"Poverty" is too broad of a label

Last night, Jane correctly pointed out an egregious error in my thinking regarding the intersection of poverty and education as she commented on my weekly journal.  Her point was that a lot of the Beegle article really just applies to generational poverty -- the deepest form of poverty -- which is a small percentage of the total number of families in poverty today.  She pointed out that for me to apply Beegle’s conclusions to all students classified as being in poverty (now almost 25% of American schoolchildren) is to apply sweeping generalizations that lead to wrong conclusions.  For instance, although many families in generational poverty don’t see the value in education and therefore exert little effort to overcome the substantial obstacles to their children’s success in school; many other families in poverty see education as their lifeboat, their ticket out of poverty, and will make tremendous sacrifices to keep their children in school.  

As we saw in our role-plays on Monday night, there are definite differences between the situations of families in generational poverty vs. working poverty vs. temporary poverty which affect their attitudes toward education in important ways.  When I first read Beegle’s article, it felt like her distinctions between different types of poverty were in some cases “splitting hairs,” but now I see more clearly that those distinctions can cause vastly different perspectives on education -- primarily whether the family sees education as a source of hope or a source of frustration and futility.  One of our cohort members even mentioned on Monday about her experience as being part of “immigrant poverty” which was not characterized by hopelessness.  On the contrary, they pinned all of their hope on education because they saw the value of education in lifting them out of their circumstances.  As a result, they placed a very high priority on obtaining education for their children.

I am reminded that even when we apply labels in an attempt to help certain groups of marginalized people by drawing attention to their plight, we can do so too broadly and to the detriment of what we are trying to accomplish.  As Jane commented on my paper:  “poor kids come in many forms” and many now live not just in cities and rural areas but even in suburbs.  It comes back to the lessons we have been learning about getting to know each child and their families individually in order to build unique bridges to each of them.  We need to be wary of putting families in “boxes” that seem convenient and useful to our understanding of their situation, but are, in fact, barriers to our truly getting to know them and help them.