By one recent study, Chattanooga is No. 1 among the country’s top 10 metropolitan areas for income inequality.
In greater Chattanooga, there are 21 low-income households for every home that enjoys a yearly income above $200,000. That’s more than two and a half times the poor families in America’s average ratio of 8-to-1.
The Chattanooga Times Free Press on Sunday began a series of stories – The Poverty Puzzle – about how we got here, what it means and how we change the trajectory.
And, no, the answer is not just jobs. If that were the case, the Chattanooga Chamber of Commerce and local foundations would not recently have written a report calling for local school improvement because employers in Hamilton County have some 15,000 unfilled jobs. Why? Because they can’t find educationally qualified applicants for some of the 10,000 jobs that Volkswagen and its auto suppliers have brought here over the past eight years.
That means our children and families remain in poverty while these and other local businesses are hiring 44 percent of their workers from outside Hamilton County.
Using anonymous tax records to map economic mobility across the U.S., a Harvard University study found that a whopping 91 percent of all U.S. counties did a better job than Hamilton County in creating paths to high earnings for children born at the bottom of the income scale. The study found the differences may lie in five measures: segregation, inequality, schools, social capital and family structure.
Think about that. We here in Hamilton County have done what the vast majority of U.S. counties have not done: We brought in 10,000 new jobs, yet we haven’t touched our poverty level and income inequality – in huge part because our young workers are not well enough educated, cannot read well enough, to fill 15,000 available jobs in our city and county.
We’ve spent hundreds of millions to turn our downtown from a ghost town to a 21st century tech magnet for young upwardly mobile people who want a city life with suburban niceties. We’ve spent still more hundreds of millions for industrial incentives to VW and other manufacturers. And this is not to say that money wasn’t well-spent. Chattanooga is the only city in decline after desegregation and the wholesale loss of manufacturing jobs in the late 20th century that has managed to reverse its fortune. Our visionary expenditures on downtown and replacement industries are, in part, why this is true.
What we have not made adequate commitment to is education. Hamilton County – through property owners – in fiscal 2015 spent $132 million on our public schools – 33 percent of the $399 million funding budget.
In other words, we and our county commissioners commit just $3,015 a year to the total $9,114 budgeted for each of the county’s 43,797 students. With our sales taxes, we provide another $64 million, or 16 percent. State, federal and foundation money pays for the remaining 51 percent of our children’s K-12 education.
It should go without saying that as an extension of education, we have not made a commitment to end local segregation and poor race relations: 43 percent of our public school students are minorities, while only about 25 percent of all Hamilton County residents are of a minority race. Clearly the white kids from upper-income families are among the some 25 percent of school age Hamilton County youngsters that attend private schools.
That continuing “white flight” holdover from the 1960s contributes to our county’s lackadaisical school funding, and at least one result is that virtually all of the county’s lowest-performing schools are high-minority and high- poverty schools.
Clearly focusing on lifting families and improving education in those schools – coupled with the new jobs that we have made commitment to – would go a long, long way toward bridging our city’s yawning inequality gap.
Meanwhile, the news out of our public school system gets worse and worse and worse.
We recently learned that 60 percent of all Hamilton County third-graders do not read on grade level and all public school students here tested below the state average in nine of the 10 tested TCAP categories by as many as 16.7 percentage points.
We can stop this vicious cycle of poverty begets ignorance and ignorance begets poverty.
We just have to choose to do so.