Conquering persistent poverty in America is our greatest, and most important, challenge.

Recent IRS data found that the gap between the richest Americans and the poorest Americans is at its widest in 25 years. The richest the one percent of Americans earned 21.2 percent of all U.S. income earned in 2005 – a record high. 

The American Dream is not working for all Americans. 

How can it? Not when the bottom half of the nation accounts for only 12.5 percent of the nation's wealth. That's a lot of people with little to no money to save for, let alone buy, a home.

The civil rights community has long been concerned with poverty, as many of the Americans that make up the nation's poor are minorities. The image of America as a land of rising opportunity, widely shared prosperity, and intergenerational advancement is evaporating.

Hurricane Katrina highlighted that for the nation and the world because many of the hardest hit Gulf Coast residents were those without options -- a car, a friend with a car, a relative with a car -- trapped as a result of their poverty. Our inability to break the cycle of poverty in inner cities, rural towns, and suburbs challenges our nation’s most cherished democratic and moral principles.

Tackling a problem as multifaceted as poverty is no small feat, but one of the most important things we can do for all Americans is ensure they have a high-quality education in order to give them the greatest chance of making a livable wage.

President Bush, in responding to concerns about the income gap, made a good point about the importance of education. He told the Wall Street Journal that, "[s]kills gaps yield income gaps. And what needs to be done about the inequality of income is to make sure people have got good education." He is right.

My organization, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, joined a coalition of civil rights groups and the Alliance for Excellent Education and launched a campaign to ensure that American high-school students, particularly students of color, receive the highest-quality education.

In addition, we are working with ACORN, the Center for American Progress, and the Coalition on Human Needs on a public education campaign to cut poverty in half in 10 years. 

It's an ambitious campaign and we do not take it lightly. We'll need concrete solutions.

Recent research into corporate 401(k)s found that Blacks participate in retirement plans at far lower rates than Whites and are much less likely than Whites to invest in the stock market.

Though no industry-wide study of 401(k) plan activity by race has ever been conducted, studies like this – coupled with the knowledge that many of the Americans who are losing their homes in the current foreclosure crisis entered into mortgage loans they perhaps did not understand – suggest that there are significant numbers of Americans, particularly minorities, who could use financial education.

Providing Americans with the tools to manage their lives, both financially and educationally, will help break a cycle of poverty by empowering more people to make decisions that will better their chances of moving up the socioeconomic ladder.