“I think poverty to a large extent is also a state of mind. You take somebody that has the right mind-set, you can take everything from them and put them on the street, and I guarantee in a little while they’ll be right back up there.”

In this post, Richard Rothstein critiques Carson’s comments in light of a new article about the department just published by New York magazine and ProPublica, an independent news organization, by Alec MacGillis, titled “Is anyone home at HUD?” The article is critical of the way Carson is running the department, saying that there is a fundamental lack of leadership at the top.

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The subject of poverty and the academic achievement of children living in it is central to efforts to improve troubled schools, but under former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, school reform efforts concentrated on holding students, teachers and schools “accountable” for progress through the use of standardized test scores. Proponents of this kind of reform have said poverty can’t be fixed right away and that teachers too often use poverty as an excuse for doing a poor job helping students succeed. Critics say the effect of living in poverty on children is profound and that school reform programs that don’t address the consequences cannot fundamentally succeed for most children.

Rothstein has written extensively about how schools have been affected by federal, state, and local policy that has explicitly segregated metropolitan areas nationwide. He is a senior fellow at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund’s Thurgood Marshall Institute, and author of the new book, “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How our Government Segregated America.”

He is also a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit created in 1986 to broaden the discussion about economic policy to include the interests of low- and middle-income workers, and the author of other books, including, “Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right, and “Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap.” He was a national education writer for the New York Times as well.

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This first appeared on Medium.com, and Rothstein gave me permission to republish it.

By Richard Rothstein

Ben Carson, secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, told an interviewer recently that poverty results from “the wrong mind-set” and that low-income people with strong motivation can escape poverty while those with negative attitudes remain poor.

His own life story seems to illustrate this. Poor children with ambition and self-discipline can occasionally climb the socioeconomic ladder. Luck figures, too, but a child must be on the lookout for it to benefit. Children expecting defeat may never seize opportunities within reach.

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Yet as a scientist, the secretary should realize that it’s always dangerous to jump from anecdotes about exceptional cases to generalizations about entire groups. Every human condition has variability. Only some children in Flint, Michigan, got lead poisoning, although all drank the same poisoned water. Even native intelligence is distributed: in any demographic group, some have above average I.Q.s., some are below it, and most are average, around 100.

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Policymakers like Carson certainly should concern themselves with the welfare of all children: ensuring that those with less-than-average motivation, ability, or luck have a safety-net to keep from falling further, and those who are above-average in these respects have opportunities to flourish. But, rather than focus on the ineffable individual qualities that help some children overcome poverty on their own, government should be concerned, perhaps mostly concerned, with trying to remedy the socio-economic conditions that cause and perpetuate poverty for the typical low-income child.

If our nation did nothing to improve overall conditions but had strong mobility, we would expect that children born to poor parents would have roughly equally chances, as adults, to be either poor, middle class, or affluent — based on their ability, mind-set, and luck. Yet our mobility is weak: of children born to poor parents (with incomes in the bottom fifth of all family incomes), almost half (43 percent) remain trapped in poverty as adults. Only 30 percent (those with better mindsets, luck, or ability) make it to the middle fifth or higher.

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Low-income African Americans are stuck even more. Over half (53 percent) remain poor as adults; only a quarter (26 percent) make it to the middle fifth or higher.

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Middle-class white children also have varied outcomes. Of those in the middle income fifth, one-third fall as adults into the poorest or next-poorest fifths. Middle-class children also have a range of mindsets, ability, and luck.

But children who grow up in poor neighborhoods face even greater impediments. For low-income black and white children who are similar in every observable respect (single parenthood, parent education level, etc.), the whites grow up to have higher adult incomes. About one-fourth of the difference results from black children being more frequently raised not only in poverty but in poor neighborhoods. If their families move from high- to low-poverty areas, low-income children typically will have higher adult incomes, be more likely to attend college and be less likely to become single parents. The concentration of poverty in so many African American neighborhoods seriously impedes black children’s life-chances and directly falls within Secretary Carson’s purview.

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Black children are less upwardly mobile partly because of the multigenerational effects of government policies that purposely segregated their grandparents into low-income communities from which exit was difficult.

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In the mid-20th Century, the government subsidized builders to construct suburbs of single-family homes — Levittown east of New York City, Lakewood south of Los Angeles, and scores of similar developments between — on explicit federal condition that no homes be occupied by African Americans. Selling for less than $100,000 (in today’s currency), they were affordable to working-class families, black or white. Today, they sell for up to half a million dollars. Over several generations, federally subsidized white home buyers gained a quarter-million dollars in home equity or more. In contrast, the government restricted African Americans, including war veterans, mostly to segregated urban apartment rentals where no wealth appreciated.

White homeowners bequeathed some federally subsidized wealth to subsequent generations, after using it for retirements, children’s college education, care for elderly parents, or medical emergencies. African Americans had to use current income for such expenses, if they could do so at all, pushing many into poverty, even those with the best mindsets. Largely because of 20th Century federal segregation policy, while average African American income is about 60 percent of white income, African American wealth is only 7 percent of white wealth.

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Other federal policies forced African Americans into poverty, continuing for generations. In 1935, the government gave construction and factory unions the right to bargain for higher wages and benefits. As proposed by Senator Robert Wagner, the law denied that right to unions that barred African Americans. Segregated unions lobbied to remove that provision and the Wagner Act was then passed, unconstitutionally empowering unions to exclude black workers — a policy that continued for over 30 years. Denied the best blue-collar employment, African Americans participated less in the income boom that raised white working class incomes in the three decades following World War II.

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Today, many white families that benefited from postwar employment and housing booms suffer from deindustrialization and automation. For African Americans who remain isolated in urban neighborhoods where jobs are scarce and transportation to employment opportunities is lacking, the suffering is exacerbated.