This past Monday, Dr. Eric Schansberg - economics professor at Indiana University Southeast and member of the Bluegrass Institute board of scholars - was interviewed on KET's Kentucky Tonight program by Bill Goodman. Attica Scott, District 1 representative on Louisville Metro Council, and Terry Brooks of Kentucky Youth Advocates were also guests on the show.

Watch The Price of Poverty In Kentucky on PBS. See more from WKGB.

The topic was the price of poverty in Kentucky and hopes for solutions on this critical issue. Dr. Schansberg pointed to family structure and education as the key determinants to poverty. But while it would take nothing less than a magic wand to fix the problems of family household structure, Schansberg was more optimistic for education reform:

Behind jobs is skills. That points to K through 12 education. If you exit our school systems with the equivalent of a 9th grade education or if you drop out of high school, you're going to have a really hard time succeeding. You can bust your tail. You can work your duff off. You can do all the things we were just talking about but if you have a poor education, a poor quality education, your life is very difficult. And that's something we have a shot to fix fairly easily is through education reform, making a difference in the skill level and thus the types of wages people can earn.

So why don't schools provide the type of education our young people deserve? Dr. Schansberg had an answer, and possible solution.

That's an area where public schools have tremendous monopoly power over particularly the poor and the lower middle class. They don't have options where they go to school...And we don't trust monopoly power in the private sector. We shouldn't trust it in the public sector. Kentucky is behind, way behind where the nation is going with that. But if we had competition we'd have all kinds of different models of schooling...We need more competition and more flexibility and that's what you find when you allow competition.

So competition through school choice could be the light at the end of this tunnel of poverty - not throwing more tax dollars at the problem. After all, as Schansberg pointed out, "It's really hard to really help people. It's easy to spend money, but it's hard to help."