Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 1, 1990 TAG: 9007010297
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Advocates for children charge that the nation's leaders have done little over the last decade to try to turn around those figures.
But now, some advocates are optimistic that President Bush and Congress will come up with more funding for children's programs.
A few reasons why they are more hopeful:
There is growing documentation that citizens are willing to pay more taxes to improve schools and other programs for children - as long as they are assured that the money will go for what it's supposed to.
For example, a Gallup Poll has shown that more than 8 of 10 Americans are willing to pay more taxes to improve schools.
The nation's business leaders have begun calling for a larger commitment to children's programs.
As Lisbeth Schorr, author of "Within Our Reach: Breaking the Cycle of Disadvantage" says, when the Council on Economic Development starts sounding like the Children's Defense Fund, you know something's happening.
That something, Schorr says, is a coming together of people moved by compassion for children and people moved by self-interest - business people who want an educated work force so America can compete with Japan and increase profits.
Support is growing for major cuts in the federal government's spending on the military.
"This year, for the first time, we do have a chance at getting at that peace dividend," Schorr said. "Our tanks in Europe don't have anybody to shoot at anymore. Let's get our hands on that money. Let's not see it frittered away."
Not everyone is optimistic.
Dr. Victor Sidel, principal investigator for New York State Hunger Watch, says that only radical efforts - similar to the civil rights movement of the 1960s - will force America's leaders to do something for children.
"People are going to have to march through the streets of this society," Sidel said. "Some people are going to have to die."
The problem, Jule Sugarman and other advocates say, is summed up in their favorite cliche: "Children don't vote."
"Nobody ever voted for children's programs because they think if they don't, they'll be voted out of office," said Sugarman, founder of the Head Start child care program.
Speakers at a recent conference on children's issues in New York City talked about at least three major roadblocks to getting more money for children: lack of cooperation among organizations working on children's issues, growing budget strain from programs for the elderly, and continued segregation in the nation's schools.
Sugarman says that organizations working for children must reach agreement on what they want - and how they will get it.
"What you see is children's organizations fighting for their piece of the pie, rather than fighting to increase the size of the pie," he said.
His solution for increasing the size of the pie: a trust fund for children's programs, much like the separate federal trusts for highways and Social Security.
He proposes that the federal government build up the fund by adding a new payroll tax, starting at .3 percent and going up to .6 percent for every dollar earned above $51,300 a year.
Within five years, he says, the fund would provide $23 billion a year above the $40 billion a year that the federal government already spends on children.
Peter Peterson, a former U.S. secretary of commerce, argues that the only way to increase the money available for children is to stem the burgeoning cost of government payments to middle- and upper-class elderly.
Children are six times more likely to be poor than elderly people; yet the federal government spends 11 times as much on the elderly as it does on children, Peterson said.
Over the last quarter century, he said, the cost of entitlements to the elderly - including Social Security, Medicare and pensions - has grown from 5 percent of the gross national product to more than twice that.
He argues that this increasing spiral of government payments could leave the nation unable to do much for its young people - especially as the elderly population grows. "It's going to mean there's damn little money for kids," he said.
His proposal: Hold cost-of-living increases in Social Security to 60 percent of inflation for all the elderly except those who are truly poor. That would save about $90 billion a year by the end of the decade, he said.
But that will be a tough sell, Peterson said, because the American Association of Retired Persons and its 28 million members wield so much clout that politicians are afraid to do anything about entitlement programs.
The AARP disagrees with the argument that the young and the old are in competition. A spokeswoman for the organization has said that it is "mostly an intellectual issue" for which there is not much evidence.
Author and education advocate Jonathan Kozol says the nation will do little to improve the lives for all its children until it does something about educational inequality.
Kozol, author of "Illiterate America" and "Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America," says the disparities between inner-city schools that serve black students and suburban schools that serve whites are as bad as the inequities that existed during the days of legal segregation in the South.
He says he has seen evidence of injustice throughout the country - inner-city blacks going a whole school year without textbooks, 60 students squeezing into single classrooms, and all-black student bodies at high schools named, ironically, for Martin Luther King.
Meanwhile, he said, suburban school districts shower money and computers on white students, hiring lots of guidance counselors to work with kids in trouble.
The reason nothing is done, Kozol contends, is that politicians don't want to spend the money to give all children an equal chance at getting a good education. And, he said, white people in the suburbs will fight anything that might jeopardize the unfair advantage their children have.
That's one reason why he is suspicious of people who talk about getting business leaders involved in the schools.
These are the very same people whose children benefit from the inequities and who supported the Reagan-era budget cutting that has hurt children, Kozol contends.
The business-school partnerships offer a small dose of charity that is "simply adding window dressing to something that is phony," Kozol said.
Joan Lipitz, of the Lilly charitable endowment in Indianapolis, disagrees.
Instead of bashing the business community, she said, people should welcome its help. "We need as many allies on behalf of children as we can."
What the nation needs, Lipitz says, is "a Marshall Plan for children" - similar to the U.S. aid program that helped Europe rebuild from the destruction of World War II.
by CNB