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This is actually a fairly interesting discussion. There's no magic pill to fix poverty. It's inherently much more difficult to get out of poverty than to just exist inside of it. That's why there is often little movement and those charts make sense. The uglier secret is that there is very little a government or city can do to improve it. It's hard raising kids, it's even harder when you are a single parent or have to work multiple jobs (both much more likely in poverty). I grew up 10 minutes away from E. St. Louis in a lower middle income area. We weren't wealthy or even close. But, my parents were good parents and chose to spend more time being parents at the expense of earning more money. My parents were also college educated, which meant they had a good base in teaching me what it would take to go to school.
Many people in poverty don't have the advantage of parents with college educations - or even two supportive parents due to jobs/priorities/how they were raised. Let's go through the issues that exist when parents are forced to work more and/or didn't have good role models to parent from:
1. Bad food tastes better than good food. Give your kid $10 for dinner and getting a Big Mac meal tastes a lot better than a grilled chicken salad and a yogurt cup (both under $10). Without parenting and guidance, which would a teenager choose?
2. Doing homework is harder than laying around playing XBox. Again, this is where parenting/monitoring comes in.
3. It's more fun to hang out with buddies and see them making more money on the street than it is to work a $6-8 an hour menial job. Again, you need guidance from someone to make the right choice here.
At the end of the day, the root issue for kids in poverty isn't hunger, being stupid, bad teachers/schools, or not having access to a whole foods - it's guidance. Parents in poverty are often divorced/wedlock, they spend most of their time working and when they get a free minute they often don't have the energy/desire to parent at the same rate the rich folk do. It's harder to make sure your kid eats grilled chicken, veggies and water than it is to give them $7 to go to McD's. It's harder to come home after a 10-hour shift and spend a chunk of your non-sleeping time fixing dinner, checking homework and mentoring your kids. It's harder to follow up with teachers each week and make sure your kids aren't falling behind - making sure they get their homework done correctly before they play video games or head out with friends. All of this is very difficult when you work from 8 AM to 6-7 PM and never had a parent instill all of this in you. It's much easier to go home, turn on the TV and order out.
I'm not saying this to be cruel or to belittle parents of kids in poverty. There are some that do things the right way and many of their kids have a chance to do better than they did. But even if you do things right, you still need a little good fortune. The problem is when you do things wrong, it's almost impossible for your kids to get out and I don't know that there's anything we can do to improve that. Legislating parenting isn't something people on either side of the aisle approve of.
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