Could Your Child Live on $8 a Day?

While we wring our hands about oil belching from the ocean’s depths and ethnic bile spewing from Arizona, a long-term crisis is quietly unfolding within millions of American homes. New data shows that the recession has left about 7 million children in extreme poverty – meaning that they live on less than $8 a day.

In “The Worst of Times,” the latest report from the Southern Education Foundation, researchers make their case: In 2008, as the recession was beginning, 5.7 million kids lived in extreme poverty. Calculating rates of foreclosure, unemployment, and auto loan defaults into 2010, the authors posit that another 1.5 million youths have since fallen to this level – that is, they live in families subsisting at half the official poverty rate. For a family of four, that means living on $11,025 a year.

Every state in the nation suffers with extreme child poverty but the highest rates are in the South, with Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Alabama and West Virginia posting the highest rates.

This is likely to have a significant impact, most immediately in children’s education. Researchers found that in school districts with high rates of extreme child poverty, students scored 15 percentage points lower on state-mandated math tests.

But extrapolate that out to performance on college entrance exams, or the attainment of academic scholarships, and you begin to get a sense of the potential long-term effect.

Yet with millions of young people struggling, schools have failed to specifically identify children in extreme poverty for any particular intervention. “No educational policy at any level today acknowledges America’s large population of children in extreme poverty and the extraordinary challenges they face in education,” the authors say, calling for greater federal attention to this troubling trend.

“In truth, children in extreme poverty represent a fundamental test of America and its enduring values,” they add. “Their progress in our midst will be the lasting measure of our true worth as a people and as a nation in the worst of times, no less than the best.”