U.S. Has Highest Child Poverty Rate in Developed World

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The U.S. has the highest child poverty rate among 24 OECD countries, indicates UNICEF in its latest Innocenti Research Centre Report Card. The Report Card was issued in February of this year, and it rates many different aspects of child well-being in OECD countries. This week and in coming weeks, I will review some of the findings.


Source: UNICEF, Child Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-Being in Rich Countries, Innocenti Report Card 7, 2007.

When child poverty is defined as the percent of 0 to 17 year-olds in households with earnings of less than 50 percent of the national median income, the United States scores worst among developed nations. Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden have the lowest child poverty rates.

The U.S. is not only last, it is far behind the second-to-last country, New Zealand. New Zealand beats the U.S. by more than 5 percentage points. This is the largest difference between two adjacent countries in the entire ranking.

We cannot blame the last place ranking of the U.S. on that favorite target—single parents. The Report Card states,

Variations between countries in the proportion of children growing up in lone-parent families do not explain national poverty rates. Sweden, for example, has a higher proportion of children living in lone-parent families than the United States or the United Kingdom but a much lower child poverty rate than either.

Poverty is still fundamentally an issue of low income, not family structure.

This measure of poverty, as less than 50 percent of the national median, is really a measure of income inequality. It is a relative measure, not an absolute one. In terms of the absolute value of income, a household defined as in poverty in the U.S. could have higher earnings than a household that is not in relative income poverty in a poorer developed nation.

This point is an important one to keep in mind. On the other hand, Americans judge their well-being relative to other Americans, not relative to the living standards of people in countries like Greece, Poland and the Czech Republic.

On the broader measure of the material well-being of children, the U.S. places 17th out of the 21 countries with complete data. This placement is better, but not much better.

The Report Card defines material well-being as an average of measures of relative income poverty, households without jobs and reported deprivation.

The U.S. is 17th in well-being but places highly—5th (out of 24)—in the percentage of children living in households without an employed parent. Many of the countries with lower rates of relative income poverty among children have higher unemployment rates than the U.S. It is easier to find a job in the U.S. and also easier to be impoverished. This situation occurs because in most developed nations, the public sees poverty as harmful to the nation. In the U.S., we see people not working as the greater threat. The end result is that we have many families that can be described as working poor.

The reported deprivation scale is an average of three items: affluence, educational resources, and books.

The affluence measure asks children if their family owns an automobile, if they have their own bedroom, if they have traveled on vacation with their family and how many computers their family owns. This measure allows the high standard of living in the U.S. to be factored in.

The U.S. scores highly on affluence—6th (out of 20)—but still some distance from number one. Norway, Netherlands, Sweden, Canada and Switzerland all score higher. Denmark is immediately behind the U.S.

The U.S. is 13th (out of 24) in the percentage of children reporting less than six educational possessions, and a depressing 22nd (out of 24) on the percentage of children reporting less than 10 books in the home. The low score for the U.S. in these areas cannot be simply because children are using the worldwide web for their information. Countries with equal or higher technological development (e.g., Japan, Germany and Canada) outscore the U.S. in children with books.

“Variation in government policy appears to account for most of the variation in child poverty levels between OECD countries,” states the Innocenti Centre. In others words, the U.S. could have lower child poverty rates, we just have to want it.

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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

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Class and Racial Disparities in School Construction Spending

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

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[On the Need for Comprehensive Criminal Justice Reform.]
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Many people focus on the general disparities in school funding as an explanation for disparities in educational outcomes. This is an important point, but it is not as precise an argument as it could be. Critics point out that there are schools with high levels of funding that have low educational outcomes.

The issue is not merely how much dollars in general is going to a school. Some schools are in areas with higher costs of living. Some schools cost more to run. Some schools are better managed than others. These and other factors may absorb additional dollars in school funding without necessarily producing increases in school quality. The better argument, therefore, is about school quality. Predominantly black schools are more likely to be low-quality schools than predominantly white schools. People should make arguments specifically about reducing the disparities in school quality rather than school funding.

In general, however, there is a relationship between school quality and school funding. This relationship is probably particularly strong when one looks at the amount of dollars spent on school construction. Growth and Disparity: A Decade of U.S. Public School Construction by Building Educational Success Together (BEST) allows us to look at the class and race disparities in public school construction spending.

High income areas spent nearly three times as much on school construction as low income areas. In zip code areas where the median household income was at least $100,000, $11,500 per student was spent on school construction. In zip code areas where the median household income was less than $20,000, only $4,140 was spent on school construction.

There was a weaker disparity by the race of the school district. Predominantly white school districts spent about a third more than predominantly minority school districts. School districts that were more than 90 percent white spent $7,102 per student, but school districts that were more than 90 percent minority spent $5,172 per student.

Although the quality of school buildings may not be a common school quality measure, it matters for educational outcomes. BEST states, “An increasing body of research indicates that poor building conditions such as a lack of temperature control, poor indoor air quality, insufficient daylight, overcrowded classrooms, and a lack of specialty classrooms are obstacles to academic achievement.” Having science labs that are up-to-date and working and other good facilities also probably provide some educational benefit. In America’s schools, wealthier and whiter schools tend to have all of these things and poorer and blacker schools tend not to.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

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Are black students really afraid of 'acting white'?

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
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[Will White Rap Fans Help or Hurt Black America?]
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[This piece originally appeared in the Daily Voice.]

Nothing succeeds like stereotypes. Anti-black stereotypes are especially powerful. Take, for example, the now popular claim that black students don't value education. This claim has been repeated over and over again in spite of the fact that there is a mountain of evidence against it.

In 1986, in an Urban Review article, two scholars studying a Washington D.C. high school claimed that black students did not achieve academically because of a fear of being perceived as "acting white." People pounced so quickly on this idea that they failed to realize that the researchers did not actually present any black students who said they were afraid of being called "white."

Of the eight students discussed in the article, four indicated that they were worried about being called "brainiacs." The other four raised other issues. A fear of "acting white" was the researchers' highly debatable interpretation of what was going on, but it was not a direct quotation.

Many white students have been called "brainiac," "nerd," "geek," and similar names by other white students. It is unfortunate that students tease and bully each other. But this is not "a black thing." The real question therefore is whether academically-oriented teasing is more common among black students than among whites. There is no convincing evidence that this is the case. A 2003 study by the Girl Scout Research Institute, for example, found equal levels of concern about school-related teasing among black and white girls.

What about pro-school attitudes? Contrary to the popular stereotype, much of the evidence suggests that black students value education more than whites. The same year the Urban Review article was published, the Monitoring the Future survey found that 74 percent of black high school seniors believed that getting good grades was of "great" or "very great importance," but only 41 percent of white seniors felt as strongly. Half of black seniors reported that knowing a lot about intellectual matters was of "great" or "very great importance," but only one-fifth of white seniors felt the same.

Other and more recent surveys have had similar results. A 2006 survey by Public Agenda found that black students were more likely than white students to believe that "increasing math and science education would improve high school." The Higher Education Research Institute's 2006 survey of college freshmen found that the majority-black students at historically black colleges were more likely to aspire to obtain a Ph.D. than college freshmen generally.

Different organizations asking different questions of different black students at different times have all come to the same conclusion: black students value education. Despite the fact that these surveys are based on interviews of hundreds of black students from nationally-representative samples, none of them has been deemed as newsworthy as that study with four students worried about being called "brainiacs."

I can imagine some critics arguing that it doesn't matter what black students say, what matters is what they do. They might point out that black students have lower levels of academic achievement than white students. This is true, but it is only a part of the achievement story. One has to look at the trends in academic achievement, not just the one-time snapshots.

Since the 1970s, the best standardized tests have shown a greater increase in black students' scores than in white students' scores. The long-term trend National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) math test for eight graders, for example, shows a 14 point gain for white students but a 34 point gain for black students. There remains a large gap in scores on this test, but it was 20 points larger in the 1970s.

There are similar results for the long-term trend NAEP reading test, for the National Assessment of Adult Literacy test, the General Social Survey vocabulary test and other standardized exams. If black students are rejecting education left and right, why are their test scores increasing?

What the current academic research shows is that much of the black-white achievement gap exists prior to first-grade, many years before academic teasing begins. This gap is due to broad social and economic disadvantages among black families in comparison to white families. The gap grows during school years because these disadvantaged black students then attend schools of lower quality than white students.

Adults concerned about raising black student achievement have two options: we can get back into the civil rights business of confronting the social and economic inequalities that produce the achievement gap or we can cling to convenient stereotypes and keep on blaming black students. Blaming black students certainly means less work for us.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Race and Biology

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
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[Will White Rap Fans Help or Hurt Black America?]
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Race is fundamentally a sociological phenomenon. For some, recent developments in genetics produce confusion on this matter because it seems that scientists are uncovering the biology of race. But actually the opposite is occurring.

For example,a new discovery suggests that maybe 40 percent of blacks have a natural beta blocker that helps them recover from heart failure. Only two percent of whites appear to have this trait. This is a large and significant racial disparity. Blacks are twenty times more likely than whites to have the beta-blocker characteristic.

Some people take findings of this sort and assume that it shows that race is biological. But this is not the case. Let’s say we simply followed the biology and made a “beta-blocker race” and a “non-beta-blocker race.” Neither of these races map onto the racial categories for blacks or whites. Sixty percent of blacks and 98 percent of whites are of the same “race”—“non-beta-blockers.” We don’t know what the breakdown is for Asians or other racial categories that people have defined. Presumably, these groups would only complicate matters further because some portion of them would likely also fall into the “non-beta-blocker race.”

In recent years, scientists have found many genetic correlates to our sociological racial categories. Most of these correlates have been in what can be called the “junk DNA” in our genetic code and, unlike the beta blocker characteristic, have no apparent usefulness to our wellbeing. With many of these correlates in their toolboxes and some understanding of mathematical probabilities, scientists can use biology to predict a person’s actual race or racial ancestry from their DNA.

This process is akin to someone using a person’s consumption patterns to predict their political affiliation. If you know that 60 percent of people who buy car A vote Democratic. And 55 percent of people who listen to music B vote Democratic. And 68 percent of people who drink beer C vote Democratic. And 75 percent of people who shop at store D vote Democratic. If someone does all four of the above things—A, B, C and D—that Democrats are more likely to do than Republicans, then it is highly likely that they are a Democrat.

Geneticists have found hundreds of bits of the genetic code that are somewhat more likely to be in one racial group than another. They use these hundreds of snippets to calculate the likelihood that someone belongs to a particular racial group. Since these analyses rely on probabilities, the confidence of the prediction depends on the specific methodology and the characteristics of the group. The last time I looked into this matter, scientists found American Indian membership very difficult to predict. Scientists, however, have been constantly working to improve their methodology.

Now to do these predictions, scientists have to start with the racial category and then find the DNA that correlate. They did not simply look at the DNA and then racial categories appeared to them. Going back to the predicting Democrats example, you have to start off knowing who is a Democrat. Only then can you identify which consumption items are important to look at. Similarly, you have to start with racial categories to find the DNA bits that a useful. It cannot be done just using biology. The social category comes first and then scientists try to rig up a system of biology and mathematics to best approximate the social categories.

Using a process similar to this one, geneticists can now identify if someone is black or white. They can even go further and identify if someone’s ancestry is from a specific part of the world, like West Africa as opposed to some other part of sub-Saharan Africa. They also can make fairly accurate assessments of what share of one’s ancestry came from West Africa and what share came from Western Europe. Although scientists are piecing together large numbers of genetic clues to predict a person’s race and ancestry, this assemblage of genetic snippets is not race.

These techniques were only recently discovered. They are probably less than 20 years old, yet race is more than 300 hundred years old. People in the eighteenth century knew the concept of race, but they would be completely dumbfounded by the genetic work scientists are doing today. A person from the eighteenth century and a twenty-first century geneticist could easily talk about race, but they could not immediately talk about genetics.

That scientists can find genetic correlates to racial categories after the fact, should not blind us to the fact that it was not the genes that constructed the categories in the first place. It was people’s social definitions. In the U.S. the one-drop rule in particular highlighted the fact that even physical appearance could be of secondary importance. The U.S. Postal Service reminds us of this with a Black Heritage stamp of Charles Chesnutt. It was not biology that made Chesnutt black.



[Read more about the social construction of race in Achieving Blackness.]

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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.
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