The pathway from poor housing to poor health does not always run in a straight line. One little girl in the intensive care unit, Megan Sandel remembered, had an extreme allergy to cats. The family had a cat. “We said, ‘Oh, you really need to get rid of the cat. The child’s really allergic to the cat, and we think that’s part of the reason why she had this really bad asthma attack,’ ” Dr. Sandel recalled. “And the parents looked at me dead on and said, ‘But the cat kills the mice.’ Clearly the house was the problem, and the solution was part of the problem.”
When she and Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, also a pediatrician, did a study asking poor parents being offered housing assistance how they thought their previous housing had affected their children’s health, the words “emotionally” and “mentally” were spoken again and again. “Emotionally, no space. Too much noise in the house for homework,” said the notes from one interview. “Emotionally. Domestic violence, and also the apartment is very cold,” said another parent. “Emotionally. We can’t be together all the time.” “Mentally. Can’t go outside to play or do anything [because of street crime].” “Mentally. He needs his own room. He still has to sleep with me.” “Mentally. Grandfather is alcoholic and screams. A move is better so the kid won’t be scared of grandfather. Sister is mentally sick.”
The psychological toll on children was the concern most mentioned by parents, Dr. Sharfstein said. “A lot of families are living with friends or relatives who really don’t want them there, and the parents have to share bedrooms with the kids, and the kids have no space, and some of the parents say they can’t do their homework because there’s no quiet, they’re crying all the time, or, ‘They hate my aunt.’ People fighting in the house. I’ve heard a couple of horror stories about kids who were abused by people in the house.”
And the rats. “The kids are just terrified of rats,” he said. “One woke up with rats on him and won’t go to sleep, is having trouble in school.” The boy is caught in the unbroken cycle: Poverty leads to health and housing problems. Poor health and housing lead to cognitive deficiencies and school problems. Educational failure leads to poverty.
In a tight housing market with high rents, low incomes, and inadequate government assistance, the goal of improving conditions often means getting working poor families the subsidies they have been illegally denied. That occupies the lawyers and social workers in the pediatrics department, which treats many children who should be benefiting from food stamps, welfare payments, and Section 8 housing vouchers. The vouchers, which are federally funded, pay at least part of the rent for privately owned houses and apartments, but there is not enough money or housing in the program, and the waiting lists are long in most areas. With rising wealth driving up housing costs, the working poor have been left practically helpless, unable to get into the market and unserved by underfunded federal and state housing programs.
The system is also plagued by welfare cheats. They are not people who receive welfare illicitly. The more damaging welfare cheats are the caseworkers and other officials who contrive to discourage or reject perfectly eligible families. These are the people who ask a working poor mother a few perfunctory questions at the reception desk, then illegally refuse to give her an application form, despite the law’s provision that anyone of any means may apply. It is a clever tactic, say the lawyers, because they cannot intervene on behalf of a client who has not applied.
The welfare cheats are the officials who design Kafkaesque labyrinths of paperwork that force a recipient of food stamps or Medicaid or welfare to keep elaborate files of documents and run time-consuming gauntlets of government offices while taking off from work. “I have clients with daily planners that are filled more than mine are,” said Ellen Lawton, an attorney at the clinic.
If you want to stay on welfare, you have to provide pieces of paper proving that your children have been immunized and are attending school. If you want food stamps, you have to deliver pay stubs and tax returns. If you want a job, you need day care for your children, and if you can’t afford it, you have to get a day-care voucher, and if you want a voucher, you have to prove that you’re working. Getting a voucher involves multiple visits to multiple offices—during working hours, of course. Caught in this Catch-22, one mother put herself on waiting lists at infant day-care centers all over the city; meanwhile, her caseworker told her that she had to get a job before she could get day care paid for. Lawton quoted the caseworker: “So if you’re on a waiting list, you need to find somebody who’s gonna watch your kid.”
Every demand for a document provides an opportunity for a cutoff, because no matter how meticulous a recipient may be, pieces of paper seem to get lost in the bureaucracy. “I just had a client like this last week,” said Lawton. “She had received three different notices informing her in three different ways that she was being cut off. One of the issues was that she hadn’t provided a certain piece of paper about her attendance at a [job-training] program. And she said she had provided the paper, but they lost it. Fine, we provided another piece of paper. She receives another notice that she’s going to be cut off. Well, it’s actually a different computer system that’s generating that notice, so she has to take time off from her program to go and get another piece of paper, bring it to the office.… Being poor is a full-time job, it really is.”
It also promotes absurdity. One mother, desperate to get her asthmatic child out of a harmful apartment, obtained a letter from her pediatrician saying the house was making the child sick, which technically qualified her for emergency assistance, Zotter said. But the welfare department’s receptionist turned her away three times, telling her that she already had housing and couldn’t even apply for temporary shelter as long as she wasn’t homeless. The mother seriously considered moving out and making herself homeless to qualify. As the lawyer was explaining forcefully to a caseworker how the welfare department had broken the law, “she gave up and she moved to Atlanta, because she said she didn’t feel like the system was helping her.”
Just under half such cases can be solved with an attorney’s phone call, Zotter estimated. One involved the mother of another patient who was denied an application for emergency food stamps. “If you’re really low income you can get food stamps within twenty-four to forty-eight hours,” Zotter said, “and then they do your verification and see if you really qualify. And they wouldn’t let her apply for it. I just called them up and said, this is her income, she has no resources, she qualifies for this, you have to give it to her. And they did.”
Blessed are the poor who have lawyers on their side.
Chapter Nine
DREAMS
But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tr ead softly because you tread on my dreams.
—William Butler Yeats
“When I grow up,” said Shamika, age eleven, “I want to be a lawyer so I can help people.” What kind of people? I asked her. “The homeless,” she replied. “Little kids need help. That’s why I want to help the homeless.” She made her declaration with the bright certainty of a sixth-grader whose eyes still shone in the conviction that anything was possible.
In her desperate neighborhood of Anacostia, across the polluted river from Washington’s marble monuments, that clear gaze of childhood rarely survives into high school. Along the way, somehow, the visions from younger years are dulled—or distorted into fanciful notions of fame and riches on the gridiron and under the hoops.
Virtually all of the youngsters I spoke with in poverty-ridden middle schools wanted to go to college. Some of their parents were unemployed; others moved furniture, sorted library books, and cleaned government buildings. Many worked in supermarkets, factories, nursing homes, garages, hos- pitals, and hair salons. Only a few had skilled jobs as mechanics, carpenters, electricians, and computer operators. To realize their hopes, most of their children would have to move up substantially through the social hierarchy of education, jobs, and income; they would have to fulfill the Ameri
can Dream.
Three of the five sixth-graders in Shamika’s group imagined themselves as lawyers; one wanted to be an optometrist; and the fifth, Robert, saw himself “working in a office like a [corporate] president or something or a doctor.” His goal was to have the power to do good. “Like if my family hurt or something, then I can go over there and I can even help them out,” he said. Running a company, “I’d go over and help homeless people out and give them money and help out with charity and stuff.”
In a poor neighborhood of Akron named Opportunity Park, a group of sixth-graders wanted to be singers and pediatricians, a police officer and a nurse, a rapper and a mechanic. Their ambitions spilled over the brims of their young lives. Dominique, the daughter of a construction worker and a hair stylist, yearned to be “a archeologist and a pediatrician.” At the same time? I asked. “No, a archeologist when I get older and a pediatrician when I’m a little bit younger, like in my twenties and thirties.”
Blacks in seventh grade at the Akron school listed the most visible black models: football player, basketball player, and rapper. Whites mentioned artist, veterinarian, and auto mechanic. Don, who was white, explained why he wanted to pave roads for the city: “The pay is good.” At schools in two low-income Washington, D.C., neighborhoods, seventh-graders, almost all of them black, mentioned lawyer, photographer, football player, basketball player, FBI agent, policewoman, salesman, doctor, dancer, computer specialist, architect, and artist. Eighth-graders in Akron said: marine biologist, computer engineer, scientist, construction worker, lawyer, and pediatrician. Professions they happened to encounter or read about or see on television entered their hopefulness, sometimes as a passion, more often as a notion carried on a breeze of impulse. Some would realize their aspirations, if overall statistics were applied, but most would not. Many would drop out of high school; few would go to college; most would be trapped in low-wage jobs.
Their ambitions brought a sneer from Mrs. C, a veteran who had taught history for fifteen years at Shamika’s school, the Patricia R. Harris Educational Center in Washington. “They come late every day and are out every other day,” the teacher scoffed. She was black, and so were nearly all of her students, which freed her to be tough and candid without being accused of racism. “I ask them, ‘Where are you going to be ten years from now?’ They’re gonna be doctors, they’re gonna be basketball players. They’re gonna be lawyers. They’re gonna be football players. I say, ‘How many football teams are there, and how many players on each team? What is the chance that you’ll be able to do that? And do you realize that if you’re gonna be a lawyer, that requires reading skills? If you’re gonna be a doctor, that requires math skills, reading skills? Yo u can do it, but you’ve got to get going.’ ” She was treading on dreams, and not softly, but she was trying to tell them the truth. “I want them to dream but be realistic in the process.”
For Mrs. C and many other teachers, the truth was tainted with exasperation. “They’re lazy,” she said. “They don’t want to read, don’t do their homework. Homework is like pulling teeth. A lot of them don’t get attention at home, so they want it in school,” and they misbehave to get it. Were there rewards and punishments at her disposal? She shook her head. “They’re perfectly happy making Fs,” she declared. “They don’t care. We’re the ones who care.”
Shamika was already caught in the cycle of mutual resentment. She was cute and talkative. Two charming braids began high on her head and hung down over her ears, testimony to her mother’s attentive affection. Her words tumbled out so fluently that her teacher called her parents to complain that she talked too much in class; Shamika insisted that she was being confused with another Shamika. And so her parents did not like her teacher, she reported with relish, and she tried not to care about her teacher’s evaluations. “I got a paper back, and she was being smart on the paper,” Shamika said acidly. “I had missed this word, and she was being smart, told me, ‘You need to study, gril.’ and she put it G-R-I-L. And then when my report card came, she gave me a D, and she didn’t even know how to spell ‘girl’!”
Children can be trapped in corrosive relationships between home and school. Some parents with little education or busy work schedules cannot help with homework, cannot take the time for meetings with teachers, and do not know how to be constructive advocates for their children. Some had such bad experiences as students—sometimes in the very same building— that now, as mothers and fathers, they perceive school as a hostile place to be avoided. When they hear from teachers, the news is rarely good (most teachers call with problems not praise), so the conversation may be humiliating and adversarial.
Across all socio-economic classes, parents adopt various postures in dealing with schools: the confrontational, the conciliatory, the cooperative, the indulgent, the negligent. At the lower end of the spectrum, however, a mother or father confronts particular problems. For many a parent in poverty, love for a child is akin to anxiety. In the context of danger and failure, against a life history of little achievement, raising a son or daughter offers another chance at success. But that goal stands at the end of a long road sown with the land mines of drugs and gangs, of disrupted schools and decaying households. So, for a few parents, the aggressive methods that have worked best for survival in rough families and rough neighborhoods are the favored techniques of interaction. Having defended themselves effectively in their homes and streets, they carry the confrontational manner into their children’s schools. It is a crude form of support for their children, and some of their children imitate the style.
“The first day I came in, I was called a white bitch by a kid, like, a second-grader,” said Miss V, a brand-new graduate of Columbia who taught second grade at Kenilworth Elementary in Washington. “I was hit on several occasions by the children, like, punched.” More frightening, though, was the hostility from parents, many of whom were children themselves when their babies were born. Among the “very young adult mothers and sometimes fathers,” she observed, “if you say something like, ‘Your child’s doing this and this in the classroom,’ they’re very defensive because they feel that it’s a reflection of their parenting.… Sometimes they will be like, ‘Well, my son or daughter said this about you in the classroom, and what are you doing to him and her, because they’ve never had problems like this before.’ And we also got a lot of, like, ‘I’m gonna come and beat the shit out of you white bitches.’ ”
Normal teaching duties became risky, even such an innocuous gesture as a note home inquiring about a girl’s long absence, Miss V said. The child’s mother, who had assaulted a teacher two years before, “wrote me a threatening letter in response: ‘If I want my daughter to be out of school, she’s gonna be out of school.’ ” Then the classroom next door was invaded by neighborhood toughs brought by another parent to threaten the teacher, who was also a young white woman. “I feared for my life,” Miss V said, and both she and her colleague transferred to other schools at the end of the year.
At the opposite extreme, whites are often stereotyped by African-American parents as permissive and unduly lax in disciplining children. It is an image that emerges repeatedly in interviews about attitudes across racial lines. Miss V was seen that way by a few parents who tried to enlist her as an ally by giving her license to hit their kids. “ ‘Just take ’em in the bathroom,’ ” she quoted one of them as saying, “ ‘and I’ll give you a letter saying you can do that.’
“ ‘Well, I can’t,’ ” Miss V replied. “A lot of teachers do a little of that,” she admitted, but it was against the law.
Across the gulf of race and class, encounters between parents and teachers can perplex both sides. Miss V was puzzled to find most of her students’ parents “very, very concerned with their kids, even the children that were very messed up and whose parents I knew had been through crack.” She could not quite sort this out. “They love their kids dearly, and their kids are very precious to them,” she said with surprise and admiration.
If the combative parents stand at one end of the spectrum, the absent parents are at the other, and they are much more numerous. Low turnouts at parent-teacher meetings have become a chronic disease of low-income school districts. “They can live one block from the school, they’ll never come down and visit,” complained Theodore Hinton, principal of Washington’s Harris center, which educates children from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade. “Out of my seventy students,” said Mr. I, a math teacher at Dunbar High School in Washington, “at my last parent-teacher conferences I saw eight parents.” Even where schools have opened their doors to accommodate the odd hours of low-wage workers, or have offered child care during meetings, or have tried to lure parents by requiring them to pick up their children’s report cards in person, the successes have not been overwhelming. At Bell Multicultural High School in Washington, parents were supposed to get report cards at the main desk, then walk around to meet teachers. Suzanne Nguyen, who taught math there, usually saw the parents of about ten of her sixty students.
The absence sets a bad tone and is often misread by school personnel. In Akron’s Mabel M. Riedinger Middle School, 85 percent of the children were poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, and most were black, Latino, or Asian. When I asked several white staff members in the teachers’ lunchroom what problems the youngsters had, the answers were brutal. “They don’t value education, values that should have been taught at home,” complained a librarian. “They don’t care if they get suspended.” Other teachers at the table endorsed the contemptuous appraisal. It was part of a pattern in which students blame teachers, teachers blame parents, and parents blame schools. The fault always lies elsewhere.
The Working Poor Page 31