RALEIGH – The Raleigh News & Observer embarrassed itself on Tuesday with a ludicrous front-page, above-the-fold story claiming that roughly half of North Carolina’s schoolchildren live below the poverty line.
No one with any knowledge of poverty, education, or, frankly, a connection to reality would believe such a thing. This is, in part, what editors are for – to spot ridiculous claims or inconsistencies and demand that reporters justify or excise them. This is, in part, why journalism has sunk so low in public esteem – because readers who actually know something about the subject being covered so often find media accounts incomplete, misleading, or risible.
Let me begin the explanation of why the N&O got the story very wrong by providing some definitions. The Washington-based McClatchy reporter, Halimah Abdullah, would have helped herself and her readers by distinguishing between “below the poverty line,” “low-income,” and “free or reduced-price lunch.” Each term has a different meaning.
The federal poverty line is a problematic measure of poverty – some believe it understates the extent of true destitution, others believe it overstates it – but at least it’s a starting point. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 18 percent of school-aged children in North Carolina live in families with incomes below the poverty line.
In theory, measurements of poverty should be constant, at least within the context of a given culture or nation. There has to be a fixed threshold, adjusted annually for price changes, above which a household or family is no longer considered poor. Otherwise, quite literally, the “poor” will always be with us.
On the other hand, there are valid reasons for using relative data based on what is called the income distribution. Rather than holding fixed an income threshold and then seeing how many people fall above or below it, a relative measure fixes a percentage – say, the top 10 percent or bottom 20 percent of households by income – and then looks for other information, such as the median incomes or other characteristics of each income group.
Although there is no ironclad definition of the relative term “low-income,” most analysts use it to refer the bottom quintile of the population. They then use “high-income” to refer to the top 20 percent, with the remaining three quintiles referred to as some flavor of “middle-income.”
If you apply the same reasoning to the public-school population, I’m afraid there will never be much news to report. By definition, 20 percent of today’s students are low-income. In the past, 20 percent were low-income. A century from now, 20 percent will be relatively low-income, even if by today’s standards their living conditions are middle-class.
The only relevant variable will be the percentage of school-age children who are schooled privately or at home. In most states, including North Carolina, this number is not large enough to change the income distribution much (and while the average income of such families is higher than the norm, most are far from wealthy).
So what we are left with, and what the underlying report from the Atlanta-based Southern Education Foundation actually used, is a far-broader statistic: the percentage of schoolchildren eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (FRL). Those thresholds are 130 percent and 185 percent of the poverty line, respectively. In North Carolina, the Census reports that 39 percent of school-age children were at or below the 185 percent threshold in 2006. If you back out the children educated privately, the share of public-school children in FRL rises into the low 40s, which is what N.C. public schools have recently reported (I have yet to confirm the 49 percent statistic).
Most of these children are not poor. The 185 percent threshold for one parent with two children is about $32,000. For two parents and three children, it’s about $45,000.
The Southern Education Foundation report is itself problematic. Some of its estimates of FRL eligibility, for such states as Florida (62 percent) and Mississippi (75 percent), do not jibe with other published data. The report compares public-school spending across states without adjusting for variance in purchasing power, thus yielding useless conclusions (because it treats a teacher earning $40,000 in Manhattan and one earning $40,000 in Magnolia, N.C. to be compensated equally). And it obviously should not be using “low-income” and “free/reduced lunch” synonymously. But taking the report’s findings as a given, the McClatchy Newspapers story about it was atrocious. It grossly overstated the share of North Carolina children in poverty. It failed to mention the word “immigration,” which the Southern Education Foundation at least briefly discusses.
Chronic poverty is a real problem. It has real, albeit difficult and often misunderstood, solutions. But it does no one any good to wildly exaggerate its extent and effects on public education. Unfortunately, given the N&O’s prominent placement of the original story, and that few readers will ever see the inevitable correction, the 49 percent myth is likely to persist in North Carolina political debate for months, if not years.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.