Confronting Poverty (confrontingpoverty.org) is a new website that offers a set of resources dealing with American poverty and inequality. Most notable is an interactive "poverty risk calculator" that estimates for the first time the likelihood that an individual will experience poverty at some point in their future.
The idea is similar to the heart disease risk calculators that you can find on the Internet. In this case, the data is based on the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (psidonline.isr.umich.edu). But do probabilities dictate a person's fate? That's a compelling question that we should encourage students to wrestle with.To aid in that effort, there are discussion guides designed for various groups to further explore different issues around poverty and inequality. In addition, there are a number of online resources tied to the discussion guides that teachers and students will find invaluable in expanding their understanding of these issues.
"High school students and their teachers might very well find this work to be both exciting and relevant to some of the topics they are exploring. We will be piloting some of this material in June 2017 with several school systems in upstate New York," says Mark R. Rank, Herbert S. Hadley Professor of Social Welfare, George Warren Brown School of Social Work, Washington University in St. Louis.
Please send comments about your experiences using this unique teaching resource to Dr. Rank at markr@wustl.edu and to the editor at tssp@ncss.org.