While some students from these families thrive and do well in grade school, high school, and college, many more do not. Nationally derived statistics such as those available from Kids Count often contain statistics linking poverty with poor student outcomes. The Kids Count statistics put children "at risk" if they have three or more of the following indicators: living in a family with income below the poverty line, living in a single parent family, living in a family where no adult has full-time year round employment, and living in home where the head of household is a high school dropout (Annie E. Casey Foundation). In addition, if we take US Government statistics that compare student outcomes by state, it is clear that many states with higher poverty rates also have higher rates of illiteracy, school dropouts, and lack of achievement on standardized tests, especially among the least affluent population centers, even when they are located right next to more affluent population centers (US Census Data). This fact is usually accepted as the norm despite the fact that the situation was recently improving. However, that trend toward improvement that has taken place from 1990 to 2000 is being reversed.

Knowing that poverty affects the educations of both children and adults, we can welcome any trend toward reduction of the percent of children and adults living in poverty, however, since the 2000 census data (Kids Count; O'Hare), the percentage of adults in poverty is rising again after a ten-year decline during the Clinton years. The unemployment rate is rising again. Between 1990 and 2000 the percent of children living in poverty dropped 6% on the national level, but in the two years of the Bush Administration that number is being reversed. The US Census Bureau reported: "the number of Americans living in poverty jumped to 11.7 percent-32.9 million people. Medicaid enrollment increased from 29.5 million people to 31.6 million in 2001...an additional 1 million adults enrolled in Medicaid in the first quarter of 2002" (Pugh A1+).

When we know that there is a link between childhood poverty and poor performance in schools, the question is, why aren't we focusing our thinking in ways that will actually change the statistics? We have tried several strategies that have been somewhat, but not completely effective. We have determined that hungry children do not do as well in school as children who are well fed, and designed school lunch programs that ensure poor children will receive free breakfasts and free lunches. We have changed our pedagogies and changed them again and again, but pedagogy alone isn't enough to ensure that students will perform well at school tasks. Some states have changed the age of voluntary dropout to 18, ensuring that more students are required to stay in high school until graduation. We have instituted mandatory testing at the local, state, and national levels. We have threatened to and actually punished school districts with poor student performances. We have hired companies like Edison to take over in schools where the performance was low. And all of these strategies have rarely been sufficient to lift student performance to the level of schools in areas where poverty is nonexistent or rare. Why don't these strategies work to erase the influence of student
poverty on student outcomes? (Suggested reading Sternglass' A Time to Know Them)

What this suggests is that it is the poverty itself that has affected students' poor test scores. We know that the children are not, as a group, less capable of excellent achievements. In our basic writing courses, we are encountering those children, now grown to adulthood. Given the low ACT, SAT, and other scores they bring to us, it is easy to assume that they are less intelligent, but this is not the case. If we treat them as we would any other college students, expecting them to be able to learn to write well, we find that our basic writing students can actually vastly outperform their test scores.