Category: Poverty and the Justice System
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Education Matters, But Direct Anti-Poverty and Inequality-Reduction Efforts Matter More
I once began a K-12 education talk by putting the following two questions on a screen. 1. What is the single policy change that would most improve the quality of K-12 education? 2. What is the single policy change that would most reduce the opportunity gap between low-income and high-income…
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Good Policy Is the Goal. Compromise Should Not Be.
Matt Bruenig just wrote an excellent series of posts dismantling a misguided “Consensus Plan for Reducing Poverty and Restoring the American Dream” from the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution. Bruenig’s posts explain why the plan’s emphasis on education, work, and marriage will not accomplish its goals (I’ve made…
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Black Lives Matter Movement Gives Bernie Sanders’ Racial Justice Agenda the Push It Needs
Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has unveiled a comprehensive racial justice agenda aimed at “addressing the four central types of violence waged against black and brown Americans: physical, political, legal and economic.” The agenda includes, among other policy proposals, a call for police demilitarization, community policing, aggressive prosecution of police officers…
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Money and Power Matter. Family Structure, Not So Much.
50 years ago, Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a report called The Negro Family: The Case For National Action. The central argument in what has come to be called the Moynihan Report was that “The Breakdown of the Negro Family Has Led to a Startling Increase in…
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Everything You Need to Know About Inequality
Jared Bernstein and I just published a comprehensive PowerPoint presentation on inequality in the United States (available for download here). This presentation is first and foremost intended as a resource. Part 1 of the presentation documents the increase in inequality over the past 35 years; the trend is evident from…
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The 34justice Political Tool: Ethics, Truth, and a Case Study of Michael Brown and Ferguson
Seating arrangements during the French Revolution gave us the Left-Right political spectrum. During the first National Assembly in 1789, the king’s supporters sat on the right and proponents of revolution on the left. In contemporary American politics, we often consider liberals, who “believe in government action to achieve equal opportunity…
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On Education and Poverty, and How We Talk About Them (Part 3b)
StudentsFirst Vice President Eric Lerum and I recently began a debate about approaches to teacher evaluation. During Part 2 of that debate, the conversation touched on the relationship between anti-poverty work and education reform. We resume that conversation below. Here were the relevant parts of our original exchange, in case…
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The Prisoner’s Dilemma
“I used to be fast, man. I’ll race you to that gas station.” There is only one group of American citizens that are constitutionally guaranteed the right to medical services, and you may be surprised to find that it isn’t politicians, law enforcement, the elderly, or even veterans—it’s prisoners. The…
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The Mural Capital
I consider Philadelphia my city. I have never lived in it or attended school there, but I have worked there and have family that reside all throughout its various far-reaching sections. Some of these family members will even order a “wooter” when they go to a restaurant from time to…
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