America’s Lost Boys and Me

> There’s one story that’s neat and clean and politically convenient to tell about my life. It goes like this: Poverty is the root cause of my problems (and those of my friends). With enough financial aid, and a good test score, anything is possible.

> But the data tells quite a different story. Poverty, even extreme poverty, is surmountable. What is nearly impossible to overcome is the instability—the psychological havoc—created by broken homes. Especially for boys.

> Research in psychology and economics shows that childhood instability has much a stronger effect than parental socioeconomic status for a variety of important outcomes, including education. This is clear when we compare children living in poverty with children living in foster care. In the Los Angeles County foster care system (where I grew up), for example, only 64.5% of foster kids graduate from high school. But the graduation rate for students categorized as “socioeconomically disadvantaged” is 86.6%, the same as the overall average in L.A.

Turning those numbers around better shows how stark the difference is: 35.5% of foster kids fail to graduate, compared to 13.4% of the socioeconomically disadvantaged. I.e. foster kids are 2.65x more likely to fail high school than poor kids.

“I suspect I’m the only student at Cambridge University who lived out of garbage bags as a child. Here’s why I didn’t live the life I was meant to.”