Poverty And Homelessness

You'd think these reports are coming from a third world country, not the U.S.A. Update: The CNN videos for some reason got pulled form their site, so I've found a few others.

Poverty in the U.S. spikes

This isn't surprising, but it's not good either. If they really want to see an indicator, go to the low income (Title 1) public schools.

Poverty in the U.S. spikes

A Few Recent News Stories

First, view the opulence many of us will never live to see...

The Montauk House

The Palm Beach House

The Manhattan Penthouse

The Luxury Boats

Now, for a view of reality for the rest of us:

The Level of Poverty In U.S. Is Rising


Watch CBS Videos Online

Finance 101 For Title 1 Part 2

Now, here are some solutions to this problem.

The first thing I do when I'm teaching kids about money is to start with the big picture. For that, I use a powerpoint I made, with the permission of the school Principal at that time, talking about the value of an education. I use that as a jumping point to talk about what kind money they can make based on the level of education.

Since many of these kids don't really understand that kind of money just yet, I used an excel spreadsheet to break down the national average amounts of earnings per level of degree and after taxes and using the budget I show the kids, give the amount per month that each earning level has for housing. I plugged each earning level for the housing budget into the powerpoint and included pictures of what kind of homes (at 2007 values) they could afford based on each earning level. What kind of home can you afford as a high school dropout, versus the home afforded by someone with a professional degree? The more education, the better the houses got. The kids are by this point wanting those nicer homes, so then I tell them that in order to have those nicer homes, they not only need to be making the money, but they need to know how to manage it.

The first part, which is already covered in 2nd and 3rd grades, is the basics of counting the coins and bills. For this we go to these web sites:

Counting Coins

Counting Money

Then we make things get a little harder:

Count The Money

Let's Compare

Counting Money

As you can see, these are some pretty good sites for counting money. But, with the first site, it's no longer being maintained, as the university program that made it is no longer functioning. With the Harcourt site, you may need the password to get into it, which you can't get unless you purchase the Harcourt textbooks. None of this is sponsored by the Dept. of Ed.

The second class period I use a SmartBoard lesson I created to show students how to count change correctly. Have you ever been to a store where someone hands you the change, based upon the calculations of a machine? Have you ever wondered if those calculations are correct? The key to counting change correctly is to start at the amount owed, and then use coins and bills to work your way up to the amount paid. I demonstrate this using fake bills and coins on the SmartBoard lesson. Then I have them spend at least 2 class sessions (30 minutes each) counting up their change on this site:

Change Maker

After they have mastered counting the money, now they are ready to manage the money.

I show them some videos provided by Discovery Education (you have to be an educator to get access to these) on simple and compound interest.

Then I have them go to this site on generating compound interest, so they can see how their money can grow:

Compound Interest Calculator

By this time, they are ready to move on to budgeting. Budgeting is about choices:

Feed The Pig

Going To The Market

Welcome To Fedville


One of the best sites that gives all around guidance for kids is not from the government, it's from a non-profit called TheMint.org.

TheMint.org

Once they've completed this series, they can look at the school's Delicious page under finance for more sites that I've found for them:

Laird Leopard Finance

Finance 101 For Title 1

Most educators who work at Title 1 schools - schools educating the poorest among us - know there is a serious lack of education regarding finance.

In the state of Arizona, where I live and work, students learn how to count money in the 2nd and 3rd grades. It's in the Mathematics curriculum. Here's basically what they are learning.

• The students learn the differences in amounts for coins and bills.
• The students learn to add coins to the equivalent of amounts or bills ( 4 quarters = 1 dollar)
• The students learn basic subtraction to determine amount of change.

This is a great start for second and third grade. There are a few problems with this, though.

1. The students at this rate have never been exposed to decimals, so they don't grasp the math behind the adding and subtracting of coins.
2. The following grades, where decimals are introduced, money is not specified in the curriculum, so the connections between two decimal numbers (in the hundreths) and money are not made.
3. Money is not addressed again in the curriculum until high school Economics.
4. Lower income students have a higher dropout rate by the time they've reached their junior or senior years of high school, many never make it to take the Economics class.
5. Between Elementary and High School, students are not being taught budgeting and saving their money.
6. Lower income students do not have a constant exposure to money (if you don't have it, you're not going to learn about it), so they have forgotten a lot of what they learned in 2nd and 3rd grades by the time they are in 5th and 6th grades.

Because of this, the cycle of poverty continues in a family until someone is actually taught about the basics in finance, such as budgeting and saving money.

This last school year, I asked the two 5th grade classes at my school how many had ever heard of a savings account. The result was about 1/2 of the students had heard about it, much less understood that when they save their money in a financial institution, they actually get money back as a reward (interest). About half of all students in this one grade level had never heard of this.

Now, take a look at our financial situation as a nation, and the growing number of people living in poverty. If parents don't understand finance well enough to raise themselves and their families out of poverty, how are the kids going to be able to do it?