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Poverty In America

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There is an issue in the United States that a large portion of the population is either choosing to ignore or is simply naïve to the facts. I am a firm believer that poverty is directly associated to education. Research has backed this theory as it shows that 53% of those classified in upper class are college graduates compared to only 15% of whom identify as lower class (Parker, 2012). While there has been a lot of research conducted on who the upper class are and what the lower class need in order to bring themselves out of poverty there has been little to no change in funding practices of public education. If the end state goal of public education is to produce our countries future why are Americans not taking a more aggressive financial …show more content…

Some go as far to as to believe that poverty is mostly concentrated in what is considered the inner city or ghettos of America. In the south and the west portions of the country statistics show that rural areas have a significantly larger poor population than urban or metro poor with an almost six percent difference in the south (United States Department of Agriculture. 2015). In the northeast as well as the midwest portions of the country the divide is much less defined. Both of the latter regions have a less than one percent difference between people who live in the country facing financial hardships and those living in the city (United States Department of Agriculture. 2015). Families living in rural America have a completely different set of financial challenges than those living in the cities. Students who grow up in rural poor families have less access to medical care and rural clinics are continuing to close throughout the U.S. making it even more difficult to receive medical care. Those living in rural parts of the country who find themselves living in poverty find themselves socially separated as well as physically isolated due to cost of transportation. When laws are created that are meant to help the poor they actually end up doing the opposite for rural poor schools. An example of this would be the "No Child" laws that were created to help children and educators to meet certain standards and move through their education. What happened was rural schools who had historically used the same teacher for several subjects found themselves without many teachers because the veteran teachers now did not hold the required

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