Category: Poverty & income gap
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Two Medicaid Updates: Work Requirement, PBMs
By Steve Haner Medicaid Work – Training Requirement Dead Disappointing many, thrilling many, and surprising nobody, the Governor of Virginia has openly broken his 2018 promise to couple expanded Medicaid coverage with a work or job training requirement for able-bodied recipients. Moving people out of poverty is no longer the goal. Governor Ralph Northam was…
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The Inherent Flaw in “Opportunity Zones”
by James A. Bacon The City of Norfolk is gearing up to take full advantage of tax breaks contained in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. City Council has designated the St. Paul area, home to three 50s-era housing projects, as an “opportunity zone.” Plans call for demolishing the three projects and replacing them…
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A War-on-Poverty Success Story
by James A. Bacon Homelessness in the Richmond metro area has dropped by more than half since 2007, from about 1,158 homeless people to less than 500 this year. It is one of the great anti-poverty success stories — one of the few anti-poverty success stories — of our time. This dramatic improvement results from…
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The Issue of Guardianship and the Contribution of a Newspaper
On Sunday, the Richmond Times-Dispatch ran a remarkable article. It was remarkable both in the amount of space the newspaper dedicated to it, 5½ whole pages, and its subject, guardianship, a subject about which little is known by the public, but that could affect anyone. The publishing of this series of articles illustrates the continuing…
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RRHA Freezes Enforcement of Rent Collection
by James A. Bacon The Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority (RRHA) has announced an agency-wide freeze on the enforcing rent payments through the end of the year. No public housing family will be removed from their home for debt owed to RRHA during that period. “During this time,” the authority said, “RRHA will undertake an…
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Richmond’s Food Desert a Tough Nut to Crack
by James A. Bacon It is part of the liberal/progressive catechism that inner city neighborhoods across the United States, including Virginia, are afflicted by “food deserts” — large swaths of territory lacking access to stores selling fresh fruit, vegetables and other healthy foods. This deprivation is typically seen as a failure of the free-market system…
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How to Help Economically Disadvantaged Students
by James A. Bacon Over the past several days I have been highlighting how public schools in Southwest Virginia have bucked the statewide trend of declining standardized test scores. While the Northam administration has implemented a top-down “social justice” approach, a consortium of rural Southwest Virginia schools has embraced a totally different strategy: (1) identifying…
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Republicans Must Find a New Way Forward
by James A. Bacon Virginia is a blue state now. Not only do Democrats occupy all statewide elected positions — two U.S. senators, governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general — with yesterday’s election, they control both houses of the General Assembly. Republicans got their booties kicked. And the butt-stomping is not likely to subside. The…
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CIP: the Secret to SW Virginia Schools’ Success
by James A. Bacon The school districts of Southwest Virginia are among the poorest in the Commonwealth, but that hasn’t stopped them from out-performing more affluent districts across the state. Public schools in Region VII, stretching from the City of Radford to Virginia’s far-western tip in Lee County, have the lowest per-pupil funding in the…
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We Can’t Explain Virginia’s Declining Test Scores — Just Trust Us and Give Us Mo’ Money
by James A. Bacon The Richmond Times-Dispatch took a good hard look today at the alarming decline in reading scores by Virginia students in standardized tests, including both the state Standards of Learning (SOL) and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). But reporter Justin Mattingly came up dry in explaining what might have caused…
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Housing Values and School Quality
by James A. Bacon In an essay posted earlier this week on the StatChat blog, Spencer Shanholtz with the Demographics Research Group at the University of Virginia explored the relationship between housing values and school quality. He documents the reality that children living in census tracts with low-value housing are more likely to attend low-performing…
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Rapid Rehousing: a Homelessness Program that Works
by James A. Bacon Not only can Virginians count on getting electric current when they flip on the light switch, the Old Dominion can boast of something else that Californians cannot: The number of homeless people in the state is declining. A lot. And we’re spending a tiny fraction of the money that Californians do…
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Virginia Reading Test Scores Plunge
by James A. Bacon Reading scores of Virginia students taking the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests, a national standardized test, plummeted this year, and math scores declined as well. The average reading scores of Virginia fourth- and eighth-grade students on the national tests fell by four and six points, respectively. The average math…
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How to Integrate Richmond Schools: More Charters
by James A. Bacon The Richmond Public Schools school board is desperate to get more diversity in its schools, meaning it wants more white kids in schools dominated by African-Americans. The board has been considering a proposal to smear the cream, so to speak: spread the limited supply of white kids, concentrated in two elementary…
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Do Financial Literacy Classes Do Any Good?
by James A. Bacon It’s not often that I speak kindly of government programs of any kind. But a few days ago, I praised a financial literacy initiative recently announced by the City of Richmond with the goal of empowering citizens, especially lower-income citizens, with the knowledge to make better consumer decisions. The program not only…