Here's your
crisis in American education:
The Southern Education Foundation reports that 51 percent of students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade were eligible under the federal program for free and reduced-price lunches in the 2012-2013 school year. The lunch program is a rough proxy for poverty, but the explosion in the number of needy children in the nation’s public classrooms is a recent phenomenon that has been gaining attention among educators, public officials and researchers. [...]
The data show poor students spread across the country, but the highest rates are concentrated in Southern and Western states. In 21 states, at least half the public school children were eligible for free and reduced-price lunches — ranging from Mississippi, where almost three out of every four students were from low-income families, to Illinois, where one out of every two was low-income.
This is shocking. It should be humiliating to us, as a nation. And since factors outside of the classroom—poverty being a huge one—far outweigh anything that happens in the classroom when it comes to students' educational outcomes, this is absolutely a crisis not just for children being fed and clothed and having stable lives, it is a crisis in education.
A closing note to Republican lawmakers: Unless you're going to eliminate poverty by starting a whole lot of bootstrap factories employing hundreds of thousands of people at $15 an hour or more, the answer to this horrible news has nothing to do with bootstraps.