Education is the key to increasing income and closing the gap between the northern and southern parts of the city, local economists and experts said Thursday.
“I believe wealth is one of Dallas’s greatest strengths, and at the same time it exposes one of its greatest vulnerabilities,” Mayor Mike Rawlings said. “We don’t discuss why some parts of our city are drowning in poverty and why capital is flowing to some ZIP codes and never gets close to others.
“We never talk about money and how it relates to race relations,” the mayor said, using census figures to point out a widening gap in personal income between blacks and whites.
Rawlings moderated a panel discussion — called “Come Together: Connecting Capital with Underserved Communities” — on these topics Thursday night at Adamson High School in north Oak Cliff.
Participants included Dr. Susan McElroy, associate professor of economics and education policy at University of Texas at Dallas; Mike Casey, chairman of the Grand Bank of Texas; John Martinez, president of the Regional Hispanic Contractors Association; and Michelle Singletary, author and nationally syndicated personal finance columnist.
The event was sponsored by The Dallas Morning News.
Panelists discussed myths within different cultures surrounding money and how education can help narrow income gaps.
Richard Fisher, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, was a guest speaker at the event. He discussed the role of education in racial income disparities.
Fisher said his own family history taught him the most important lesson about the route to higher income and greater opportunities.
“Jobs are the route to higher incomes,” he said. “Your chances of getting and keeping a job and moving up the opportunity ladder increases exponentially the higher up you go on the educational playing field.”
McElroy agreed, saying that education “is the surest route, bar none, to improving one’s economic status. Whatever comes second is not a close second.”
McElroy said people should look at education as an investment in human capital.
“What schools ought to be doing is growing human capital, so that when you leave that high school or college, not only should you look at the world differently, you should be able to look at something and think about something and figure out something that you couldn’t before,” she said.
Martinez spoke about the challenges within the Hispanic community. Just because some Hispanics are fearful about placing their money in banks, he said, does not mean money is not being made within the community.
“[Hispanics] can pull a lot of money together, and part of the myth is you think they don’t have money and they don’t spend money the way we see people normally spending money,” he said. “We need to ... have them put it into the proper banking facility.”
Casey, who owns a bank in Oak Cliff, stressed that if money is coming into a community, it is important to employ residents of that community.
Singletary spoke about what she is teaching her children in hopes of bridging the economic gap for future generations.
She said her daughter wants to be a teacher. Singletary said that rather than discourage a specific career field, she is encouraging her to be smart with her money.
“Talk to them about saving. Talk to them about investing,” she said. “These are good conversations to have because that will help bridge the gap as well.”
A benefit to children of learning at a young age to save money, Singletary said, is that they can continue their higher education debt-free.
While Singletary agreed with other panelists that higher education is crucial to bridging the gap in incomes among races, she lamented the high levels of college-related debt.
“College is costing people too much,” she said. “How do you build a foundation for yourself when everyone is in debt? My goal is to pay my house off before I retire and send my kids to school debt-free, and the way we do that is save.”
