Also, society has changed, Levy reports. Fifty years ago there was an income gap, just like today. But then the elderly made up the majority of the poor population. Today the elderly are doing relatively well, but the young, especially children of single-parent households, are most likely to rank among the poor. And those are the very children the Scholarship Fund is trying to help.
Political push needed Still, such funds can only be a small part of the solution.
The public schools must be improved, but improvement will take more than economic remedies. It will take political will. The state of Illinois is demonstrating such political will. Three years ago a Republican-led state legislature, determined to fix the urban schools, handed authority over schools to a Democratic mayor, Richard Daley of Chicago. Ever since, that city's desperately ailing school system has been undergoing repair and steady improvement through stern but intelligent hard work.