Reply to "A Cheap, Race-Neutral Way to Close the Racial Wealth Gap..

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I just wish one supporter of one-time cash handouts would explain why this is better than spending the same money to effect long-term change in all the systemic barriers that keep black kids in bad schools with hopeless job prospects.

I know I sound like a broken record because I've asked this several times.
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I have answered this, as have a social worker and a teacher earlier in this thread.  I’m a psychiatrist, not an economist, so my thoughts are colored in that direction.  
But what I see when I talk to kids about their hopes and dreams is that they are extremely limited.  I think that if kids grew up knowing that they had $$ to spend to improve their lives, they would start thinking about how to use it and see more possibilities for themselves.

I don’t know how much you know about structural scaffolding in education.  The idea is that you start with the basics of a concept, then you continue to build on that information.  This is a formal concept that takes advantage of the way our minds naturally work.  Once we have scaffolding, then we will start to hook new information to it and build a more fully formed understanding.  For example, when you get pregnant, you start learning about pregnancy, and you start noticing that there is information about pregnancy all around you.  It was always there, but it just slid away from you before.  Or when you first start reading Ancient Greek tragedies in school, you suddenly start noticing references to them.  Again, the references were always there.  You just didn’t pick up on it before.

I think for many kids that growing up with this money would provide a kind of scaffolding.  Information about ACT exams, college applications, home ownership, small business ownership, etc. wouldn’t just slide away.  It would have a place to stick.

Now, are there a number of kids who are never going to get there?  Yes.  Are there some bad parents out there who will try to steal the money?  Yes.  Are there kids out there who were born looking for ways to succeed and don’t need it?  Of course.  But for a lot of kids, I can see how this would be very helpful in a way that throwing money at the schools or neighborhood programs would not.

I mean, imagine what kind of discussions teenagers might have about what they are going to do after high school if everyone there has $60k in a bank account.  It might look an awful lot more like the discussions middle class kids have.  
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Thanks for this. I guess my point is, I don't see how this would be more useful than using the same money to reform early, elementary, and secondary education. And then offering college tuition support in the form of grants administered by the colleges, instead of as a handout to a kid. That way, people couldn't blow it or have their parents steal it. I also feel like, if schools don't prepare kids to succeed in college, then what are we doing but setting kids up for failure.

I suppose that telling a kid "here's $50K, but you can only use it for college" is different from, and might be more motivational than, "if you go to college, you'll get some part of tuition for free." It's the difference between knowing you own your 401(k) and the promise that you might get Social Security. But again, $50K will get you two years at UMD, and not even a full year at Columbia. So now we're saying, we'll give you half the tuition, and you might get a scholarship, but you might have to borrow the rest.[/quote]

Who says that UMD is the best way to spend $100k and 4 years of your young life?  Maybe for some people it is.  Maybe for other people, it would be better to use the time and money to buy tools to be a contractor or an auto mechanic.  Maybe some people would want to go abroad.  I don’t know.  I am not even 100% sure college is going to be right for my own children, let alone some random stranger I have never met.  When you put restrictions and say that $$ can only be used for xyz, it often doesn’t get used in the most effective way.  [/quote]

I agree college isn't for everybody. So use the money for training and certificates. But I totally disagree that we give $50K (the proposal isn't for $100K) for 18-year-olds and their parents to use as they see fit. A trip abroad? A new car? While I'm a firm believer that travel is educational, none of that will help change the systemic problems caused by bad education and lack of opportunity, and make changes that will last over generations. And those are the goals, right?[/quote]

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