Initial Issues Post

One of the very first topics we covered was "Poverty, Health and Policy", and in it we read a chapter by Gorski titled "The Inequality Mess We're In". Gorski outlines in this chapter issues related to class and poverty. Since poverty is one of the key issues in the topic of urban education, I found this article very informative. Not only did Gorski cover poverty, but how it intersects with all sorts of identities, such as gender, race and disability. I think poverty is an important issue to start with because it centers around the other pressing issues that face urban education. It is the issue that can have negative impacts on health, physical and mental, which can lead to conditions worsening.

Since a lot of the information we read was informational, I felt like we were missing the solutions. I'm sure we will encounter the issues of poverty as we go through the rest of this semester, and there is a lot more to learn about it. Some policy solutions were presented in the article "A Closer Look at Income and Race Concentration in Public Schools" by Reed Jordan. In his article, Jordan suggests change in school and housing policy, and states that "to generate opportunity and mobility for all students, the public school system needs to provide the same quality of education for students of color and poor students as it does for white students". This issue does have many layers, but poverty is the central one.