Veronica Brooks left the Darden School of Business (www.darden.edu) on January 31 more than a little miffed. After listening to back-and-forth discussion at the school’s first-ever Symposium on Poverty—featuring experts in fields such as public policy, education and outreach—Brooks shook her head in dismay. “I’m just really surprised there isn’t more awareness about these things,” Brooks said.
On the other hand, that was exactly the point.
Organized by UVA’s Student Committee on Social Responsibility, the poverty symposium divided into five groups tackling the always-cheery poverty-related aspects of race, education, investing, health care and wealth distribution. The idea? Examine the socioeconomic implications of poverty—which is the Darden way of saying, “What’s this gonna cost and who’s gonna pay for it?” In the education group that Brooks joined, the answer was clearly: “We’ll get back to you on that one.”
 Some Darden students had a lot to learn at a symposium on poverty offered last week. |
A few facts were tossed out by the moderator, such as that, in fourth grade reading tests, 41 percent of white students are at least “proficient” versus 13 percent of black students. Some questioned No Child Left Behind’s philosophy of taking funding from low-performing schools. Another asked how long the government should keep pouring money into an investment (i.e., the school system) that’s not panning out.
Finding many of the comments ill-informed, Brooks finally spoke up to offer herself as a case study. A senior from the rural town of Halifax in Southside, where a faltering school system produced numerous dropouts and teen pregnancies, the African-American undergrad came to UVA on a full scholarship.
“Economics and race, they’re interwoven, and it’s often hard to untangle that knot. But I left and I’m here,” she said. After graduation, she’ll spend two years in the Teach for America program, teaching impoverished middle school students in rural Louisiana.
Most of the poverty-worrying crowd, largely Darden students, could comfortably discuss the subject in the abstract, knowing that MBA grads rake in upwards of $120,000 a year. First year teachers? Subtract about $90,000. Perhaps the symposium could have added one more facet: donations.
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