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What the Poverty Report Misses

By Maureen Lane

Even though one in five New Yorkers is living in poverty, it sometimes takes the hubbub of a highly publicized report and the mayor's response to it for an actual discussion about how to ameliorate poverty to make the press. Lucky for New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has recently been making public statements in response to his Commission on Economic Opportunity's first set of recommendations.

The problem is that when it comes to access to education – which has been shown to be the most successful and consistent route out of poverty – both the report and the mayor's reaction to it are riddled with policy pitfalls and dangerous double standards.

Simply put, if the City Council takes the recommendations of the Commission on Economic Opportunity, New York's poor will be left with a segregated solution to poverty: young people should get education, and single mothers should get to work.

Excluding poor adults – the bulk of whom are women – from access to education flies in the face of proven facts, and simply won't make any progress in the fight to break the cycle of poverty. A recent study from the Institute for Women's Policy Research confirms that college is the successful and consistent route to economic security for poor women, and in turn makes it much more likely that their children will complete college and achieve financial self-sufficiency.

In one breath, it argues, “education is a fundamental prerequisite of any solution” – yet this focus on education is extended only to “young people.” And in the next, families are left with the policy suggestion of “making work pay,” even though the report also prints that working your way out of poverty is only becoming a more difficult dead-end: “the working poor constitute 46 percent of poor households in 2005 – up from only 29 percent of poor households in 1990.”

When policy makers and experts acknowledge that education is an important step in young people's ability to achieve their own financial security, they're right. Denying this same access to poor adults, who are primarily single mothers, does nothing to end poverty and makes for cruel and counterproductive public policy.

Why are poor women systematically blocked from getting education? It's not just by the Commission's recommendations on the municipal level. The harmful new federal welfare regulations released by the Department of Health and Human Services also hinder access to education to the point of impossibility for many poor women. Under these new rules, welfare recipients will continue to be required to perform workfare in order to receive benefits, but only a few weeks of school, and not a college education, will count as workfare.

Policy pundits removed from the reality of people' lives declare that people receiving welfare and juggling workfare commitments in order to receive benefits can seek any education they want. But it is disingenuous to suggest a mother working 35 hours in a workfare assignment, raising a family at 50 percent below poverty level and not receiving child care assistance for anything but her workfare can attend classes at night. Who will take care of her children? How will she get to school?

According to the US Department of Labor, 90 percent of the fastest growing jobs in the United States require some level of post-secondary education or training. If breaking the cycle of poverty is truly the goal, policymakers need to remember that 88 percent of women who finish their college degree move permanently out of poverty.

Maureen Lane is a fellow at the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy.