This article first appeared in the “Money Issue” of The Mockingbird magazine.

There’s an obscure 1897 painting by the Russian artist Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky called “At the School Doors.” It shows a beggarly child of elementary school age, dressed in rags, standing at the edge of a classroom looking wistfully in at other children sitting at rows of desks. It’s a beautiful evocation of the tragedy of missed opportunity, and it reminds me of my grandfather.

Pap, as we called him, grew up in rural Kentucky during the Great Depression. He had been so neglected and malnourished that he had a permanent hunch and a mouth full of false teeth by the time he was in his early twenties. He didn’t go to school long or regularly enough to even learn to read because he had to work in tobacco. He didn’t have electricity, running water, or underwear until his late teens. His father was gone before he was born, his mother died of pneumonia when he was eight, and the sharecropper grandfather who had raised him died of throat cancer when he was fifteen — from which point Pap basically had to make it on his own.

That might sound like the start of a great American rags-to-riches story, but it’s not. Sure, he survived, thanks to the grace of relatives and neighbors and some lucky breaks, and ultimately carved out a solid working-class life for himself and his family. But there was nothing edifying or romantic about his being dirt poor — “poor as Job’s turkey,” he might say. It just sucked. It made growing up by turns tragic, excruciating, and dangerous, and it prevented him from pursuing all manner of life paths that might otherwise have been available to him. His story has always been a reminder to me of how recent desperate, life-threatening poverty is in our own history. For me, it’s just two generations removed. For many, even less.

Late in life, Pap used to say with a smirk, “Being poor ain’t no shame, but it sure is mighty inconvenient.” There’s no doubt it’s “inconvenient,” but I also suspect that being poor is actually full of shame. Because he had to work as a child, for instance, Pap never really learned to read, and he carried that dark secret throughout his life. I still remember his visceral anger one Sunday after he came home from church: Apparently the dimwitted leader of his adult Sunday school class had asked him to read aloud from scripture and kept pressing him on it when he declined, humiliating him in front of his peers. I don’t think he ever went back to that class.

We like to believe that poverty doesn’t really present insurmountable barriers — that anyone, no matter the situation they’re born into, can build a good middle-class life for themselves and their families through some mix of hard work, patience, faith, ingenuity, and integrity. The reality is that resources matter more than merit. My grandfather was one of the lucky ones who managed to escape poverty, and even then, the scars of deprivation never left him.

*

For those who grow up in middle- or upper-class neighborhoods, it might seem like severe poverty is not really an issue in the U.S. anymore, that it’s mostly a thing of the past or the burden of less developed countries. But despite having a graduate degree in International Development, I think I’ve learned the most about poverty right here on American soil. I’ve seen it affect people close to home, close to my heart. This was especially true during the five years I worked as a teacher at a high-poverty public middle schoo l— the hardest years of my life.

I learned a lot during that time that I didn’t want to know: about myself, my students, my country, and the relentless nature of poverty. Within days of entering the classroom, I slammed up against the grim realities of life for the “under-resourced.” My poorest students were typically multiple years behind their peers in almost every academic category. By middle school, some still couldn’t write in full sentences. They could usually read a little but lacked the fluency to understand what they were reading. These kids typically came to school tired, distracted, and malnourished. Some were chronically absent, or in trouble. Some wore shabby, stained clothes. In winter, they were inevitably underdressed. Twice, kids brought bed bugs into my classroom. It was not unusual for my poorest students to sleep through entire periods, no matter how much I prodded them.

Sometimes they smelled like they hadn’t bathed in weeks. They’d get mocked for it, and I’d struggle to shut that down. Poor kids tended to be more prone to disruptive or confrontational behavior, blowups, fights, and emotional and behavioral disorders — probably related to trauma and the chaos of their home lives. They complained about school food like the others, but they ate it.

These kids often bounced around from home to home between various caregivers, usually aunties or grandmas. Sometimes even from shelter to shelter. It was not uncommon for them to be involved in ugly custody battles, or for at least one of their parents to be dead or in prison. These kids basically never lived with both biological parents.

They rarely had access out of school to computers or reliable internet. They’d lose any books or papers that got sent home. They were typically “latchkey” kids — they didn’t have people at home regularly keeping tabs on them, checking in, making them do their homework or go to bed at a decent hour. Though still prepubescent, they often came and went as they pleased. They ate whatever was at hand, usually cheap feel-good food of the corner-store variety. They never had the kinds of enriching extracurriculars their middle-class peers did — traveling, going to museums and summer camps, attending local events or performances — and they rarely had much in the way of academic support. Summers were dead time for these kids, educationally speaking. Months on end of that “latchkey” life. What could possibly go wrong?

I had middle school students who had seen people get shot or family members hauled off to prison. It might sound like a cliché, but too often the poorest kids were exposed to and involved in dangerous things at a young age — violence, crime, sex, gang activity. One summer, a student of mine shot and killed another.

The challenges outside the classroom inevitably spilled in. How could they not? I got better at handling them over time, but there’s only so much a teacher can do.

*

Money matters. As Kendrick Lamar once put it, “Money trees is the perfect place for shade.” My encounters with my poorest students broke my heart. They also helped me begin to grasp how poverty can affect our lives in all kinds of ways, visible or not.

It’s no surprise that children who grow up poor suffer uniquely in education, health, and career. But research over the last two decades also suggests that part of the reason for this is that poverty actually has detrimental impacts on the brain itself, much of which can be attributed to the constant stress poverty inflicts. “When a person lives in poverty,” writes Tara García Mathewson in the Atlantic, “the limbic system is constantly sending fear and stress messages to the prefrontal cortex, which overloads its ability to solve problems, set goals, and complete tasks.”

As a teacher, I often asked myself, Why can’t they just focus and stop fighting me? Why can’t they see how important education is to their life prospects? Now I understand a little more.

One study in Science found that “a person’s cognitive function is diminished by the constant and all-consuming effort of coping with the immediate effects of having little money,” to the point that the “cognitive cost of poverty […] was practically like losing an entire night of sleep.” All told, as Alla Katsnelson summarizes in the New York Times,

dozens of studies have found that children raised in meager circumstances have subtle brain differences compared with children from families of higher means. On average, the surface area of the brain’s outer layer of cells is smaller, especially in areas relating to language and impulse control, as is the volume of a structure called the hippocampus, which is responsible for learning and memory.

Poverty is constant pressure. It’s mental noise. It sucks up energy and attention. It’s like having a chronic dull headache — it’s hard to think about much else until the pressure is relieved, and even then the experience of having lived with that pressure leaves a lasting imprint. Other things will always tend to take a back seat to meeting your immediate needs, and that certainly includes boring school stuff that may, at best, only have a long-term payoff.

In spite of all this, we expect these kids to come to school ready to learn. We expect them to sit quietly and be respectful and do their worksheets, to leave their “issues” at the door. And we expect them to keep doing this, diligently following expectations, year after year, decade after decade. We expect them to somehow scrape together the money to go to college and then start a respectable career and work their way up the ladder and stay out of debt and eventually get married and buy a house in the suburbs and on and on … holding it all together by sheer force of will, until someday, maybe in their fifties, they’ll have “made it.” If everything goes just right, all that work — all those decades of white-knuckling it through a hostile world — will have paid off. And life will finally look like a day in the Cleaver household. Just as God intended, right?

*

The steep odds and tough circumstances poor kids face can sometimes make what goes on in the bottom third of public schools feel like a hopeless charade. But after they leave school, their prospects don’t improve much. Our society never really stops punishing poor folks — with low wages, lax benefits, meagre protections and support, and heaps of shaming and blaming. When it comes to poverty reduction, we still tend to opt for the self-righteous “tough-love” approach, which presumes that poverty is somehow the best cure for itself.

Of course, it isn’t. Notwithstanding the corrosive effect of consumerism, the envy that the poor often have of the rich is not in fact unjustified. Poor folks know: If they had more money, they’d have healthier, happier lives.

There’s plenty of hard evidence to support this. Higher income levels, for example, track with way better health outcomes. According to a 2019 article in the New Republic, the richest Americans live 10–15 years longer on average than the poorest. They also get more years of good health — “eight to nine more years of ‘disability-free’ life after age 50 than poor people do,” according to the New York Times. In other words, even in the developed world, poverty is a life-and-death matter.

And to an extent, more money makes you happier as well. The causal mechanisms should be obvious here: More money makes you happier by making you less unhappy — by relieving the causes of stress and strain that you’re constantly carrying around if you’re poor, and at the same time by opening up new life opportunities that didn’t previously exist, including relational ones.

The writer and social scientist Arthur Brooks recently published an article in the Atlantic (“How to Buy Happiness”) in which he examined some of the data around the income-happiness connection. While he begins with the important caveat that money can’t buy happiness “off into infinity” and that “happiness flattens significantly after $100,000,” for those making less, especially the poor, a little more money can make a big difference. “As economists have repeatedly shown,” he writes, “well-being rises with income at low socioeconomic levels because it alleviates the problems of poverty. People can erase calorie deficits, educate their kids, and go to the doctor.”

It sounds so simple: Just add resources. It’s like a really basic pancake mix. Of course, it’s a little more complicated than all that — but not that much.

Let’s revisit that painting I mentioned at the outset. Unlike in the world it depicts — or that of my grandfather’s childhood — my students were not standing outside looking in. They were inside the classroom with at least some chance to learn, and were not, generally speaking, dressed in rags. That’s progress. But the poverty they faced was still a massive barrier — an invisible burden — that haunted their lives and prevented them from fully accessing the opportunities that existed for others.

People outside education sometimes ask me what I think needs to change — how we can “fix” public education. And there are lots of specific things we could do, specific problems we could address — things like inequitable funding, poor teacher training and compensation, summer learning losses, oversized classes, segregation, a lack of mental health services, overemphasis on testing, crumbling infrastructure, and much else. But the biggest problems in education are not actually in education. You can’t “fix” education until you fix poverty. And that’s rather a tall order.

For five years, I gave what I had to my students, and there were certainly good things that happened in my classroom, thanks be to God. Often in spite of myself, I loved my students, and I was able to show up for them, teach them a few things, and help them to grow.

But by the time I quit my job at the end of my fifth year, I still felt like a failure. I came out of that school exhausted, angry, and full of sadness and despair for my poorest students. In the grand scheme, I knew I was utterly insufficient to the deeper challenges they faced — and for the record, so are the Hollywood-style “super-teachers” out there, if they exist. Education alone isn’t going to “save” the poorest kids. The barriers they face outside school are just too high, the dark roots of poverty too deep. Looking back, it’s clear I needed a break, a chance to reset.

In our best moments, the suffering we see in others elicits compassion and service in us. But we also can’t lose sight of the overwhelming limitations in our own capacity to “fix” much of anything, even in ourselves. But perhaps we can view life less as an endless struggle for improvement, more as a gift to be shared; less as a series of problems to be “fixed,” and more as an opportunity to love people. And no matter how bleak the circumstances, God is not absent from our suffering, which is reason #1 for hope. Hope somehow still punctuates our despair, laughter our grief, and joy our suffering.

The late Jack Gilbert made that point memorably in his beautiful poem “A Brief for the Defense.” It begins with some rather harrowing observations: “Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies / are not starving someplace, they are starving / somewhere else.” And yet, Gilbert notices, beauty and delight still seem to abound: “There is laughter / every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta, / and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.”

My grandfather was always a consummate wag. And despite the tough circumstances many of my students faced, they never missed an opportunity to enjoy themselves, to savor simple pleasures or have a good laugh, even if it was at my expense. They understood, even when I failed to, that you have to leave room for joy, no matter the struggle. And that’s one of the lessons from my experiences in the classroom. As Gilbert continues,

If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

*

After a year away, I’ve decided to go back into education. I am still the same mediocre teacher I was before, and my students will still face the same crushing challenges. But I feel my spirits renewed: I’m looking forward to it. And while that indelible image of the impoverished child standing on the edge of the classroom still touches my heart and inspires me to serve, I reenter education with a deeper sense of my own limitations.

Surely the great problems of this world cry out for a response, and we should take them seriously — but not ourselves. As Canadian suffragette Nellie McClung once put it, “Let us do our little bit with cheerfulness and not take the responsibility that belongs to God. None of us can turn the earth around; all we can ever hope to do is to hit it a few whacks on the right side.”

 

 

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