NY official: education best cure for poverty

from the Connecticut Post

JOHN BURGESON

BRIDGEPORT — The city was urged to examine the long-term effectiveness of the many programs designed to help inner-city youth at the annual breakfast conference of the Bridgeport Child Advocacy Coalition.

Linda Gibbs, New York City's deputy mayor for health and human services, told the gathering of about 375 at the Bridgeport Holiday Inn that, in the long term, the most important thing that government can do to erase poverty is to educate its children.

"One out of three high school dropouts will live in poverty for the rest of their life, but if you have a bachelor's degree, you will have a less than 10 percent chance of living in poverty," she said.

"Poverty is related very strongly to other social conditions — infant mortality rates, low birthrate children and high rates of diabetes and obesity."

Gibbs, who formerly served as commissioner of New York's homeless services and with the city's child welfare agency, urged the social-service advocates in the audience to "look holistically" at a family in a crisis situation, rather than focusing only on the emergency at hand. She said that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg wanted the various social agencies in New York to stop thinking about making the so-called safety net stronger, but rather find ways to reduce poverty — because too many people were spending too much time in the safety net.

"The working households in poverty have doubled since 1990 as a percent of our total poverty population," she said. "This is a huge and growing problem in this country as a whole."

She went on to describe that the 16- to 24-year-olds as the "lost population," which have many members who are poor, out of school and out of work, with few strategies designed to meet their needs. "Don't just rest on good intentions," she said. "We believe that because we're doing good, that the goodness of our acts is what makes us deserve the money," Gibbs said. "Are these interventions actually having an impact? When we're asking taxpayers to put up money, we should do more to show them that we're spending their money with integrity and with accountability." Gibbs highlighted two innovative programs, both of which seem to have had good results in New York.

The first is a nurse-family partnership program, in which a nurse is assigned to help poor first-time mothers deal with their newborns. "The benefits went way beyond the original intervention in terms of reduced child abuse in the household, increased employment, increased income and reduced juvenile delinquency 10 or 15 years later."

A second successful program targeted community college students. "Nationally, only 16 percent of the students entering community colleges get their two-year degree — not just in two years, but ever."

What she found was that most students drop out of community college because of conflicts with their work hours. "When the schedule of the second semester schedule isn't the same as the first semester, you're going to give up the classes before you give up the job." Gibbs said that allowing students to take their classes in the same time frame from one semester to the next can result in a dramatically improved graduation rate, which, in turn, leads to less poverty later on.