Homeless, hungry students. We can’t expect Kentucky schools to fix this alone.

A few weeks ago, reporter Will Wright documented the plight of low-income students in Harlan County, some of whom live without running water or other amenities, including enough food.

One of them, Rebecca Carriker, said she missed a lot of school because she was too hungry to get out of bed.

“When you’re starving, you don’t want to do anything,” she told Wright.

It reminded me that when I moved to Kentucky 22 years ago to cover the Kentucky Education Reform Act, lawmakers and educators recognized that crucial point. As part of that education revolution, they designed family resource centers that were designed to level that playing field, to “help solve outside problems that prevent student learning,” as I wrote in 1998.

Of course, the centers, along with KERA’s other advances, such as level school funding between poor and rich counties, have been decimated by a lack of funding and budget cuts. According to a story last year, state funding for the centers has fallen from $57 million in 2009 to $51.5 million in 2017.

Wright’s story struck a nerve because of another article, this time in “The Atlantic” magazine by a venture capitalist who actually admitted he was wrong about education.

In “Better Schools Won’t Fix America,” Nick Hanauer wrote about how he thought that America’s income equality was caused by failing schools. He joined other captains of industry, like Microsoft founder Bill Gates, in promoting charter schools all over the country.

“But ... I have come to the uncomfortable conclusion that I was wrong,” he wrote. “And I hate being wrong.

“American workers are struggling in large part because they are underpaid—and they are underpaid because 40 years of trickle-down policies have rigged the economy in favor of wealthy people like me. Americans are more highly educated than ever before, but despite that, and despite nearly record-low unemployment, most American workers—at all levels of educational attainment—have seen little if any wage growth since 2000.

“To be clear: We should do everything we can to improve our public schools. But our education system can’t compensate for the ways our economic system is failing Americans. Even the most thoughtful and well-intentioned school-reform program can’t improve educational outcomes if it ignores the single greatest driver of student achievement: household income.”

In other words, we’re blaming schools for societal problems rather than blaming societal problems for issues at our schools.

There is ample evidence on the link between test scores and wealth, as well as income inequality in this country. As far back as 2012, studies found that while the achievement gap between black and white students had narrowed, the gap between rich and poor students had grown about 40 percent since the 1960s.

Of course, we need to improve our schools, improve our outcomes, and improve the number of people with college degrees, which is still a huge driver of upward mobility. Kentucky is one of the poorest states in the country, a seemingly intractable problem. Another story by Will Wright showed recent per capita income data from the Appalachian Regional Commission. Of the 80 counties that will be considered economically distressed by the ARC in 2020, nearly half are in Eastern Kentucky, and in some of those counties, income has actually fallen.

Nationally, Hanauer estimates that since the 1970s, tax policies have shifted $2 trillion a year from the middle class to corporations and the wealthiest Americans. At the same time, reports the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, state legislators are looking at further shifting state taxes from income to consumption, which further would benefit the wealthy and leave even less money in the general fund to support programs like family resource centers. Remember when Kansas cut income taxes by a third, along with big cuts in public spending? The experiment brought Kansas public schools to their knees before the cuts were reversed.

In Kentucky, that means more funding and support toward our schools, not turning them into a grifter hunting ground of charter schools and “scholarship tax credits,” i.e. vouchers. (That’s a topic for another column.) What if family resource centers were properly funded and could do more to make sure students get enough to eat and have places to sleep? Schools are a remarkable lever of mobility, but poverty is a heavy weight to educational achievement. We should acknowledge that, and do more to improve the latter before we start blaming the former.

Linda Blackford writes columns and commentary for the Herald-Leader.

This story was originally published June 27, 2019 at 12:16 PM.