Category: Poverty & income gap
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Sustaining the Biggest Public Nuisance in Richmond
Republished from Cranky’s Blog. Not satisfied at maintaining the largest public nuisance in Richmond – the one that just led to the shooting death of a State Policeman – the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority (RHHA) now proposes to do nothing realistic about it: Fencing and gates. RRHA says this remedy is “largely . . .…
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The Scourge of Rootless, Predatory Males
Last week 27-year-old Travis A. Ball allegedly shot and killed Virginia State Police Special Agent Michael T. Walter in an apparently unprovoked attack in the Mosby Court public housing project. The murder was the seventh homicide and one of about 20 shootings to take place in the troubled housing project so far this year. The…
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Elite Universities and Socioeconomic Diversity
Over on Cranky’s Blog, it appears that John Butcher, like me, has little better to do this Memorial Day weekend than to ruminate upon the implications of a recent New York Times op-ed piece written by columnist David Leonhardt. Lamenting the paucity of smart kids from poor schools admitted to the nation’s elite universities, Leonhardt…
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How Do We Respond to Declining Economic Diversity in Elite Universities?
Writing in the New York Times earlier this week, columnist David Leonhardt expresses his dismay at the decline in state funding for higher education, the resulting surge in tuition, and the slide in economic diversity at the nation’s top public universities. “The declines in state funding are stunning,” he says. “It’s as if our society were deliberately trying…
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How to Dismantle the Poverty-Industrial Complex
Richmond’s new mayor is young, energetic and bursting with ideas. At 36 years old, the James Madison University-educated Levar Stoney represents a new generation of African-American political leadership. He has one foot in the minority community and one in the creative class. His top priority to date has been to restore competence to a city administration…
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Running in Neutral: a K-12 and Higher Ed Scandal
In this month’s issue of Atlantic, Nick Ehrmann writes a perceptive article, “Solving the Mystery of Underachievement: Why work hard enough to earn an A when a D will suffice for college admission?” He tells the story of an intelligent African-American lad who was groomed to attend college — and ended up dropping out after the…
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Government’s War on the Poor: College Loans
Students graduating in recent years are defaulting on student loans at a significantly higher rate than earlier age cohorts, finds Mark J. Warshawsky, a senior research fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, in a posting on the Mercatus website. “Some students, particularly from nontraditional backgrounds, seem to have been harmed by the…
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How Important Is Insurance to Health Outcomes?
A dominant strain of political rhetoric tells us that having health care insurance is absolutely vital to maintaining peoples’ health and longevity. Without health insurance, people will die! The logic makes sense if one assumes that the United States (and Virginia) have a binary health care system in which people either (a) have health insurance…
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Probing the “Insurance Coverage” Numbers
With Governor Terry McAuliffe making another bid to expand Medicaid via a budget amendment, the publication by the StatChat blog ten days ago of data on the extent of insurance coverage in Virginia couldn’t be more timely. The blog post is content to present the data with little commentary or explanation of what’s happening, however,…
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Slum Maintenance at Essex Village
Who needs tenement slums when we’ve got public housing projects? The supposed “market failure” of the private sector to provide the poor and working class with decent shelter provided the justification for the federal government to get into housing business in the 1930s. We all know the result. Uncle Sam turned out to be the…
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A Prosecution or Persecution of Pawn Brokers?
The Virginia Attorney General’s office has extracted settlements from two Fredericksburg-area pawnbrokers for allegedly charging illegal interest and fees. Spotsylvania Pawnking LLC and Stafford-based All-Star Pawn & Gold will provide more than $62,000 in refunds to more than 1,000 customers to resolve the allegations. The two pawn shops also paid the Attorney General’s office a total…
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For-Profit Colleges and the Student Debt Apocalypse
Tressie McMillan Cottom worked as an enrollment officer at two for-profit technical colleges before she went on to earn a PhD., join the faculty of Virginia Commonwealth University, and write a book, “Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy.” Cottom says that for-profit colleges get one important thing right: They invest…
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How Much in Tax Breaks Does Harvard Really Need?
The 281 public universities studied by the Nexus Research and Policy Center received $7,000 a year per student in state support on average over the past three years. But that sum pales in comparison to the indirect support, in the form of tax breaks for endowments, enjoyed by the larger private universities. Gifts to university endowments…
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College Graduation Rates and SAT Scores
John Butcher, of Cranky’s Blog fame, is turning his analytical gaze from K-12 schools to higher education. In his latest post, he explores the strong correlation between a Virginia public institution’s six-year graduation rate and the average SAT scores of its student body, as seen in the table to the left and the plotted chart below…
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Fighting Food Deserts One Neighborhood at a Time
The Richmond Times-Dispatch ran a profile today of Jim Scanlon, a former Ukrops Super Market executive who opened a grocery store near downtown Newport News and plans another in Richmond’s East End. His mission is to eliminate Virginia’s so-called “food deserts” one neighborhood at a time. The story of how Scanlon has worked with local economic…