Greetings from the Newberry County Literacy Council. The People’s College met during the fall, while wearing masks and maintaining distance.
We read Robert Putnam’s “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis.” It is a disturbing book that needs to be read by all of us: leaders, followers, old and young, white, Black, Latino. Putnam is a government professor at Harvard and has a long career of writing books about important topics, filled with the latest research, with keen insight and analysis about the meaning of it all.
What is Putnam’s thesis? Kids raised in the 1950s, even from poor and struggling families, had a reasonable chance at the American Dream, of rising above the educational and income level of their parents and securing a middle-class lifestyle. Kids today do not have this same chance.
What happened? Putnam points to economic changes beginning in the 1970s — the closing of factories and loss of manufacturing jobs, the loss of unions and the growth in income and wealth inequality that began to match the “Gilded Age” of the early 20th century. These changes led to increasing poverty, educational failure, family instability and neighborhood breakdowns. They led to an increasing income gap, the rise in single-parent families, increasing residential and school segregation by class, and the end of the American Dream for the ‘have-nots.’
He has a chapter for each of the major areas. For the family, the departure of manufacturing and good union jobs led to loss of steady income which increased family instability, promoted more single-parent families, and disrupted neighborhoods, all of which impacted children.
For parenting, it meant fewer resources to raise children, less time to spend with them as parents struggled, often as single parents, to work enough to keep the family afloat, living in neighborhoods with increasing crime and drug use as people turned to alternate means of coping and getting by. Again, the children suffer.
For education, it meant poor and working-class children increasingly going to schools segregated by class which reflected the growing trend of neighborhood segregation by class. These schools in poorer neighborhood were underfunded and had higher teacher turnover, fewer extracurricular activities, more discipline problems, and fewer accomplished students who could be models and assets for the struggling students. The increasingly class segregated neighborhoods deprived poorer families of connections, resources, and neighbors they could depend on for help.
Putnam shows how the economic changes of the 1970s led to these other changes. In doing this, he shoots down the charge that poverty, poor parenting, poor school performance, and family and neighborhood instability are the result of individual failings such as laziness, stupidity, or immorality.
Those of us who work with the poor know they are not lazy or immoral. They are not guilty of something. They are people victimized by economic changes and the absence of effective programs to deal with the problems these changes cause — to families, parenting, education, and neighborhoods. Putnam also rebuts the notion that poor school performance is the result of bad schools. Schools, he points out, should not be blamed for the class background of students who attend them or for the fact they are in poor neighborhoods and must deal with problems that schools in richer neighborhoods do not.
The poor have few options in choice of neighborhoods or schools. They do not have connections that richer parents have to help their children when they have drug problems or mental health issues. They don’t know lawyers and doctors and other professionals who can intercede for them. They don’t have an educational background that benefits their children and that enables them to study the latest trends in parenting or offer a stimulating home environment for cognitive and emotional development. They don’t have the money to move to a new neighborhood because they don’t like their neighbors or the school their kids are attending.
Putnam ends the book with some ideas for hope. We can fight poverty and restore the American Dream, but it will take money — for family support, to fix up neighborhoods, to help schools with poor students, to pay a living wage. We can raise the minimum wage, increase the Earned Income Tax deduction, extend the child tax credit, improve neighborhood infrastructure, offer pre-school education for all and affordable health care.
But these ideas involve tax money and expanded programs and redistribution — all of which face opposition. Why should I spend my tax money? Let people help themselves! Most of us know little about the realities of life for those struggling. In larger communities, classes live in separate neighborhoods. It is hard to identify with those who struggle if you never interact with them, if you don’t consider their kids “our kids.”
A final note: Putnam’s research focuses on larger cities. Newberry schools are not as neighborhood-based and thus have more diverse student bodies. Our neighborhoods are less segregated by class. Nevertheless, the issues of poverty and inequality and their effects on “our kids” are real and can be solved only by understanding Putnam’s analysis of their causes.
Much to think about. Until next time, happy reading!