Abstract
Americans have long underestimated both the extent of youth poverty in the United States and the degree to which it produces educational failure. According to Bruce Biddle’s The Unacknowledged Disaster: Youth Poverty and Educational Failure in America, this tendency is not due to a lack of information. Indeed, as Biddle makes clear in his compelling and well-researched book, we know a great deal about the size, scope, and consequences of youth poverty. However, our popular and political cultures are hostile to reasoned, evidence-based dialogue on this issue. Biddle calls youth poverty the“elephant in the room” of American society—a problem that we are determined to ignore despite the fact that it has widespread individual and social consequences.
The Unacknowledged Disaster seeks to call attention to this elephant, to raise awareness about the links between youth poverty and educational failure, and to generate a sense of urgency among its readers. Though Biddle is certainly motivated by a frustration with the ways conservative ideologies have interfered with Americans’ ability to understand these issues, he largely relies on information rather than political diatribes to make his case. In essence, The Unacknowledged Disaster is a masterful review of decades of scholarly literature on poverty and education. Biddle sets out to show that evidence about the disastrous consequences of youth poverty is so overwhelming that we continue to ignore it at our peril. For the most part, he is quite successful in making this case.
After laying out the argument of the book, Biddle goes on (in Chapters Two and Three) to review the research on the nature and scope of youth poverty in the United States and the ways in which it compares with other industrialized countries. He draws on data showing that the United States has significantly higher rates of youth poverty than other nations and leads the pack in rates of teenage births, child abuse and deaths from malnutrition, and infant mortality. Biddle goes on to show how our social policies—including our minimum wage level, social benefits, and tax structure—compare to those of other countries, arguing that these differences help explain our high rates of poverty. His calculations comparing actual household income to household income once taxes and other social benefits are incorporated is especially powerful. For example, once the value of these policies is accounted for, youth poverty in Denmark drops from 11 percent to 2 percent, in France from 28 percent to 8 percent, and in the UK from 25 percent to 15 percent. In the United States, however, our social benefits have a much smaller effect on youth poverty, decreasing it only from 27 percent to 22 percent. Data like these will be especially effective with students who assume that the United States does more than other countries to provide equality of opportunity.
The book’s next three chapters review the connections between poverty in homes, neighborhoods, and schools and educational failure. In each of these chapters, Biddle brings clarity to often complex bodies of literature. For example, in discussing the evidence about the extent to which youth poverty can be seen as causing school failure, he uses an extended analogy to the development of scholarly consensus that cigarette smoking is not only associated with lung cancer but actually causes the disease. This analogy helps readers understand the ways in which particular research methodologies—including panel studies, studies that control for such variables as race or parent education, pathway studies, and experimental studies showing that supplementing the incomes of poor families can improve children’s achievement—contribute to our understanding of the causal relationship between youth poverty and school failure.
While Biddle is mostly evenhanded in his assessment of research and policy, there are a few instances in which greater engagement with counter-arguments would have been helpful. This is especially the case in the last chapter, in which Biddle discusses policy options. In that chapter, he is quite critical of the influence of conservatives on social and education policy and perhaps too dismissive of the resulting reform strategies. For example, his discussion of charter schools ignores the fact that there is a lively debate in the field about the extent to which they improve outcomes for low-income children and a general consensus that some charter schools do outperform public schools (see, e.g., CREDO 2015; Maul 2015). Instead, he treats charter schools as part of a larger attack on public education. Though sympathetic to his skepticism about current education “reforms,” I believe Biddle’s arguments would be more convincing if he acknowledged the mixed findings on charters and other strategies.
This issue aside, the bulk of the final chapter usefully highlights a variety of policy solutions. Biddle begins by identifying key themes in American culture—including individualism, communitarianism, and hostility towards elites—and arguing that advocates of more equitable policies must be aware of the ways these themes could generate support for, or opposition to, their proposals. He then lays out a set of interventions to improve outcomes for youth in poverty, such as increased cash, housing, and childcare benefits; improved daycare and preschools; and universal, tax-supported healthcare. He further argues for a host of interventions targeting conditions in homes, neighborhoods, and schools. The direct connections Biddle draws between each of these policies and his earlier discussion of research on youth poverty make his recommendations especially compelling.
Much of the research in this book may be familiar to sociologists and other scholars interested in social inequality and education. However, Biddle’s ability to pull together multiple bodies of research yields fresh insight about the weight of the evidence and the danger of assuming that education alone can solve the problem of extensive child poverty. The Unacknowledged Disaster would be excellent for graduate and undergraduate courses on education and social inequality. It will also be an invaluable tool for scholars studying these issues. By writing such a lively and engaging research synthesis, Biddle has done a service to the field.