Gene Marks offers some advice:
If I was a poor black kid I would first and most importantly work to make sure I got the best grades possible. I would make it my #1 priority to be able to read sufficiently. I wouldn’t care if I was a student at the worst public middle school in the worst inner city. Even the worst have their best. And the very best students, even at the worst schools, have more opportunities.
TNC demolishes Marks' simplistic logic:
Let us not be hypothetical here. I am somewhat acquainted with a poor black kid from West Philly, and have been privileged to grapple with some of the details of his
life. When he was six he came home from school and found his entire life out on the sidewalk. Eviction. He says he saw some of his stuff and immediately reversed direction out of utter humiliation. He spent the next couple of weeks living on a truck with his father, his aunt and brother. Everyday they'd search the trash for scrap to take to the yard for money. His father abused everyone in the family. He last saw his father alive when he was 9. At 17, convinced he would die if he stayed in Philly, he dropped out of high school and lied his way into a war.
You will forgive me if I've written in these pages of my father with a kind of awe. It is not merely the fact of being my father, but having acquainted myself with his childhood conditions, I shudder to think of what might have become of me.
Cord Jefferson supports TNC's take, with an example of a problematic student whose behavioral problems kept escalating, but only because he wanted to be sent home to protect his mother from turning tricks while he was at school. Karl Smith defends the rationality of not choosing Marks' route:
For a 16 year-old girl regular unprotected sex will result in a full term pregnancy in the modern world with roughly probability one. … Now, just like any other parent the birth of that child will be the most important event in her life. And, the love of that child will be the most valuable thing she experiences. Some people say that looking back their career was more important than their children, but those people are few and far between. So, if the girl has unprotected sex she gets right here, right now, the most important and valuable thing in life will happen immediately with PROBABILTY ONE.
McArdle runs through some of the barriers that stand in the way of those who do want to change their lives:
Poor people have very little financial capital. But they have very strong help networks that help them survive. These networks are vital to keeping them off the bottom, but also make it harder to rise–there's a much greater expectation that if you get your hands on some money, you share it; that you will take in needy friends and relatives even if that makes your life much harder, and so forth. (There's some really interesting work on how microfinance actually functions as savings for people who cannot save because their savings will be tapped before they can be used by needy relatives and friends. The EITC seems to work the same way here). The more you have, the more you have to share. This erodes the incentive to get more.
Kelly Virella examines the Civil War roots to Marks' reasoning. Imani Gandy points to the obvious problem of racism, even if the kid isn't poor:
[B]eing a black child—poor or not—is also difficult because teachers and administrators take a look at you and make assumptions about your intelligence and abilities based solely upon your skin color. In my case, even after I told my teachers and principal that the classes in which they had placed me were too easy, they didn’t believe me.
Marks' piece inspired the creation of an "Ask a poor black kid anything" tumblr, maintained by a certified poor black kid.
(TNC is the little kid at the bottom of the above photo. You can watch him talk about his family in this video.)
The Dish 