The status quo is encouraged by neglecting to give the people in poverty families child-rearing knowledge and the opportunity to use it while raising their children that those in professional and working class families receive.
The right talks about education vouchers. Sorry, folks-- too late. Early childhood is where it's at for brain development, social development, and physical development. Get it wrong there, and it's catch-up for the rest of the kid's life, including the whole education thing. Civics education and participation in civic life included.
Who wants to ax HeadStart? Who wants to send poor single mothers to work without providing quality child care for their children? Where are the outreach programs to show poor parents how to give their kids the kind of start that will give them the tools to compete with kids from well-off families? Where is the real equal opportunity culture?
Research shows the number of words spoken to infants and toddlers directly impacts their language development. The Hart & Risley report shows the average "welfare child" experiences 62,000 words per week, compared to a "working-class child's" 125,000 words per week. In addition the "welfare child" listened to 500 words of encouragement and 1,100 negative words per week while the "working-class child" averaged 1,200 words of encouragement and 700 negative words.
See more issues here. The data from Polk County is from 2003, but the general brain and social development research hasn't changed. The link there to naeyc.org is also helpful, though a user has to really mine it to get information about social conditions.
Think about this: teen parents, married or not, often will not speak to their children in an off-hand, conversational way because they are waiting for their children to speak to them. It's a typical teen way of looking at things. They need to be taught that speaking to babies is the way to get babies to speak.
There's more to breaking out of poverty than making people stand on their own two feet. First you have to show them where their feet are. Then you have to teach them to count to two.
The saying goes, "Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats every day." A good concept, one that the right quotes frequently as a way to demonstrate the fallacy of the welfare state, but one that assumes a great deal about the fishing student that may not be true. Unless he is taught about accompanying social behaviors and the resources to use them, this new fisherman can do himself considerable harm. To teach a man to fish is to help give him food poisoning because he doesn't know he has to cook the fish, or how to cook the fish, or where to get the fuel to build the fire upon which to cook the fish. Then, of course, it's necessary to teach the man how to put the fire out properly so he doesn't burn his house down. To teach a man to fish in his polluted neighborhood pond (industry typically dumps in industrial neighborhoods, and the well-off usually don't choose to live in those places) is to help give him mercury poisoning. To teach a man to fish but not how to serve the fish with vegetables is to fail to prevent vitamin deficiencies in the man and his family. And so on.
People don't know what they're never taught, and if they don't know precisely what's missing, they can't ask for it either. There's just a kind of unfocused understanding that something that should be there isn't there, and something that should be done isn't done. Since everyone else seems to know what it is, people who lack such knowledge will believe that it's somehow instinctive (it isn't) and that they either are too dumb to know it (they aren't) or that what they leave out is of no consequence (it isn't).
There's a lot more to the dependency cycle and the income gap than the right wants to think about. It's not just about the money. It's about all the little things you learn by hanging out with the people who know. Henry Higgins knew that.