Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis — Reflection
“Do youth today coming from different social and economic backgrounds in fact have roughly equal life chances, and has that changed in recent decades?”
This is the central question that Robert Putnam examines in Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. Rather than income inequality this book examines trends in opportunity inequality. After all opportunity is the cornerstone of the American Dream.
“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”
Opportunity is a seed.
Ode to Putnam.
I admire Robert Putnam about just as much as you can admire a fit to a tweed jacket Harvard professor (although Greg Mankiw comes in a close second). Putnam wrote Bowling Alone which became a national best seller, generated enormous political discourse, graced our lexicon as an adjective to define our society, but most importantly it laid the foundation to my freshmen and sophomore year program. Putnam argued “Civic engagement is on the decline” and CIVICUS, set out to reverse the trend as much as any group of 144 college students could. When Putnam published a new book I felt compelled to read his next testament.
“A better description [of Robert Putnam] might be a poet laureate of a Civil Society” -Jason DeParle
Here are my takeaways:
Stories
“There is great power in telling difficult stories in a beautiful way” -Unknown
This book reads like a modern day “How the Other Half Lives”. Putnam told rich qualitative stories of incongruent life narratives — one where opportunity is growing and another where it is shrinking. He managed to balance his data rich findings by also finding a feeling that resonated with the audience. As I have said before people react to stories not data — Putnum not only brought together almost 400 sources to show trends in societal shifts but he was able to humanize these trends for the laymen to digest. (Further reading: — Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die)
Schools
“Do schools in America today tend to widen the growing gaps between have and have-not kids, do they reduce those gaps, or do they have little effect either way?”
The school sections stands out to me because education has the longest reach in affecting human capital in society — the impact of education spans generations. Ancient philosophers like Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, and more recently Dewey argued that strong societies depend on preparing the next generation. We understood the importance of schools centuries ago but still demonstrate serious weaknesses. Here are some weaknesses:
- Residential sorting by income has led to high income students going to better schools and low income students going to bad schools. (Even 50 years after Brown v. Board schools are far from equal)
- Kids do better in schools where the other kids are affluent. This is proven by research but simply think of going to school surrounded by drugs vs ambition).
- High poverty high schools offer fewer AP classes and have more disciplinary problems. These differences lead to completely different lesson plans.
- Consistent involvement in extracurricular activities is strongly associated with a variety of positive outcomes — especially upward mobility. Low income schools have less extra curricular activities than high income schools.
- A family’s SES had become even more important than test scores predicting which eighth grades would graduate from college.
- Poor kids are more likely to attend a for profit institution and end up with higher debt.
- College completion gap (by family income) has steadily increased. I find this especially frightening.
John Oliver has a great segment on charter schools:
Malcolm Gladwell discusses how the American school system continues to leave an extraordinary amount of talent on the table:
Putnam makes a similar point — a major difference between rich and poor is the number of opportunities each group gets (231). Rich kids have more ‘air bags’ when things go wrong to get them back on the course towards success.
NPR discusses why schools are closing and how it is disproportionately affecting poor, black students.
When measuring test scores a researcher concluded: “The achievement gap between children from high- and low-income families is roughly 30–40 precent larger among children born in 2001 than among those born twenty-five years earlier”. So are schools responsible for the exacerbation, if not than who is?
“When parents are involved at school, their children go further in school, and the schools they go to are better”
Parenting
“The gaps in cognitive achievement by level of maternal education that we observe at age eighteen — powerful predictors of who goes to college and who does not — are mostly present at age six, when children enter school.”
Age 6! Shouldn’t we focus on a child’s development? Children spend way more time with their parents then with their teachers. (Someone find me the exact hours).
“Virtually every aspect of early human development, from the brain’s evolving circuitry to the child’s capacity for empathy, is effected by the environments and experiences that are encountered in a cumulative fashion, beginning in the prenatal period and extending throughout the early childhood years”
On one hand their is upside for successful development from good parenting but also immense downside from bad parenting that stems from toxic stress and neglect. Here’s elaboration on the class differences in parenting:
- Well educated parents aim to raise autonomous self directed children while low educated parents focus on discipline and obediences
- Family dinners, a proxy for strength of parenting, has shown a widening gap since the mid-1970s.
- All parents are increasing spending on child development but well educated parents are doing it at a faster pace. (I should be more grateful for the family dinners I had)
- Financial worries for low educated parents have been widening. This leads back to more stress in the child’s development.
Freakanomics asks “Do the kids with PTA parents do better than the kids whose parents have never heard of the PTA?” They conclude this:
“Parents who are well educated, successful, and healthy tend to have children who test well in school; but it doesn’t seem to much matter whether a child is trotted off to museums or spanked or sent to Head Start or frequently read to or plopped in front of the television. … The reality is that technique looks to be highly overrated”.
Both Our Kids and Freakanomics agree that a child’s early development is critically important but Freakanomics argues that parenting isn’t so much about technique as it is about who the parents are and what resources they can provide.
Putnam says it’s probably not the schools that are widening the gap and Freakonomics loosely says parenting technique doesn’t matter as much as we think. Than what is it?
Community
This brings us back to the beginning: Bowling Alone. TL;DR Society is on the trend to individualism. Here all the differences in communities between rich and poor
- The amount of close friends
- The size of social networks
- Access to the internet and how it is used (see: Digital Divide)
- How many mentors we have
- The rust in neighborhoods
- The amount of adolescent obesity
- Church attendance
I was surprised by how important and impactful religious communities are. I overlooked what they offer, philanthropy, guidance, stability, and family support. The poor kids involved in religious groups stand closer to the rich kids in the criteria listed above.
Communities might not be causing the gap but they certainly may be an avenue in fixing it.
Why closing this gap matters
Through out the book we see recurring scissor charts. Here’s one for example:
Why does this all matter? Why should we close the widening gap?
Malcolm Gladwell illustrates by pulling up the weakest parts of our society we pull up all of society. Why improve the best airpoet when improving the weakest will have the largest impact on all the airports?
There is serious opportunity cost here if we let this talent go to waste just because private and public institutions don’t support the poor like they use to. (Check out page 230 for a serious discussion on economic costs). How might we not let this talent go to waste? Is it by fixing these institutions or finding another angle?
Another question that will arise when discussing the solutions are is the notion of equality vs fairness. What is fair is not always equal. Read more about the difference here. From Putnam:
“…because investment in poor kids raises the rate of growth for everyone, at the same time leaving the playing field in favor of poor kids. That has been the core rationale for public education throughout U.S. history, and much empirical research confirms that premise”
What’s challenging about this entire discussion is we are looking at trends that are hard to spot the difference between causation and correlation:
“It is important to distinguish between the sites of disparity and the causes of disparity. It would be too easy to assume that because family income so closely predicts college graduation, college costs must be the cause of class discrepancies. The fact that a given rung of the ladder is the site of a rapidly growing class gap does not imply that that rung itself caused the gap” (“Freakanomics” wrote a very similar point)
The book is dense and this reflection barely scratches the surface. But in the end I’m left with a feeling of hope. I always like to think hope is more powerful than despair. Yes there are problems and yes they are growing, but these are problems created by humans so they can also be fixed by humans. Read the book and let’s have a conversation on a section or two.
Further reading:
Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
