I just want to spin out a little object lesson, pivoting off the President discussing some of the data in that Census report from yesterday, the one which got the media to focus on poverty for a second. The important thing to remember is that the poverty rate could have been much worse. Initiatives in the stimulus like extended unemployment insurance, and importantly, food stamps, alleviated some of the pain for the poor.

The poverty rate “misses most of the programs that have been added or expanded in the last 20 years to reduce poverty,” says Bruce Meyer, an economist at the University of Chicago.

For instance, the government estimates if the food stamp program was counted, it would have lifted 3.6 million people above the poverty threshold last year.

Now this is a question of the accuracy of the statistical analysis of measuring poverty, but the facts are that 3.6 million people get enough help from an expanded food stamp program to lift themselves out of poverty.

Now what happened in July? The Congress passed a bill to give $23 billion dollars in assistance for Medicaid and education budgets to the states. It was billed as an education jobs bill and that the future of our kids would be in peril without it. And how was that paid for, in part? By a $13 billion cut to the food stamp program, in effect lowering the increase and scaling it back.

This could have been avoided. In fact, the first time the bill came up, it was avoided. David Obey created a bill that would have rescinded some other programs to pay for the education jobs, including a small cut to the Race to the Top grant program, money that goes to schools which change their education policies to accommodate particular “reform” agendas. The White House and the Education Department promptly responded to that by making a veto threat. Obey told the Fiscal Times that the Administration suggested the food stamp cuts as an alternative.

We were told we have to offset every damn dime of [new teacher spending]. Well, it ain’t easy to find offsets, and with all due respect to the administration their first suggestion for offsets was to cut food stamps. Now they were careful not to make an official budget request, because they didn’t want to take the political heat for it, but that was the first trial balloon they sent down here. … Their line of argument was, well, the cost of food relative to what we thought it would be has come down, so people on food stamps are getting a pretty good deal in comparison to what we thought they were going to get. Well isn’t that nice. Some poor bastard is going to get a break for a change.

Now, the connecting thread here is what we know about the correlation between poverty and education. We know that child poverty is a significant drag on student achievement, and that anti-poverty programs have been tested and proven to work at raising that achievement. They’ve certainly been tested as much as the education policies that Duncan is pushing on the states and dangling money in front of them to do it, to boot.

So, given all this, the fact that the same people interested in raising student achievement suggested cutting a major anti-poverty program to pay for education reforms, even though we know that education and poverty are closely correlated, can we conclude that Arne Duncan and school reformers like him are seriously interested in student achievement, or seriously interested in getting their way on policies they like?