<p>I think those kind of programs that give coats and mittens are simply designed to meet very immediate needs - to give coats and mittens to people who don’t have them. They serve a very important function, but they are what they are. They are quite different to programs to address wider family or societal issues though longer term interventions.</p>
<p>I think part of the difficulty in talking about interventions is that “the poor” are not some undifferentiated mass of people who all have the same needs. </p>
<p>I was reading a report recently about ESL provision in MA. The study found that the average income of immigrants who were fluent in English was $25,000+ p.a. higher than the income of those who were not. Even when you looked just at immigrants who had a college education, the difference was $20,000 p.a. But at any one time there was a waiting list of 10,000 people to get on an ESL course, and people could be on a waiting list for two and a half years. For those people, who want to learn, just having more money available to open up more slots in classes would help, but it wouldn’t address any of the needs of people who already spoke English or who lacked the education to take advantage of the ESL provision available.</p>
<p>When my mother took ESL courses, they included a component designed to educate parents about the US school system, about how their children could achieve at school and go to college, about the options available to them. But these particular courses were almost exclusively taken by people who were well-educated themselves (although I understand it is a bit different now, due to changing patterns of immigration, through the 90s when my mother went, the educational qualifications of the people taking the courses would put the average graduate school to shame!). They knew what achieving well in school could do for you, they wanted their children to go to college, but they needed information about how best to support their children in an unfamiliar system, how to do their best with the resources they now had available to them (and the English language skills to do this). When these courses are funded and people have time to attend them, they meet the needs of this particular population well, but it is a particular population of the low-income population as a whole. Other groups of low-income English language learners didn’t have the time, or didn’t see the point, of attending these more time-intensive courses, and of course they were not available to English-speakers.</p>
<p>Similarly, when I was at school, I was part of a program designed to prepare low-income and first generation children for college. It was a very good program, and very helpful, but all the very small number of children chosen for it were those who had already risen to the top of their classes, and who were already motivated and already achieving. It worked out great for those who were part of the program, virtually all of whom went on to college, but for the ones who were not chosen - the less motivated, the less already high achieving, the ones who had already given up on the idea of going to college by the time they started high school - it had no impact at all.</p>
<p>Some groups amongst the low-income population are much easier to target with interventions than others. Both financially and politically, it can make a great deal of sense to target your resources at the people who have the best chance of succeeding. To me, while you no doubt should assist the ones who are easy and help them to achieve what they can, the greatest challenge is how you intervene to help those that some people in this thread seem happy just to write off - all the messy, complicated, difficult… children.</p>