Debate about poverty, not about music taste
Once and probably future Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee made his way back into the headlines last week for excoriating President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama for allowing their daughters to listen to music by the singer Beyonce, describing it as “mental poison.”
Malia and Sasha Obama are, it must be said, hardly unique among teenagers in their appreciation for Beyonce. There aren’t too many out there downloading the Carpenters or Up With People onto their iPods, or raiding their great-grandmother’s basement to find copies of her mothballed Mantovani or Mitch Miller collections. But even if the first daughters listened to something harder-edged than Beyonce – say, Norwegian death metal – there’s every likelihood they are going to fare just fine in life. They attend the tony Sidwell Friends School outside Washington, D.C., and have parents who are accomplished and affluent. They have tremendous advantages.
It’s the 51 percent of American schoolchildren who are now classified as low-income, according to a report released last week, that Huckabee should be furrowing his brow about.
Compiled by the Southern Education Foundation, the report found that a little more than half of all children in the country qualify for free or reduced-price lunches at school. These are available to children who come from dirt-poor homes up to families of four where the household income tops out at $43,568, which may not be impoverished but leaves little room for frills. More students may also be part of the tally due to changes in Agriculture Department regulations that allow all students at schools to get free lunches if the majority of them qualify.
Nevertheless, the fact remains: More young people are living in poverty today, or painfully close to it.
According to the report, the majority of students in 21 states are poor. The leader of this pack is Mississippi, where 71 percent of students come from low-income households, followed closely by New Mexico at 68 percent. Huckabee’s home state, Arkansas, is fourth on the list, with 61 percent. West Virginia has 52 percent, while Pennsylvania has 40 percent and Ohio 39 percent.
The number of students at or near poverty in the United States climbed steadily in the United States over the last quarter-century. In 1989, only 32 percent of students in our public schools came from homes in the low-income classification. Some of this can be credited to the lingering impact of the Great Recession, and some is due to immigrant families still trying to get their economic footing in this country. As the report states, though, if nothing is done to address this problem, there is the danger that it will “enlarge the division in America between the haves and have-nots and endanger the entire nation’s prospects.”
It continues, “No longer can we consider the problems and needs of low income students simply (as) a matter of fairness … Their success or failure in the public schools will determine the entire body of human capital and educational potential that the nation will possess in the future. Without improving the educational support that the nation provides its low-income students – students with the largest needs and usually with the least support – the trends of the last decade will be a prologue for a nation not at risk, but a nation in decline.”
These are the issues Huckabee and his fellow candidates in both parties need to be debating as 2016 draws closer, not what’s atop the Billboard music charts.