COMMENTARY: What We REALLY Learned from Katrina

[jochhejaam]

I just want to comment on this first point made in the article:



This is the most stupid point to make if you are trying to give someone a lesson on how to not "end up poor".

This author is saying that you should just go to school and skate through .. "Just be furniture".

Never in my life have I ever been asked to show my HS Diploma in the job market. Not when I was 18 years old, or anytime in the 20 years since. Sure, it says on a job application "Do you have a HS Diploma or a GED?" and everyone just marks "yes" and that's the end of the story.

But if you are trying to stress to someone that education is important in order to get a job, telling them to just coast through high school and just get a diploma isn't good advice.

The author of the article should have said either:

1. Concentrate on your high school studies and do well, so that you can get into college.

or

2. Learn a trade while in high school or shortly thereafter.

Because in reality, just getting a high school diploma doesn't make you any closer to getting a job (avoiding being poor) than if you just dropped out of high school in 10th grade.

I agree, the HS my son attended had 4 different diplomas and one of them was a "certificate of completion" which you could get even with flunking grades your senior year. That's a degree that leads to no where, ridiculous.
He also failed to stress the importance of support/encouragement from family/parents, that's not a given by any means.

[RandomGuy]

Also, I don't see it as a "blame the poor" mentality.

I see it as a "hope for the poor" study.

It shows that limited wealth, and a brighter future, is not as elusive as some might have them believe.

Funny that you use the word hope.

That is the one thing that usually gets extinguished in children at an early age by crushing poverty. The other day I read an interesting op-ed piece in the Chicago tribune by a reporter who had grown up in just such cir stances.

She said that the only difference between herself and the people she grew up with was that her mother kept hope alive in herself and that carried over to her daughter.

Also, knowing a bit about statistical methods, I would say that the study that this whole thread is based on is probably being taken out of context by the "blame the poor" crowd.

It is one thing to statistically analyze poverty, quite another to come up with realistic solutions for it.