Breaking the Poverty Cycle

Poor youngsters benefit immensely from solid preschool programs like Head Start. That is well documented, but the problem is that there are not enough desks in Head Start classrooms for thousands of children in many cities. This is the kind of problem that the Urban Strategies Council plans to tackle in an experiment in Oakland aimed at helping families break out of poverty.

“A Chance for Every Child,” the group’s program prospectus, describes children and families at risk of being poor from generation to generation. To tackle persistent poverty, the council--which is financed in large part by the Rockefeller Foundation--plans to build on programs that are known to work when they are available. The commitment is for three years, with a goal of developing approaches that can work in city after city.

The council is headed by Angela Glover Blackwell, a public-interest lawyer formerly with San Francisco’s Public Advocates law firm. Preschool education is a good example of the council’s goals and the way in which it plans to reach them.

The council already knows two things about preschool education in Oakland. It knows that Head Start and similar programs work. It also knows that there is room for only about one-third of the children from welfare families in Oakland. What about the other poor youngsters of Head Start age?

So the next step in Oakland will be to pull together city and school officials to see whether Oakland has enough public resources to expand the preschool programs.

Another important group on the council’s list will be parents. Why don’t they send their children to preschool? Why don’t they put more pressure on Oakland to make room for their youngsters?

Once the council has all the support that Oakland can afford, the backing of parents and the commitment of teachers, it will start pinpointing funds to make Head Start and other preschool classrooms available to every eligible youngster.

Using similar step-by-step techniques, the Urban Strategies Council will also focus on expanding other programs, both public and private, that have already helped lift families out of poverty.

One obvious way to relieve poverty is to help men and women with incomes below the poverty level earn more money. Another essential ingredient is better health care--starting with early and adequate prenatal care for poor mothers, whether teen-age or middle-age. Poor babies, whether first-born or last-born, often weigh less than they should. Urban Strategies wants to expand community health care because a bad start can combine with other problems to set in motion generations of poverty.

Head Start is only the beginning of the task of improving education as a means of beating poverty. School is often the only hope for poor children. Many of the poor students succeed brilliantly in the classroom, but the ones who don’t can usually forget about college. Without a high-school degree, they are more likely to face the same old traps: lack of skills, teen-age parenthood and joblessness. Without an education, they are less likely to know the rewards of a steady job and a decent paycheck--the keys to generations of self-sufficiency.

Breaking the cycle of poverty is monumental work, but it’s not hopeless. Hope grows when an organization like the Urban Strategies Council makes a sustained commitment so that more poor children have a decent chance.