A Different Approach to Breaking the Cycle of Poverty

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/12/a-different-approach-to-breaking-the-cycle-of-poverty/384029/

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ATLANTA—This neighborhood south of downtown is bleak, with empty parking lots fenced in by barbed wire, and skeletons of buildings covered in graffiti.

Many of the people walking the long blocks of Mechanicsville grew up poor, and their children are likely to be poor, too. It’s part of the vicious cycle of poverty—without access to high-quality education, kids born into poverty are likely to remain there for their whole lives, despite the promise of the American Dream. According to the Kids Count Data Center, a project sponsored by the Annie E. Case Foundation, 39 percent of African American children lived in poverty in 2013, the highest rate of any racial group. And one study found that 42 percent of African Americans born into the lowest-income category remained there as adults.

Policymakers have some ideas about what can help ensure that children born into poverty succeed. In one oft-cited study from the 1970s, the Abecederian Project randomly selected certain infants from low-income families to attend full-time, high-quality education from infancy through age 5, while others were put in a control group. The children who participated in the education program had higher cognitive test scores, were more likely to attend a four-year college, and put off having a first child for longer.

Similarly, the Perry Project in the 1960s randomly selected African American children born into poverty for high-quality pre-school and followed those students throughout their lives; those who attended pre-school had higher earnings, were more likely to hold a job and had committed fewer crimes than the control group that did not attend pre-school.