Poverty Cutoff Research Articles

Poverty Measurement and Politics: Why Is It So Hard to Change the Way We Measure Poverty?*

As has been outlined in detail in the other papers presented in this session, the current official poverty measure grew out of a series of studies undertaken by Mollie Orshansky, whose work we commemorate today, for the Social Security Administration in the early and mid 1960s. Orshansky's effort was important for several reasons. First, although some work had been done to develop empirical measures of poverty in Great Britain before the 1960s,1 there had been few attempts at empirically based measures in the United States. Therefore, rough though it was, Orshansky's measure constituted a major improvement over earlier efforts to define a poverty threshold in the United States, which largely involved plucking a likely number out of the air.2 In contrast, Orshansky based her estimates of basic needs on some form of evidence. She had very little data available to her, but she made the most of what she had, combining a rough idea of food needs by family size with some information on the share of food expenditures in the typical family's budget. The resulting poverty cutoffs were necessarily very approximate, but they were a considerable advance over earlier work in that they at least recognized that needs varied by family size. But Orshansky's work was also important for an even more compelling reason. Poverty was a topic of major policy interest in the United States in the 1960s, but there was little consensus about exactly what the term meant. Once Orshansky's scale had been published, it gave a veneer of technical authority to a set of measures that were badly needed for political reasons. As James Tobin

Do Supplemental Educational Services Increase Opportunities for Minority Students?

WHEN CONGRESS included a provision the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act that required to offer supplemental educational services as a remedy for poor performance, it was a political compromise between supporters and opponents of vouchers. There was no precedent federal law for this provision and no body of research that provided clear and consistent evidence that supplemental educational services improve learning outcomes for low-performing--particularly low-income or minority--students. Yet the supplemental educational services provision represents a major tenet of NCLB--that competition will produce better educational opportunities for disadvantaged students than the public provide. According to federal policy makers, ... supplemental educational services requirements of the law not only help to enhance student achievement but also provide an incentive for low-performing to improve. (1) Underlying supplemental services is the assumption that academic instruction provided outside the regular school day by public and private organizations will able to do what cannot--raise the achievement of students consistently poorly performing schools. NCLB included two required sanctions for identified as in need of improvement, that is, those that did not meet the state's adequate yearly progress (AYP) goals. The first was that offer their students the option to transfer out of low- performing schools. The second was that parents could purchase supplemental services with money set aside from the district's Title I budget for this purpose. NCLB defines supplemental educational services as academic instruction designed to increase the academic achievement of students low-performing schools and indicates that they must high quality, research-based, and specifically designed to increase student achievement. The federal legislation also requires that supplemental services be provided outside the regular school day, which may include after-school and weekend programs. (2) By specifying who could offer these services, the law created a market for public and private organizations to provide tutoring services to students enrolled public schools. These requirements reversed the direction of earlier Title I legislation that focused on establishing schoolwide programs coordinated with the regular curriculum. The original categorical Title I program had been criticized because of curricular and instructional fragmentation the delivery of instruction and a lack of coordination between the Title I program and the regular curriculum. (3) Recognizing the problem, federal officials began to soften requirements that program services distinct and easily identifiable. The 1988 Hawkins-Stafford Amendments to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)--and later the 1994 Improving America's Schools Act--gave local school districts and greater flexibility deciding where and how to use Title I resources and encouraged the adoption of schoolwide programs. The federal law also lowered the poverty cutoff point required for to qualify for adopting a schoolwide program. While not a panacea, schoolwide programs eliminated some of the major obstacles to integrating Title I services with the school curriculum. The earlier Title I legislation also granted increased flexibility to school professionals to address the concentration of disadvantaged students poor neighborhoods. (4) It directed additional resources to serving disadvantaged students and promoted flexibility the use of those resources to encourage instructional innovation and coordination between the Title I program and the regular curricular program. Finally, prior ESEA legislation incorporated accountability by requiring that the same standards apply to all students, including those high-poverty Title I schools. Taken together, these approaches were intended to foster deep and comprehensive school reform that would demonstrate results. …

Nutritional Consequences of Wealth Differentials in East African Pastoralists: The Case of the Datoga of Northern Tanzania

Among African pastoralists evidence that wealth is associated with other measures of household success is scant and the significance of wealth differentials for family welfare remains poorly understood. Predictions that wealth in livestock is associated with increased adequacy of household food supply and with improved child nutrition are tested with longitudinal data on herd size, household composition, food supply, and anthropometric status collected in 1992 for a sample of traditional Datoga households (n = 20) living in the Eyasi basin in northern Tanzania. Although a majority subsisted below poverty cutoffs estimated for east African pastoral populations, there was large variation among households in measures of wealth and resource availability. Individuals in relatively wealthy households did not appear to benefit either in terms of adequacy of household food supply or in terms of average growth performance of young children. Theoretical and methodological challenges in the study of the relationship between wealth and health in nomadic pastoralists are discussed.

The Farm Poor: Counted, Miscounted, or Discounted?

C HARLES DICKENS, in A Tale of Two Cities, opens with the state\Cy ment, was in the best of times, it was in the worst of times, ... it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair... . This perhaps echoes the sentiment of many people in the United States today. Our economy is in the best of times for many but in the worst of times for others. For some, their economic position puts them in a real spring of hope. For others, their future appears as a winter of despair. In order to more equitably share the wealth of our nation with its less affluent citizens, guidelines are needed to determine who the less affluent are, what constitutes poverty, and what some attributes of the are. Lack of financial resources is the handiest explanation of poverty. The current definition has been built around income: How much is necessary to maintain a family of four persons at a given level of living. This definition of poverty was developed for use by the Council of Economic Advisers in the President's war on poverty. Later the Social Security Administration (SSA) developed a poverty line centering around $3,000. In this definition, a family of four was considered poor if their total annual cash income was less than $3,000; a single unrelated individual, if his annual income was less than $1,500 [4]. The SSA refined this definition by including such variables as family composition, sex of head, and place of residence, (farm or nonfarm). The resulting poverty index is the officially adopted poverty definition of the Council of Economic Advisers and the Office of Economic Opportunity. In 1955 the Household Food Consumption Survey indicated that families of four persons, regardless of income level or place of residence, spent about one-third of their annual income on food. It was thus assumed that an income of at least three times the cost of the economy food plan was necessary to keep a family out of poverty. Using the economy food plan, as developed by the USDA, and a multiplier of 3, as obtained from the 1955 survey, a poverty cutoff level was established. Thus, if the food plan was priced at $1,000, the resulting income would be $3,000. Any family of four with an income of less than $3,000, spending $1,000 or more for food would be considered to be in poverty. This same survey showed that about 40 percent of food consumed by farm families was produced at home. This means that the average farm