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<p>But whose choices? Definitely doesn’t seem like it is the kids’.</p>
<p>One of the things I find heartbreaking is how difficult it is for young black men in my area. If they do the right thing, stay in school and do their best, it’s still much tougher for them than for other groups because they are less likely to be hired for those first jobs that will allow them to actually be in college on a day to day basis. The conflict between the needs of some American kids and some illegal immigrants takes a toll.</p>
<p>Ohiobassmom, I’m still waiting to hear whether “welfare” means TANF or SSI or what.</p>
<p>“All 4 of these kids have continued this cycle…”</p>
<p>You sure make it sound like good and bad parenting choices launch kids in different directions. Do you really think it is so simple to change the trajectory when your parents launched you in a bad direction?</p>
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<p>I find this pretty offensive. My grandfather came to this country from Eastern Europe with no English, no skills, and a 5th grade education. He worked as a lumberjack then later as a mill hand and taught himself English by reading the Bible, the only book he had ever read in his native tongue. His son–my Dad–spoke no English until he started public school, but was fortunate enough to get drafted during World War II, because that allowed him to earn an engineering degree at the local public university on the G.I. Bill after the war. I graduated from our state’s flagship, then went on to earn two graduate degrees from Ivies. Classic up-by-the-bootstraps immigrant family history.</p>
<p>My D2 has a lot of friends who come from immigrant families, and my wife does some work with immigrant communities. We have very large communities of recent Hmong and Somali immigrants here in Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Many of those immigrant households are poor, and very few of the parents have college degrees (or for that matter, any college at all). Many don’t speak English, or have only rudimentary English; the kids mostly learn English in school and on the playground. But they’re decent, hard-working people, with close-knit families and close-knit communities. They came here because they aspire to better, but they know it will come through their children’s generation, not theirs, and for that reason they value education highly. The kids work hard in school, and most will graduate HS; many, though perhaps not a majority, will go on to college.</p>
<p>But I think these kids face a lot of barriers that my Dad’s generation didn’t face. Partly it’s racial; there’s still a lot of discrimination. The Somalis face the added challenge of being Muslim, and from a country that has spawned and harbored terrorists and pirates, which makes them doubly or triply suspect in the eyes of many; anti-Muslim bias seems to be the one form of religious bigotry that is still largely socially acceptable. Then there’s this widespread anti-immigrant sentiment abroad in the land. No doubt there was some anti-immigrant sentiment in my grandfather’s day, too, but in the communities where he found work pretty much everyone was an immigrant or the son or daughter of immigrants, so my Dad didn’t really face much of it. Then, too, my Dad didn’t need to contend with the truly horrendous urban schools that a lot of these kids get trapped in. Nor did he have to pick his way through a minefield of gangs, drugs, crime, and violence. Yet despite all that, most of the Somali and Hmong immigrant kids will graduate from HS, probably at higher rates than the native-born poor, though I don’t have the stats to back that up.</p>
<p>Then comes the final barrier: paying for college. The immigrant kids my D2 hangs with all aspire to college, and many will find a way to get there. But it’s a tough row to hoe. Let’s be real about this: it’s only a handful of elite colleges and universities that meet 100% of need and will give a free ride to a kid from an impoverished background with an EFC of zero. The vast majority of colleges and universities don’t come close to meeting 100% of need. Most immigrant kids won’t qualify for those elite colleges, and even those who might on paper have a shot at it aren’t going to be steered in that direction by their parents (who just don’t know what’s out there) or their HS GCs (who at our local public HS are responsible for hundreds of kids and can do little more than herd them through and make sure they take their ACTs, and who in any event have a good deal less knowledge of colleges and college admissions and financial aid than the average CC reader). So for most kids from immigrant families, our state’s flagship is the highest they aspire to. It’s a decent public university overall and impressively strong in some areas, but I’m ashamed to say it doesn’t come close to meeting 100% of need: it meets full need for only 29% of its students, and the average percent of need met is 74%. If you’re from a household that’s making $20,000 a year by piecing together several minimum-wage jobs, it’s going to be an awfully daunting challenge to come up with that last $6,000—one quarter of our flagship’s $24K COA, which is what on average these kids will be on the hook for after the university has made its best FA offer (which will include loans and work-study as well as grants). So many will make compromises: start out in a community college, or choose a less expensive second-tier state college, or attend college part-time, or begin college on what’s known in Minnesota as “the six-year plan,” meaning you start out planning to attend college intermittently and take semesters or whole years off to work to pay for it. The six-year plan worked for a lot of people in my father’s generation and even for some in mine, but given the high cost of college and the difficulty these days of getting anything but a minimum-wage job without skills or a college education, the six-year plan now more frequently ends up stretching to 8, or 10, or ending in no college degree at all.</p>
<p>I admire these immigrant kids and their families. They’ve got drive, and spunk, and ambition. They’re incredibly self-disciplined and hard-working, they have brave dreams of pulling themselves up by the bootstraps just as my father’s generation did, and I marvel at how far they get on a shoestring. But our society doesn’t make it easy for them. Many people seem to have given up caring that there are fewer and fewer ladders of opportunity. As for the “culture of entitlement,” I sure don’t see it in my D2’s friends or their families. In fact, the biggest “culture of entitlement” I see these days is among the contentedly well-off, many of whom seem to feel they deserve every privilege and advantage they have in life, and who smugly justify inequality by blaming poverty on the poor.</p>
<p>Did you read the entire story…there were 8 children in that family overall–1 is severely mentally ■■■■■■■■ and was placed in a “home” early on, the rest of the kids made a life for THEMSELVES, despite what their parents never did for them–which was lay in their bed and drink all day long. The point being, one sister who by all accounts had nothing going for her made SURE her children succeeded–her choice. Those 4 kids could have made the same choice their aunt did for HER kids.</p>
<p>People being “offended” by the facts is what stops helpful discourse on a subject.</p>
<p>Hana-welfare–an all encompassing word to include section 8 housing, food stamps, WIC, TANF and whatever else you want it to be. SSDI is something different. Get over it.</p>
<p>[Navigating</a> the welfare system | Minnesota Public Radio News](<a href=“http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/05/12/minnesota-welfare-programs/]Navigating”>Navigating the welfare system | MPR News) Here is a link to the WELFARE programs in our state…</p>
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<p>I think you meant to address this to mncollegemom. I know we’re both in flyover states and all… ;)</p>
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<p>The only ones you can have “for life” are for disabled, blind, elderly or ill people. Except food stamps.</p>
<p>No, I meant to address it to you, ohiobassmom – you were responding to posts about “welfare,” and I was pointing out that that term is flying around here with no definition.</p>
<p>I’m in a flyover state, too.</p>
<p>“section 8 housing, food stamps, WIC, TANF and whatever else you want it to be”</p>
<p>What I want it to be has nothing to do with it. You made claims about people you have met personally who are getting a “government supplied check giving them money each month” for “walking around the mall” their entire adult lives. I’m asking you to follow up on that statement and tell me which programs are cutting the “welfare paycheck” to these people you know. It’s a simple question.</p>
<p>Although it has no time limits, Section 8 doesn’t send any check, so that can’t be what you meant. WIC ends when the youngest child reaches age 5, so that can’t be what you meant either.</p>
<p>MNcollegemom- sorry, I agree with Hanna. It isn’t “whatever else you want it to be”- these are specific government programs targeted to specific low income members of the population. It’s like me saying, “The government should get out of the subsidy business”. Well sure- you probably don’t like your tax dollars paying gentleman farmers not to grow stuff they had no intention of growing in the first place. But maybe you like taking a bus for $1.50 a ride instead of the $6 it would cost you if the government weren’t subsidizing public transportation. Or maybe you like having your mortgage subsidized by the rest of us- allowing you to live in a nicer house than you could otherwise afford via the tax deduction on mortgage interest.</p>
<p>See? It’s not “whatever else you want it to be”- you need to cite specific government programs and tell us exactly what upsets you about them.</p>
<p>WIC upsets you? Subsidizing milk and cheese for poor kids? And a nice subsidy to the dairy farmers along the way???</p>
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<p>All I said about welfare was: “I completely agree that sweeping generalizations about “lazy poor people on welfare” really don’t move the discussion forward”.</p>
<p>So I’m not sure what you’re asking me to clarify.</p>
<p>Not every state has the same programs available. Some states have state and local programs that are all welfare programs outside of the federal programs. I never said the programs upset me, I was classifying them for a poster that was trying to prove some kind of a point?? The point I was also trying to make is that there are people that take advantage of the system and don’t see that getting an education is a way for them to do any better than walking around the mall all day while the county, state and federal government mails them checks. These are the people that we need to CHANGE the way they think to lessen the educational gap. The problem is, on a board like this, someone will take one sentence out of context and run with it…and change what I said to “all people on welfare are lazy”. It’s hard to have a conversation with people like that and with people that ignore the reality of what is going on in this country sitting in their cushy houses in upscale suburbs thinking that just bad luck put people where they are. Yes, sometimes it is bad luck, but those are NOT the people you see working the system. Those are the people you see using the system to get by until they can get a better job or finish their degree or whatever. THAT is what the system is designed to do. It’s not about talking milk and cheese from poor people…</p>
<p>Obviously parenting matters and when the parent is a drug abuser or alcoholic it drags the children down. Not everything or everyone’s weaknesses or disadvantages can be made whole by society or government. But in my own extended family, there are cases of children from the same parents going in completely different directions. Raised in the same household under the same conditions and one goes to college, becomes a professional and the other becomes blue collar. (Nothing wrong with that).</p>
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<p>Wow I’m not sure if all that was meant for me, but I’m not in a cushy house, nor did I spend most of my life in an upscale suburb, though I suppose you could call where I live now one, sort of.</p>
<p>I grew up in the ghetto that defines ghetto in this country. I was poor and I was surrounded by poor people, I went to school with poor people and I feel like I am entitled to share my own personal experience. My own personal experience has **not **been that any sort of entitlement attitude prevents poor people from getting an education. </p>
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<p>How does the underlying problem get addressed with the “entitlement attitude common in the poor population”?</p>
<p>menloparkmom…I tried to send you a PM but your PM box is full.</p>
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That was your first post on this thread. Perhaps I am among those who interpreted this wrong, but it certainly sounded like you were telling us that an “entitled attitude is common in the poor population”. To me, common means more people are that way than not. Sorry, but that is offensive. What in your life has allowed you to know so much about how others feel?</p>
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This also crossed my mind as I was reading this thread. Thank you for your post.</p>
<p>This article was in the local paper today & it brings up some good points.
( although I must note that the racial makeup of teachers in Seattle is pretty similar to the city as a whole, if not the district. There are also many administrators of color, both at the principal level & in district leadership, so not sure why this is so difficult, except that education is not often viewed as an enticing field to enter)</p>
<p>[Local</a> News | Wanted in Seattle classrooms: more teachers of color | Seattle Times Newspaper](<a href=“http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2017470322_teacherdiversity10m.html]Local”>http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2017470322_teacherdiversity10m.html)</p>
<p>“Sorry, but that is offensive.”</p>
<p>YES!!!</p>
<p>And how many people have to say?</p>
<p>So what is the solution. I have become aware over the last year, just how sheltered I am. To be honest, I always had the idea that is someone wanted to get ahead, they just needed a good work ethic. My parents were not rich, but education was VERY important… I don’t see how we fix societal problems… I just don’t see how… So I am just doing what is best for mine and yes we are rich now… I search it out. I try to do the absolute best for my kids. Maybe when they are gone, I will try to help out others in our community. Right now, I just don’t see how I have the time… But then I feel guilty… And lately between Occupy Wall Street, it has made me feel VERY guilty about having money… But then I think… wait, we tried very hard not to have any debt. We paid things off. Yes my husband is a doctor, but when we were dirt poor in med school, we didn’t have cable, cell phones (Ok…they didn’t exist yet), didn’t go out… We started saving the first year we were married…savings bonds automatically deducted… When I had my first kid and everyone else was going out to eat after Bible studies, I didn’t. We couldn’t afford it. We still don’t have cable… We worked hard to pay off our house as soon as possible and are putting it all in savings now… Yet, it feels like we have done something wrong in the current economy… I thought anyone could do that, but have come to realize that people don’t have the same upbringing/background of saving… I just don’t get how we fix this. I would do whatever it is in a heartbeat. I hate to see people suffering… We give to food banks and homeless shelters. We volunteer… But how do you stop the cycles??? I’m just so discouraged… I’ve taken to just retreating… But that won’t solve anything either…</p>