“If I study, I will have a better life for me and for my daughter”
By Scott Gurian
Experts say that having access to quality educational opportunities — from early childhood through adulthood — increases the chances that economically struggling individuals will achieve professional and financial success.
This is one of the few ways that ALICE families can get ahead over the long term. But many of the people we interviewed for this project described a series of obstacles they encountered at various stages.
The challenges start from nearly the moment a child is born.
Research shows that the human brain develops fastest during the first three years of life, and this is when kids are most receptive to learning. Yet good child care is the most expensive cost for households with two or more young children. The United Way of Northern New Jersey found that even once government aid and nonprofit assistance are factored in, a two-parent, two-child family earning less than $56,000 in Essex County or less than $62,000 in Middlesex County has, on average, only half of what they need when it comes to their child-care budget.
After Marisela — an undocumented immigrant from Mexico that we interviewed — got a job packing shoes in a warehouse, she had to find a babysitter to watch after her two kids. Her children’s cousin agreed to help out, charging $100 a week, which is less than one quarter the amount most people pay.
Still, for someone who earned minimum wage and took home only $220 a week after taxes, that was a sizable percentage of Marisela’s paycheck. On top of that, she also sent $100 a week to her son back in Mexico, which left her with just $20 to cover the rest of her expenses.
Affordability issues aside, access is also a problem affecting many New Jersey residents.
Margarita Rivera grew up in Puerto Rico and had her first child when she was 22. After her son turned two, she went back to school and got her associate’s degree to become a cardiovascular technician. But when she started applying for jobs, Rivera discovered that all of the positions for someone starting in that field were night shifts, which weren’t an option because she couldn’t find someone to watch her son in the evening.
Sometimes the resources people need don’t exist, or they simply don’t know where to find them.
Migdonia Carrero had dreams of becoming a teacher or musician, but after her second marriage ended in divorce, she was left to raise her four kids on her own. Though money was tight, she said she had to apply for public benefits rather than find a job to support her family because she felt she had to be there for her children.
“Who was going to take care of my kids?” she said. “My mother wasn’t going to take care of my kids, and I didn’t have nobody, because it’s hard to trust somebody with kids.” She has a couple of sisters, but they both had their own children to take care of, she said.
After her kids grew up and moved out, she had to take custody of her nephew’s child, who was born with a serious medical condition that required round-the-clock attention. As a full-time caregiver for five years, she remained unable to earn an income and continued barely scraping by on government assistance.
David Harris of the Greater New Brunswick Day Care Council recommends that people like Carrero who don’t know where to turn should contact their county-based Child Care Resource and Referral Agency, which helps people earning less than 150 percent of the federal-poverty threshold find state-licensed, free or low-cost places to take care of their children. But he’s quick to note that there are often waiting lists, and the system lacks the resources to come anywhere close to meeting the state’s enormous needs.
While he acknowledges that Gov. Phil Murphy’s effort to expand pre-K to more school districts has been a step in the right direction, he thinks much more needs to be done.
“The glaring deficit, the big hole in the program is for children [age] 0 to 3,” he said, explaining that there are fewer facilities that accept infants and toddlers because it costs more to care for them. “Even though houses are built starting with the foundation, they skipped over that.”
Harris would like to see a network of community centers or even public schools where parents experiencing poverty could drop off babies as young as six weeks of age and go to work without worrying about the cost. But under the present system, he said, “there’s not sufficient funding available to level the playing field for all children.”
Another educational barrier many of our interviewees without a high-school diploma face is difficulty finding steady and well-paying employment. In Migdonia Carrero’s case, she left after the ninth grade to get married and have her first child, a decision she now thinks she should have waited to make.
“I was too young,” she said. “I didn’t even get my diploma or anything like that. That’s a very crazy idea, I believe.”
All four of her kids also left school early, she added, as did both of her sisters, and now they’re struggling financially like she is. “The same [thing] keeps happening and happening, and it’s happening now with my grandkids,” she said.
New Jersey is one of just a handful of states that permit students to quit school upon reaching their 16th birthday, and they don’t even have to get their parents’ permission. State lawmakers have introduced several bills over the years to make students stay until they turn 18. But those efforts failed after critics raised concerns about the added cost of anti-truancy enforcement and said it was counterproductive to force kids to remain in a classroom if they really don’t want to be there.
One of the main reasons students leave school early is to achieve short-term benefits, like being able to raise a family or earn a paycheck a bit sooner than they otherwise would. But over the long run, most jobs for people without a high-school diploma tend to pay relatively little and have few clear paths for advancement or moving up the income ladder.
That was certainly the experience of Monica (who asked us to use a pseudonym, since she’s an undocumented immigrant).
For her, the decision to drop out before getting her degree was not her own; it was her mother’s. Monica arrived in the United States at the age of 15 and was doing well in her studies but had to repeat a grade to continue to improve her English. She was hoping to graduate, but her mother made her quit before she finished her senior year to earn money to send back to her siblings in Ecuador, who were trying to buy a piece of land. Since then, Monica has worked a string of low-paying jobs at places including a money-transfer agency, a laundromat and a dry cleaners.
The good news is that — as of last year — 91 percent of New Jersey’s students stayed in school and graduated within four years, which is among the best rates in the nation. However, a closer examination of the numbers tells a more nuanced story.
At the high end of the spectrum, 97 percent of Asian students and 95 percent of white students in New Jersey graduate. But the graduation rate drops to just 85 percent for Latinx students and 84 percent for Black or “economically disadvantaged” students (which the State Department of Education defines as those who qualify to receive free or reduced-cost lunch). The numbers plummet to 73 percent for students who are homeless and 63 percent for students in the foster-care system.
In one study from 2014, the National Center for Education Statistics found that kids from families facing severe economic hardships are more than four times as likely to drop out as those from the highest-income brackets.
The group Advocates for Children of New Jersey spent two years studying the problem and had one big takeaway.
“There is data nationally that shows that chronic absenteeism is one of the predictors of high-school graduation,” said ACNJ President Cecilia Zalkind. “The highest absenteeism rates are in preschool through kindergarten, and then they drop off and start going back up in ninth grade. And if you intervene in ninth grade and keep kids in school, the graduation rate goes up.”
Many of the days kids missed during their early school years were related to reading difficulties, her group reported, underscoring the need for quality education early on. But there were also myriad other reasons that complicated the search for a simple solution.
“When we started looking at absenteeism, I felt like we opened Pandora’s box,” Zalkind said, “because it raised all these other issues about families struggling with child care and jobs that start before school opens, about health issues like asthma that keep kids out of school, but also keep their siblings out of school if a parent doesn’t have anybody to watch the child or take their [other] child to school while one child is home sick. So [there’s] a whole variety of factors.”
Simply hiring an extra guidance counselor wouldn’t magically solve the problem. Still, after conducting focus groups with parents, school administrators and high-school students themselves, Zalkind said her group noticed a theme that she now feels is central to creating a culture where kids want to continue their education.
“The most dramatic issue certainly for older youth,” she said, “was the sense that they had no connection to anyone in the school. This disconnectedness is certainly tied with school performance and staying in school to graduate. Students talked to us a lot about having someone who really cares that they’re in school and that notices when they’re gone.”
Zalkind noted that all too often, schools focus on their average, overall daily attendance numbers — which might appear good at first glance — but conceal the fact that there are individual students who have a record of not showing up for class.
In the end, ACNJ drafted legislation that Gov. Murphy signed into law in June 2018 that require school districts with high rates of absenteeism to keep better records of students who are chronically absent (defined as missing more than 18 days in a school year). That’s nearly 10 percent or 129,000 of New Jersey’s 1.3-million K–12 students.
Districts will also have to develop strategies to address the problem, including “establishing protocols on informing and engaging parents when a child begins to show a pattern of absences.” The State Department of Education is currently in the process of drafting regulations, so the new rules haven’t taken effect just yet, but Zalkind is hopeful that they’ll have a positive impact.
Even if kids do manage to graduate from high school, they aren’t out of the woods when it comes to overcoming educational barriers to success.
The Pew Research Center found that college is more important in today’s economy than ever before, with college grads earning 51 percent more, on average, than people with high-school diplomas alone. They’re also much more likely to be employed.
In addition, the study found that 22 percent of 25–32-year-olds who had only high-school diplomas were in poverty in 2012, compared with just 6 percent of those with college degrees. But higher education remains expensive and unattainable for many students.
When Liz (who asked that we omit her last name) completed high school, she immediately got a job at an insurance company in Newark.
“I had no choice because my parents were struggling with six kids,” she said. “So we all generated a little extra income for them. There was no way that my father could have ever afforded to send us to college.”
After her second marriage — an abusive relationship — came to an end, she had four children to support on her own. She asked friends to babysit while she shuttled between three different low-paying jobs to cover the bills. She was a banquet waitress at a ski resort and a bartender, and on weekends she worked at a deli.
“It’s pretty sad that I had to work that many jobs in order to make enough money to live,” she said. And she was still just barely making ends meet and struggling to put food on the table.
If the cost of going to college was out of reach for Liz and her siblings when she graduated from high school in the mid-1960s, it’s sobering to realize how much it’s continued to increase by leaps and bounds, doubling over the past 30 years, eight times faster than wages during that same period.
Gov. Murphy has vowed to tackle the affordability problem by launching the Community College Opportunity Grant, a pilot program that helps students at state two-year schools cover their unmet needs. The program essentially provides free tuition for those facing the most severe economic hardships if they don’t have other ways to fund their education.
After the program started out relatively small last spring, Murphy asked lawmakers to more than double the funding and make $58.5 million in grants available to students for the 2019–2020 school year, potentially aiding some 18,000 students. But the legislature balked at the proposal, cutting his request in half and allowing for only a modest increase.
Students attending any of the state’s 18 county colleges who have adjusted gross incomes of less than $65,000 are now eligible to be considered for the program (see more info here), but they’ll be competing for limited funds. Some critics have called for the grant program to be expanded to cover four-year state schools as well.
In early 2019, the governor released his State Higher Education Plan, including a “Student Bill of Rights,” which — among other things — called for more student access to internships and apprenticeships, support networks for struggling students, and courses that are more relevant to the future job market. In addition, Murphy reiterated support for the “65 by 25 campaign,” a target first announced by Gov. Chris Christie that 65 percent of working-age New Jerseyans should earn college degrees or certifications by 2025 (it’s currently around 50 percent).
“When implementing this strategy, policymakers and college leaders must focus on populations that have been historically disadvantaged, including underrepresented minorities, low-income students and working-age adults,” the plan said. “The state must address the causes of equity gaps in order to build a better future and a stronger and fairer economy. Ignoring these populations is a lost opportunity to reach all those who never got the chance to attend college, as well as the roughly one million New Jerseyans who attended college but left without obtaining a degree.”
Which brings us back to Monica, the undocumented immigrant from Ecuador whose mother forced her to leave high school before she finished her studies.
After working a string of low-paying jobs and facing a contentious — and expensive — legal dispute with her ex-husband to regain custody of her daughter, she had a stroke of potentially game-changing good luck. She told her story to one of her regular customers at the dry cleaners, and he generously agreed to provide her with some financial help. She’s now studying online for a degree in fashion manufacturing, and sending her teenage daughter to private school.
To be clear, money is still tight, and Monica often finds herself having to make sacrifices, but she now feels more optimistic about the future. She hopes to one day open her own business selling bespoke suits and dresses, and she’s determined to help her daughter forge a different path.
“If I study, I will have a better life for me and for my daughter,” she said. “If I do not get ahead of the situation, I will always be stuck, and I don’t want that. If I go to college, it’s so my daughter can become more than me and doesn’t get stuck. That’s what motivates me.”
But she’s acutely aware of how fortunate she is, ever mindful that most people in her situation never get to have these sorts of opportunities.
“I tell my daughter, ‘you’re going to a private school, you have that blessing,’” she said. “You have to take advantage of it, because other children do not have the same situation as you.”