Category: Poverty & income gap
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More Meaningless Numbers from Virginia Educrats
by James A. Bacon In a story that generated front-page headlines, Governor Terry McAuliffe announced yesterday a “significant increase” in the number of Virginia public schools earning accreditation in 2015. The number of fully accredited schools increased by 10 percentage points to 78%. “Offering every Virginia student a world class education in a public school is…
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Shutting Down the School-to-Prison Pipeline
by James A. Bacon Amid growing national concerns about “mass incarceration,” particularly of African-Americans, a Center for Public Integrity study found in August that Virginia schools refer students to law enforcement agencies at a higher rate than schools in any other state in the country — and three times the national average. The report highlighted…
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Woolly Headed Thinking about Transportation
by James A. Bacon Virginia Beach’s ongoing debate over light rail is emblematic of everything that is wrong with Virginia’s system for determining which transportation projects get built. While the Virginia Department of Transportation is implementing a mechanism for ranking road and highway projects, there is no mechanism for ascertaining the proper balance between roads/highways and…
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How the War on Poverty Went Awry
by James A. Bacon In 1968, nearly five decades ago, Edward C. Banfield wrote a brilliant analysis of urban problems in America: “The Unheavenly City.” Today, his contributions have been all but forgotten. But they are worth resurrecting because of their prescience. While optimists proclaimed that the expansive programs of the Great Society would conquer poverty, Banfield…
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Addressing the Racial Divide in School Performance
by James A. Bacon Race is a bigger indicator of success than economic status in Lynchburg city schools, asserted Jay McClain, assistant superintendent for instruction, at a school board retreat yesterday. Even when controlling for economic disadvantage, white students show pass rates about 20 points higher than black students, he said, as reported by the…
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Highland View: a Poor School that Works
by James A. Bacon Highland View Elementary School educates children from one of the poorest districts in Bristol, a city where the poverty rate is nearly twice the state average. Poor families, mostly white, grapple with the same kinds of issues commonly associated with inner-city black families in Virginia’s urban crescent: broken families, high unemployment, alcohol…
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Maximizing the ROI on Investments in Human Capital
by James A. Bacon There is a sterile quality to the debate over universal childhood education. Liberals cite studies that say that it makes sense to invest in pre-school for poor children on the grounds that it increases the odds that kids will perform better academically, thus less likely to drop out of school, more…
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How Inflated Are Hospital Charity Care Numbers?
Bart Hinkle, an editorial writer at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, has long crusaded against “baroque and opaque” pricing in the hospital industry, a fundamental flaw in the health care system that makes it difficult for patients to exercise consumer choice. Now Hinkle is taking aim at the accounting conventions by which hospitals calculate how much charity care…
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Why Released Felons Fail
by Sarah Scarbrough Society chastises criminals, felons, addicts and others getting out of jail. The average citizen today thinks this population consists of bad guys. Why should people care about repeat offenders? They deserve to be locked up and the key thrown away. But in the next breath, people decry generational cycles of criminality and…
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Breaking the Cycle of Debt and Suspended Licenses
by James A. Bacon Joe Herbin has always been a hard worker. When he was 15 years old, he’d accumulated the $1,200 it took to buy an old Cadillac. The fact that he didn’t have a driver’s license — or was too young even to get one — wasn’t a deterrent. He installed a bad-ass sound…
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Conservatives, Planned Parenthood Is the Wrong Target
by James A. Bacon Like millions of other Americans, I was horrified by the videos detailing the traffic in aborted fetal tissues and organs in which Planned Parenthood takes part. But I’m not joining the parade of conservatives calling for the de-funding of the organization. Not only would de-funding be a meaningless gesture — Planned Parenthood doesn’t use…
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Income, Ethnicity and Student Indebtedness
by James A. Bacon Both sides of America’s ideological divide acknowledge that student debt is a huge and growing problem, and both sides deem the climbing delinquency rate on student loans to be a bad thing. The question is what to do about it. The Obama administration has chosen to target private career colleges, whose…
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Virginia's Tax Code the 35th Most "Unfair"
On the subject of state and local taxes (see previous post), a 2015 report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy says that Virginia has the 35th “most unfair” state and local tax system in the United States. By “unfair,” the Institute means regressive — poor households pay a larger share of their income…
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Virginia’s Tax Code the 35th Most “Unfair”
On the subject of state and local taxes (see previous post), a 2015 report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy says that Virginia has the 35th “most unfair” state and local tax system in the United States. By “unfair,” the Institute means regressive — poor households pay a larger share of their income…
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Purge the Algorithms
by James A. Bacon It’s Labor Day, a suitable occasion for opining on the future of work… One of the great questions of our era revolves around the impact of robotics and artificial intelligence on the job market. People have fretted about automation since the days of Ned Ludd, the knitting-frame wrecker. Machines have been replacing human…