I have been doing a lot of research regarding poverty and the effects of poverty on children in regard to educational achievement. I’m not going to dump a lot of stats, or disseminate a lot of research here. I simply want to summarize some of what I have learned over the last year. Before I do, I want to provide a reason for this research. In the state of Iowa, we teachers are required to have a professional development plan for a cycle of 3 years. I know that most of my fellow music teachers go to conferences and state conventions working on endorsements in Orff, Kodaly, African Drumming, and Dalcroze teaching methods. I decided after 30 years of teaching K-undergraduate and leading professional and amateur band groups that I desired information regarding my students’ needs rather than my needs.

When I moved to Davenport in 2020, the trauma of the pandemic was present everywhere. The students harmed the most by that trauma are now in middle school and high school. The first three years of my time here were the hardest I have ever experienced as a teacher. When you teach at a Title One school, you know that you are dealing with many sociological issues amongst your students. Music is not a high priority for children that are suffering from severe trauma or devastating poverty and even homelessness. Since I love action research, and I have always blurred the lines of music education with core education my first professional development cycle was using trauma-informed strategies in education and applying them to my music classroom. I worked to adapt my music education teaching strategies to accommodate trauma. Now I am onto developing strategies for dealing with the effects of severe poverty.

There isn’t a one size fits all approach to teaching around sociological conditions created by bad policies from governance, and all out war on the poor by the disinformation from the rich, and the ever growing wealth gap created by neoliberal capitalism and the socializing of big business. I’m going to avoid the education bits and just examine the variables of poverty.

Poverty is an isolating learned condition that is passed down from generation to generation. What people do not understand is that the modeling of poverty, lack of education, lack of work skills, homelessness, mental health issues or neglect, corporal punishment, poor health care, and gullible beliefs regarding any number of issues seems normal to a child. A child’s worldview is their parents, guardians, and family. They see this as the normal way of life. When they meet or see people of affluence they assume their caste in life without question. I have watched this carry out within my own family, and as I used education to lift myself away from these very same issues I found myself absentmindedly neglecting mental health and health care. I did not understand investments and portfolio management until my late 30’s. I have watched a member of my family use the social safety net to live, and now their children are using the social safety net to live as neither one had a complete education or job training. Despite the adult members improving their wealth status and retirement portfolio through work promotions, they still exercise the same modeling/conditioning of poverty from their youth. It is a challenge to change when that is all you know.

The measures of poverty within the United States are extremely inaccurate. The earned income measures or daily expenditure measures have not changed in decades. Our governance has hid the growing epidemic of poverty through statistical manipulation. This includes hiding inflation or cost of living increases for the measurement of poverty. It does not include insurance or health care expenditures for poverty analysis. During the $45, Biden, and $47 administrations the government has purposely kept the poverty measures nebulous to provide hope or a false sense of consumer and economic confidence. When I see a report that lists the nations poverty level dropping from 2.3% to 2.2% from fiscal years 2023 and 2024, yet I see an education report that shows an increase in childhood poverty from 9.9% to 20% over a period of ten years, there is something amiss. Nefariousness by Congress and presidential administrations is afoot. They are hiding the truth to avoid having to fix a sociological problem of their own making.

Poverty is expensive. Whereas my family can buy consumer products in bulk because we have an automobile and memberships to wholesale outlet stores we are able to save money on products. Someone living in poverty who doesn’t have a vehicle must buy those products at a dollar store, supermarket, or other retail outlet close to their address or shelter depending on housing status. Expense for those items is greater at these stores. Toiletries for example are extremely expensive for the poor, compared to those of us with a livable wage. Here is my plea, donate to school organizations and shelters that supply toiletries to the impoverished… thank you…

Rural poverty and Urban poverty are different beasts entirely. Urban housing is more expensive than rural housing, but this trend is changing quickly. Urban apartments tend to be 40-80% more expensive than Rural apartment complexes based on my experience. Rural poverty is aggravated by transportation costs to get to basic essentials. When I lived in a small town, the local grocery store had a limited inventory, so we planned trips to the nearest metropolitan area to do a large scale grocery, home goods, and hardware purchase which required a 90 minute round trip. We stuck to the local establishments for smaller needs like ice cream, fasteners, quarts of oil, etc. Imagine having $5 a gallon fuel prices and a need to drive 50-100 miles one way for an Aldis or Walmart? The rural poor spend more on transportation than the urban poor. The rural poor also have to travel a great distance for health care too. This is why it surprises me that the rural poor continue to vote conservative, when the conservatives keep fleecing them dry. The urban poor are now supporting social democrats, and democratic-socialists to find candidates that will provide them relief… Mamdani, AOC, Sanders…

Poverty levels are being severely affected by healthcare emergencies. The number of bankruptcies and collections related to healthcare issues is rising each day. More people are going to the poor house, because of cancer, heart, lung, or emergency medical issues. Hospitals are charging a fortune, and insurance companies are covering less. I have an excellent health plan by today’s standards, but my recent joint replacement (which was necessary after eight years of delays) cost me $1500 out of pocket. If I went to our local orthopedic specialists that out-of-pocket cost would have been $4500 before even getting the surgery. This is why I avoided the specialty clinic and went to the largest public health hospital in Eastern Iowa. This is the high cost of American health care in a nutshell.

Another cause for the increase in poverty is the lack of wage growth. Actually this is wage theft. Big businesses can afford to pay a living wage. They choose not to, to make more money. The state of Iowa’s minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. If you work a full week at 40 hours that is $290. A full month is $1160. A full year is $13,920. A gallon of gas at the closest station to me is $4.39. Our utility bill is always around $250 a month. Our dog food bill is $175 a month. Mastiffs are truly a luxury item. The lack of growth in the minimum wage has not kept up with inflation for the last 20 years. Big businesses can pay more in wages and still make money. The biggest policy problem in DC and in Des Moines is the socialism of big business and hanging the small business owner out to dry… justifying the grift of that $7.25 minimum wage.

Poverty is generational, systemic, and within the richest country on the globe an embarrassment. It is no wonder the politicians use nefarious statistics to hide the true story. Instead they brag about how the rich are doing on the stock market. What if we actually used the health of the poor as our success indicator? As I look at educational comparisons of the number of impoverished children within the top 30 developed countries, the United States is in the bottom third for nearly all of the statistical comparisons. The use of fraudulent and ineffective reform measures that do not address sociological conditions of poverty just makes it worse.

Our politicians have the power to change this. They just choose not to. This is why Zohran Mamdani scares them. This is why the entire Democratic Socialist movement scares them. We don’t talk about the problem, we want to fix the problem. Poverty in the United States doesn’t have to be this abhorrent. There are ways to fix it. A good start would be universal health care.

…so it goes…