The other day I pulled Kozol's (1988), Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America; twenty-eight year's before Desmond published Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City Kozol laid out the problem for us.  Kozol was a teacher in public schools in around Boston, but he quickly became entrenched in the fight for social justice, largely economic equity.  A few years ago I read Rachel and Her Children, and, as you can see in the below, I jotted that note about my career being rendered ridiculous by poverty.  I was echoing Kozol's sentiment: on the previous page he writes how he was hired to assist with literacy issues in schools, "Often, however, education issues became overshadowed by more pressing matters." This line of thinking moved to the forefront of my consciousness in the late 1990s due to one meeting with one student's mother.  What follows below the excerpt, and my next post, are going to get a bit more personal about why I'm doing this ride.  In part in response to an old friend's question; in part inspired by a tragedy shared by someone who attended the recent fundraiser in Rochester.  So, feel free to skip these, I'll get back to the hows and whats of cycling across America in a few posts.

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Recently, an old college friend asked why I'm doing this.  Sure, I sometimes quote Belushi's character in Animal House, "Why not!?" And, yes, my previous answers to the question are a large part of the truth.  Seriously, thousands of people do this every year; there's a race across the country on bicycles; many of them raise a lot of money for a lot of causes doing it, so what's the big deal? On the other hand, I'm not young, nor was I a cyclist, so fair question.   The inspiration for all this wasn't data about homelessness, rather, the people behind the data, namely, my students and their families.  I was reminded of this at the fundraiser in Rochester when a gentleman shared, "My uncle died of homelessness in Florida." Anyway, that inspired me to get a bit more honest with you and myself about why I'm doing this.  For obvious issues of confidentiality, names, dates, and places will not be used.  

I was teaching in a large public school.  Pretty much every student--like most humans--had a story.  Pretty much every teacher was committed and driven to help children learn and develop.  I was co-teaching with one of many faculty members at this school who helped me learn how to teach.  She was an amazing SPED teacher.  We worked together before she was married and before I had children.  Since then her family has become important to ours despite distance.  Anyway, she scheduled an IEP meeting with the mother of one of our students who was practically nonverbal and whose grades were poor in all classes.  I was the English teacher.  I came to the meeting with my concerns about the student's understanding of parts of speech.  During the meeting, the parent shared that she thought the reason her child struggled was that they had witnessed abuse.  I don't recall exactly what I said, but I'm pretty sure it had nothing to do with parts of speech.  

I went home that night affected.  Sure, a large part of it was human empathy.  But another part was frustration: it was knowing that student--and at least 100 others of the 150 I taught that year--didn't need me.  What they needed was a system of policing and CPS and social services and safety nets that worked more quickly and effectively.  Really they needed Chris Fay.  Chris Fay recently retired, but for decades he ran Homestretch--which I can now announce will be the recipient of the Breaking the Cycle (BTC) award in Virginia.  Homestretch is a transitional housing organization that extremely effectively serves previously unhoused families.  A number of those families are women and children who escaped abusive homes.  In short, I lost my ability to ignore the futility of my career.  Many of us don't want our jobs to be stupid.

I saw Dr. Pedro Noguera speak.  I've appreciated Dr. Noguera's work.  As part of his speech he spoke of growing up poor, and said, "Poverty is not disability." His point was that we should not have low expectations.  It turns out expectations have a significant impact in positive/negative directions.  True.  Agreed.  But I had worked in an orphanage with children who had suffered malnutrition; one so badly that physiologically he could not speak: the vocal folds in his larynx had not developed properly.  So, on the one hand, the kind of poverty Dr. Noguera was speaking of--in which he had enough to eat, a roof over his head, two working parents who were concerned with his education--is not a disability.  On the other hand, extreme poverty--the kind of which millions of our students suffer that comes with food and shelter insecurity--that is about as disabling as it gets.  Most of us haven't experienced that kind of hunger.  You can read about it in psych 101 textbooks: the brain loses its ability to think.  I had a student tell me that--a student who, without the benefits of a psych 101 course, declared, "Mr. Brown, when students are hungry, they can't think."  

That student's comment got scholarly support in Desmond's new book Poverty, by America, as follows: "Behavioral scientists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir call this 'the bandwidth tax.'  'Being poor,' they write, 'reduces a person's cognitive capacity more than going a full night without sleep.'  When we are preoccupied by poverty, 'we have less mind to give to the rest of life.'"

To be sure, before the above-described meeting, I'd already become aware: I knew many students who were unhoused, or nearly so, and more who suffered hunger.  However, I told myself that (a) being a positive hour for them each day of the school year had value, and (b) even in the most impoverished schools I worked in about 40% of students had enough to eat and sufficient shelter.  

Then one day, years after that meeting, a young teacher, April, came into my classroom on a social-justice vent.  Thinking I was an older, wiser teacher, I responded with words to the effect of, "Agreed, but isn't it okay to just be a good teacher for 20-30 years?" 

She replied with an enthusiastic, "No!" and walked out.  Turns out I was just older than April minus the wiser.  It was around that time that my wife and I and others decided there was room for another nonprofit to address homelessness and hunger.  

In one high-school I was teaching in, more than 50% of students were poor and hungry.  Within two years of our nonprofit implementing supplemental food programs, discipline referrals were cut by more than half.  To quote myself from 1998, "Until we provide Maslow's Hierarchy, we merely pretend to pursue Bloom's Taxonomy."  Per Maslow's Hierarchy, children need to have basic needs met in order to learn.  Our society keeps getting it backwards.  We've had this idea that with a high school and college degree, young people will become financially independent, when it's the other way around: young people need financial security to get a high school and college degree.  Why did it take so long for us to come around to so-called "housing first" programs? We had this idiotic paradigm that the unhoused should get clean, sober, employed, etc. before being allowed into shelters, when of course, with shelter it becomes much easier to get clean, sober, and employed.  

So, yes, I am riding across the country because I know this is a relatively simple problem to solve, and that solving it saves lives and money, and it is the right thing to do.  But that's not what really inspired the ride.  It's not about the data, it's not about the conceptualized causes or solutions.  The faces of my students, and the poor, and the hungry, and the homeless people who I've come to know and can't forget, they were the inspiration.  That simple.