauma victims can be both collectively and individually addressed. CLiME does not assume that existing special education or antidiscrimination law in schools is the optimal means for protecting or supporting victims of childhood trauma; however, we commence this research by investigating whether schools …
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Understanding Institutional Obligations to Children Experiencing Trauma I: Three Federal Laws on School-Based Responsibilities
This memo is the first in a series of documents prepared as part of the Center on Law, Inequality & Metropolitan Equity's (CLiME) Trauma, Schools, and Poverty project. At this stage in the research, CLiME does not propose that existing special education and antidiscrimination law are the optimal means for providing legal protection to victims of childhood trauma. Rather, we asked whether there currently exists a public duty to provide supportive services to traumatized children. This point of entry led our research to the school system, which holds a central presence in the …
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U.S. Concentrated Poverty In The Wake Of The Great Recession
The Great Recession may have ended in 2009, but despite the subsequent jobs rebound and declining unemployment rate, the number of people living below the federal poverty line in the United States remains stuck at recession-era record levels.
The rapid growth of the nation’s poor population during the 2000s also coincided with significant shifts in the geography of American poverty. Poverty spread beyond its historic urban and rural locales, rising rapidly in smaller metropolitan areas and making the nation’s suburbs home to the largest and fastest-growing poor population in the country. Yet, even as poverty spread to touch more people and places, it became more concentrated in distressed and disadvantaged areas.
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How Equal are New Jersey’s Towns and Cities?
"In this post we will explore the degree of income inequality seen in New Jersey’s municipalities. Using the same process as in our previous analysis where we explored the Gini Index and 80/20 Household Income Ratio of US counties, here we can get a more granular view of inequality seen within our counties.
Using the interactive map and table feature below, we can see the Gini Index, the 80/20 Household Income Ratio, and the income limits for the 20% and 80% cutpoints for every New Jersey municipality. This information, along with margins of error are displayed when hovering over or clicking a municipality on the maps. Options for filtering the maps and table are found on the right-hand side of the feature."
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Attitudes Toward Exploited Cities Helped Poison Flint
"Flint is one of the extreme examples of how our country has allowed geographic divisions by race and income to result in reverse–Robin Hood exploitation of those with the least power.
We’ve used free trade agreements, race-to-the-bottom economic development poaching, and inconsistent union rules to allow corporations to make a fortune off of cities like Flint and then pack up and leave for cheaper workers.
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De-Exoticizing Ghetto Poverty: On the Ethics of Representation in Urban Ethnography
INTRO: To write an ethnography about poor urban people is to risk courting controversy. While all ethnographers face questions about how well they knew their site or how much their stories can be trusted, the tone and content of those questions typically remain within the bounds of collegial discourse. Ethnographers of poor minorities have incited distinct passion and at times acrimony, inspiring accusations of stereotyping, misrepresentation, sensationalism, and even cashing in on the problems of the poor (Fischer 2014; see Boelen 1992; Reed 1994; Wacquant 2002; Jones 2010; Betts 2014; Rios 2015).
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What Is Publicly Engaged Scholarship?
Presented December 12, 2015 as part of the Equity and Opportunity Studies Fellowship writing seminar series, a partnership between CLiME at the Rutgers Law School, and the Graduate School at Rutgers University-Newark.
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The Gap in Conceptualizing Achievement in America’s Public Schools: An Analysis of the Achievement Gap
The achievement gap is often defined as the difference in academic achievement of minority and/or low-income students and their White and/or more affluent peers. Its status is evaluated through state standardized assessments, mandated under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), as well as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
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Housing Policy Levers to Promote Economic Mobility
ABSTRACT: Housing policy can play an important role in improving or impeding the economic well-being of low-income households. Through this paper, we aim to better equip researchers, policymakers, and practitioners for conversations about the links between housing policy and economic mobility. The first half of this paper clarifies common definitions and measurements of inequality and mobility. Adopting the lens of economic mobility for examining how housing policies can address challenges of inequality in society today, the second half of the paper looks at five categories of housing policy levers that affect economic mobility: tax policy, block grants, rental assistance, fair housing, and homeownership programs.
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ALICE New Jersey: Study of Financial Hardship
"According to the latest United Way of Northern New Jersey ALICE Report, 1.2 million households in New Jersey are unable to afford the state’s high cost of living. That number includes those living in poverty and the population called ALICE, which stands for Asset Limited, Income Constrained,Employed.
The ALICE study provides county-by-county and town-level data; cost of living calculations for six family size variations; analysis of how many households are living paycheck to paycheck; and the implications for New Jersey’s future economic stability."
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Defying the Greater Government: Local and State Governments’ Innovative Approach to Policymaking
Since the economic collapse of 2008, American citizens have grown increasingly skeptical oftheir government’s ability to pass socially and economically beneficial legislation. As citizens criticize large-scale government entities, such as the federal government or state legislatures, lower-level politicians have attempted to keep the masses at bay by passing legislation that will appease the voters in their districts. However, much of this newfound legislation is at odds with the policymaking efforts of their superior levels of government. In particular, over the last three years …
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Architecture of Segregation: Civil Unrest, the Concentration of Poverty, and Public Policy
Over the past year, scenes of civil unrest have played out in the deteriorating inner-ring suburb of Ferguson and the traditional urban ghetto of inner-city Baltimore. The proximate cause of these conflicts has been brutal interactions between police and unarmed black men, leading to protests that include violent confrontations with police, but no single incident can explain the full extent of the protesters’ rage and frustration. The riots and protests—which have occurred in racially-segregated, high-poverty neighborhoods, bringing back images of the “long, hot summers” of the 1960s—have sparked a national conversation about race, violence, and policing that is long overdue.
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Child Poverty By Race, Detroit
The Center on Law in Metropolitan Equity (CLiME) has generated mappings of the child poverty concentration in Detroit, by race and ethnicity, for the years 2000 and 1990.
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Single Moms And Welfare Woes: A Higher-Education Dilemma
Out of the 12 million single-parent families in the United States, the vast majority—more than 80 percent—are headed by women. These households are more likely than any other demographic group to fall below the poverty line. In fact, census data shows that roughly 40 percent of single-mother-headed families are poor.
Why? Experts point to weak social-safety nets, inadequate child support, and low levels of education, among other factors.
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Are Children With PTSD Being Neglected By Their Schools?
What kind of special education accommodations are required by law to be provided for students suffering from Traumas? At a minimum, school districts have to identify emotionally disturbed children and create an individualized education plan to accommodate their needs. Some of those services include social work and psychological services. Unfortunately school districts do not follow the rules laid out in the IDEA and end up expelling students, under classifying students, and ultimately not accommodating those students. Those failures cause emotionally disturbed …
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Childhood Trauma and Its Effects: Implications for Police
NTRODUCTION: Repeated exposure to traumatic events during childhood can have dramatic and long-lasting effects. During the past 20 years, there has been an enormous increase in our understanding of how being repeatedly traumatized by violence affects the growth and development of preadolescent children, especially when such traumatized children lack a nurturing and protective parental figure that might mitigate the impact of the trauma. In this paper, I summarize the current understanding of the effects of ongoing trauma on young children, how these effects impair adolescent and young adult functioning, and the possible implications of this for policing.
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