Majority of Southern Public School Children Live in Poverty

By Nick Hillman | November 2, 2007

As if public education isn't facing enough challenges these days, we're seeing more poor students today than we have in 40 years. More than half of all students in southern public schools live in poverty, according to a report by the Southern Education Foundation. 14 states in the US have such a distinction, and 11 of them are in the south.

All of this is occurring at a time when we see the largest gap between the rich and the poor. In 2005 (the IRS's most recent data), the wealthiest 1% of Americans earned 21% of the national income, while the bottom 50% of earners accounted for only 12% of national income. This is the greatest gap in postwar history!

The poor are getting left behind, and poor students are left with two options (a) don't go to college at all or (b) go to college and (if you're lucky) graduate with a lot of debt. In only a few instances, are poor students given a third option, which is to attend college debt-free. Higher education policy needs more options for the poor, otherwise that income gap will continue to rise and we will continue to have an America divided by the haves and the have nots.

So, what are our nation's higher education leaders doing to prepare for this surge of low-income students who will need a college degree to escape from poverty? The short answer is "not enough," but some places are on the right track.

In New York (not in the south!), Governor Spitzer just announced that the state will start pumping more funds into "education empowerment zones" that link state colleges to public high schools to help at-risk students prepare for college. Low-income students often need to take remedial courses since they come from poor districts that fail to teach kids basic math and science. So, considering the swell of poor students in the Southern K-12 pipeline, states and education systems are going to have to continue their efforts of providing remediation to get students college-ready.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is funding an effort to double the number of low-income students in higher education. Their national initiative, in collaboration with Jobs for the Future, is helping education leaders figure out multiple pathways to help get low-income students to and through college.

Some colleges (well, the ones that have multi-million dollar endowments) are able to provide grants to cover tuition for low-income students. But unfortunately, there aren't a whole lot of poor folks attending these colleges. Most poor students will enroll in community colleges and regional public four-year colleges, not the elite Ivy League universities or liberal arts colleges. Sure, those programs help some low-income students, but the vast majority of poor folks aren't getting the help they need.

A mere six states award the majority of all need-based grants to low-income students. In other words, 44 states aren't awarding low-income students much need-based aid to help them pay for college.

So, the long story short is that states need to do more to link K-12 with higher education by creating multiple pathways to success. Programs like empowerment zones, academic preparation programs, need-based grants, and creative links between K-12 and college will help serve the poor community better and hopefully, just maybe, we will start to see that income disparity start to decline.

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This post also appears on the Roosevelt Institution blog. The Roosevelt Institution is a non-profit, non-partisan national network of campus-based student think tanks for which Nick Hillman is a senior fellow.