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University of Wisconsin–Madison
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty

Tag: Patrick Sharkey

Baltimore Beginning School Study

What your 1st-grade life says about the rest of it, By Emily Badger, August 29, 2014, Washington Post: “In the beginning, when they knew just where to find everyone, they pulled the children out of their classrooms. They sat in any quiet corner of the schools they could claim: the sociologists from Johns Hopkins and, one at a time, the excitable first-graders. Monica Jaundoo, whose parents never made it past the eighth grade. Danté Washington, a boy with a temper and a dad who drank too much. Ed Klein, who came from a poor white part of town where his mother sold cocaine…”

Social (Im)mobility

The American dream gives way to a new reality: social immobility, By David Helling, June 18, 2014, Sacramento Bee: “Allison Gibbons has lived a lifetime of problems. A difficult childhood in a broken home. An eating disorder, drug abuse, depression, alcohol – ‘obviously I was self-medicating,’ she says. She is the mother of a young son whose father is in jail. Today she works for a better life, with dreams of becoming a nurse. ‘I know it’s going to be a struggle, she says. It’s a strain Mary Jo Vernon understands. Thirty years ago she was a single mother with three small children and three jobs . . .”