Education, Class, and the Divergence of Children's Life Opportunities
2015; Karger Publishers; Volume: 58; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1159/000435827
ISSN1423-0054
Autores Tópico(s)Youth Education and Societal Dynamics
ResumoJanet Yellen [2014], Chairman of the US Federal Reserve Bank, opened the 2014 Conference of Economic Opportunity and Inequality with observations that provide an essential underpinning for Putnam's important new book:The past several decades have seen the most sustained rise in inequality since the 19th century after more than 40 years of narrowing inequality following the Great Depression. By some estimates, income and wealth inequality are near their highest level in 100 years … The past few decades of widening inequality can be summed up as significant income and wealth gains for those at the very top and stagnant living standards for the majority. I think it is appropriate to ask whether this trend is compatible with values rooted in our nation's history, among them the high value Americans have traditionally placed on equality of opportunity. (pp. 1-2) Although Putnam acknowledges Yellen's description of current economic inequality, he is more interested in her question about its implications for our national emphasis on equality of opportunity. As a nation, we are less concerned with whether everyone gets to a similar place in the economic ladder than with whether everyone has the same chance to climb that ladder. Putnam's [2015] book attempts to address this belief by answering one basic question: ''Do youth today coming from different social and economic backgrounds in fact have roughly equal life chances, and has that changed in recent decades?'' (p. 31, emphasis in the original).Putnam's answer begins with a return to his home town, Port Clinton, Ohio, to compare the fates of several of his fellow class-of-'59 high school graduates with two more recent graduates. The differences are revealing. Several of his classmates, including two African American students, grew up in working-class families with high school (or less) educated parents. Yet, with the help from sport coaches, a wealthy employer, and other community figures, many of Putnam's classmates were able to graduate from college. By contrast, two more recent Port Clinton high school graduates followed paths that diverged almost at birth. The child of a more affluent local family became student council president, an honor society recipient, and attended a Big 10 university with the expectation of going to law school. In contrast, the other graduate grew up poor, had a father in prison, fathered a daughter by a former drug-addicted girlfriend, and, at the age of 21, saw no hope for the future. Putnam argues that these extreme stories capture fundamental changes that swept through his hometown and much of America in the past 50 years, changes that have profoundly divided the life opportunities of American children depending on their parents' educational status and social class. In Putnam's home county, for example, high-paying manufacturing jobs fell from 55 to 25% of all jobs in 30 years. Today, the average worker there makes 16% less than his or her grandparents (adjusted for inflation) and has ''not had a real raise for nearly a half century'' (p. 20). Although the social consequences of these changes lagged the economic collapse somewhat, by 2010 unwed births, for example, doubled to nearly 40%, and in less than 15 years (1999-2013), the child poverty rate jumped from 10 to 40%. A key point of Putnam's book, however, is that the impact of these changes depended on when and exactly where in Port Clinton you grew up. In 1990, both Port Clinton and neighboring Catawba Island had child poverty rates under 5%. By 2010, however, Port Clinton's child poverty rate increased to more than 40%, and, for the more desirable lakeside Catawba Island, it was still below 5% (for two adjoining census tracts it was 51 and 1%). In little more than 20 years, residential segregation and other changes associated with class and education had radically transformed Putnam's home county and the face of much of America.How could changes of this magnitude happen in such a short time? And what do they mean for daily lives and futures of children on different sides of the growing American class divide? After setting the stage for these questions in his first chapter, ''The American Dream: Myths and Realities,'' Putnam provides some partial answers in four chapters titled ''Families,'' ''Parenting,'' ''Schooling,'' and ''Community.''The chapter on ''Schooling'' provides a compelling comparison of the high school experiences of children from two different Latino families, with one family living in a school district having a per capita income four times higher than the other family's district. Although mean spending per student and student-teacher ratios are comparable in both schools (but see below), adolescents in the poorer district were more likely to be truant (daily rates of 33 vs. 2%), to drop out (27 vs. 7%), and scored markedly lower on statewide tests (bottom 20 vs. top 10%) than their richer peers. As would be expected, the daily experiences of children from these two families mirrored these differences. Isabella (from the wealthier district) says, ''the only bad thing is … you have to be in the top 10-12 percent. Getting Bs was considered failing'' (p. 144). In contrast, when Lola is asked about the academics in her school, she simply replies, ''There wasn't any'' (p. 154). Later in that chapter, parents - especially upper middle-class parents - are described as being quite aware of these sorts of differences. One cited study [Rothwell, 2012], for example, found that houses near a public school with high standardized test scores sold for USD 200,000 more than comparable homes near low-scoring schools. Putnam concludes the chapter with research linking this housing cost differential to the same pattern of residential segregation that affected his home town of Port Clinton over the past 30 years.The seven figures included in the ''Schooling'' chapter, on their own, provide a schematic but especially revealing summary of current class disparities in educational opportunities. For example, compared to their higher income peers, low-income students nationally attend schools that offer 1/3 as many Advanced Placement classes, 1/2 as many sports teams, and, partly as a result, are 2/3 as likely to engage in school-based extracurricular activities. Not surprisingly, low-income students are then half as likely to attend college and 1/5 as likely to graduate from college by the age of 30 as their higher-income peers. As reported by Putnam [2015]:Even more shocking, high-scoring [based on standardized academic tests] poor kids are now slightly less likely (29 percent) to get a college degree than low-scoring rich kids (30 percent). This last fact is particularly hard to square with the idea at the heart of the American Dream: equality of opportunity. (p. 190)By the end of the ''Schooling'' chapter, it is obvious that Putnam believes economic and other societal inequalities over the past 30 plus years have profoundly altered poorer children's opportunities to achieve the American Dream. Continued economic inequality, whatever some Americans may believe, has changed the communities and the neighborhood schools children attend in ways that seem likely to permanently alter their life trajectories. But how did things get this way? Without some working answer to this question, it is difficult to know how to narrow the diverging trajectories of children from more and less affluent families. In chapters titled ''Parenting'' and ''Families,'' Putnam outlines some answers that hint at a major cultural debate in the United States. On one side are critics who argue that changing social and moral values have weakened parental investments in their children, and, on the other, are those who stress the role of recent structural and economic changes in diminishing equality of opportunity. For example, in his recent book The Road to Character, Brooks [2015] cites a continuing Gallup Poll that asks high school seniors whether they consider themselves ''to be a very important person.'' In 1950, 12% said yes, and by 2005, 80% said yes. The problem for children and the parents who raise them, Brooks suggests, is that cultural values in the past half century have shifted from humility, self-restraint and public mindedness to an obsession with fame, individuality, and self-expression. In contrast, economists like Krugman [2012] and Stiglitz [2015] focus on changes like the 2008 recession that bankrupted millions of Americans ''while in the first years of the recovery, some 95% of the increases in income went to the top 1%'' (p. 11). This tension - character versus opportunity structure - is also implied in Putnam's chapter ''Families.'' In 1975, fewer than 20% of children were born to single mothers in the US, and this varied only somewhat by maternal educational level. By 2007, however, nonmarital births jumped to 65% for mothers with a high school education or less and about 10% for college-educated women. Moreover, 5 years after these nonmarital births, more than 2/3 of all women were no longer romantically involved with their children's fathers. And even when mothers did marry, high-school-educated mothers were twice as likely to get divorced as college-educated women (28 vs. 14%). Collectively, the magnitude of these changes has profoundly altered family structures and the developmental pathways of American children. Put simply, ''children who grow up without their biological father perform worse on standardized tests, earn lower grades, and stay in school for fewer years'' [Putnam, 2015, p. 78]. Explaining the origin of these changes is a complex and potentially contentious task, and Putnam's account attempts to straddle America's ''culture wars.'' Marriage 50s style, he says, involved: (1) a ''strongly patriarchal division of labor'' supported by a level of economic prosperity that allowed most families to live on a single, male income, and (2) a clear norm against ''out-of-wedlock births.'' The subsequent changes to marriage and family, he continues, happened for a variety of reasons, including the advent of the birth control pill, the reduction of economic opportunities for working-class males, an emerging individualist focus on self-fulfillment, and the increasing economic need and cultural support for women to enter the work place. As a result of these changes, Putnam continues, America has somehow fractured into three clearly defined and relatively equally sized class groups: those with at least a college degree, those with some college or vocational training, and those with a high school degree or less. As the three groups have lived through increasing residential, educational, and cultural segregation over the past 50 years, they have also become increasingly different in their parenting practices, family dynamics, and child outcomes. Moreover, as the bulk of Putnam's book makes clear, children from poorer families are doing worse than their wealthier peers by almost any standard that can be assessed. Putnam's description of the cultural and economic changes that led to increasing class/education-based divergences in marital and family patterns, however, are not very convincing. To be fair, this is not the primary focus of his book, and definitive explanations for these changes are still being debated. Still, it is not clear how recent historical changes, including better birth control, a more individualistic focus on self-fulfillment, and changes in women's roles, could drive the increasing divergence in children's opportunity structures as a function of parental education/class. For example, the cultural shifts that Brooks [2015] has recently described - purported declines in humility, self-restraint, and public mindedness - are by his description broad trends affecting most Americans and Western Europeans. Moreover, these are trends that do not differ in any obvious way by class and/or education. Why then are the economic and educational consequences of these supposedly shifting moral emphases so different for richer and poorer US children? Putnam has an answer, which unfortunately is never really developed in the book:Unemployment, underemployment, and poor economic prospects discourage and undermine stable relationships - that is the nearly universal finding of many studies, both qualitative and quantitative. A growing portion of women in the lower portion of the economic hierarchy are reluctant to marry men who can offer little or no economic security. (p. 73)This last quote is especially revealing in light of Nicholas Lemann's [2015] recent review of Putnam's book. After summarizing the clear descriptive strengths of Our Kids, Lemann argues that Putnam's overwhelming emphases on relative mobility and social capital as correctives for current inequalities are fundamentally wrongheaded. Lemann's critique begins with historical research [e.g., Blau & Duncan, 1967] indicating that American mobility is mostly ''structural'' in nature. In other words, Americans have typically moved up or down economically in very large groups (absolute mobility) rather than by changing their individual positions within the economic ladder (relative mobility). Moreover, Putnam even acknowledges this pattern, ''Over the grand sweep of history, relative mobility accounts for only a small portion of total mobility experienced by generations, whereas absolute (structural) mobility accounts for most of it'' (p. 62). What is puzzling, then, is how Putnam could be aware of these continued economic realities and yet devote the overwhelming bulk of his book to relative rather than absolute mobility. As Lemann [2015] puts it,If Putnam were more focused on absolute mobility, which was the real engine of the American Dream for his generation, then he might have spent more time exploring economic policy generally or ways of recreating the widely distributed economic growth that so much helped Americans his age. (pp. 26-27)It could be argued that there are already a number of excellent books on problems involving absolute mobility [e.g., Piketty, 2014; Reich, 2010; Stiglitz, 2012] and that Putnam is more interested in how these problems have affected American children and their prospects for the future. At this level, Our Kids provides a powerful and extremely troubling picture of the accelerating divergences between children from different social-class backgrounds. Putnam's division of American families into three roughly equally sized groups (college-educated, some college/vocational training, and high school or less) is clearly related to the increasing segregation of children's life trajectories at birth. But this is only one part of Putnam's book. It is when he turns to his second main interest - how to stop and reverse these patterns - that the weaknesses of the book become especially salient.The recent changes in ''social capital'' that Putnam refers to throughout his book - the activities and associations, and formal and informal social bonds that form the textures of daily life - are real and troubling. It is not just as Putnam [2000] argued in a previous book that more of us are ''bowling alone,'' but, as he describes in Our Kids, the time, money, and emotional energy for ''bowling'' are increasingly dependent on our class/educational backgrounds. Lemann's [2015] criticism, which I share, is that Putnam alternates in his causal explanations of the links between social capital and economic mobility. As noted above, in several sections of his book Putnam persuasively argues that: (a) massive economic changes have preceded disruptions in our social fabric and (b) changes in absolute rather than relative mobility are responsible for most of this disruption. Yet much of the book suggests that if we could only improve our social capital, the necessary social and economic changes would follow. In Lemann's [2015] words, Putnam ''is most intensely focused on increasing opportunity for individuals … by increasing their locally available store of social capital - through improved ways of rearing children, and encouraging activities and associations that will increase their chance in life'' (p. 27). This last criticism of Our Kids - that it often misunderstands the likely causal links between social capital, economic changes, and children's life opportunities - has its own potential difficulties. As Putnam argues, increasing poorer children's access to extracurricular activities, school and nonschool mentors, and high-quality community resources (e.g., parks, libraries, youth organizations) are important social goods on their own; goods that do not depend on their role in producing structural economic changes. Schools and schooling, however, play a more complex role in debates about possible causal links between structural economic changes and children's life opportunities, especially as educational status and social class have become more tightly connected. Many Americans put their hopes in the transformative power of educational institutions and innovations for addressing economic and societal inequalities. Yet, as Putnam [2015], Duncan and Murnane [2011], and numerous other researchers have described [see also Arsenio, 2013, for a brief review], children's educational opportunities in the United States depend on the specific schools they attend, and the quality of these schools is increasingly affected by ongoing patterns of economic and residential segregation. The good news is that researchers and educators are developing an increasingly fine-tuned understanding of how to improve the educational experiences and performance of children and adolescents from poorer communities [see, e.g., Duncan & Murnane, 2014]. The bad news is that it is unclear whether Americans have the political will to make the necessary educational changes or whether those changes, on their own, can halt or slow the growth of inequalities in our children's life opportunities. Putnam [2015] began his book by saying he saw his hometown change from a passable embodiment of the American dream … [to] a community in which kids from the wrong side of the tracks that bisect town can barely imagine the future that awaits the kids from the right side of the tracks. And the story of Port Clinton turns out sadly to be typical of America. How this transformation happened, why it matters, and how we might begin to alter the cursed state of our society is subject of this book. (p. 1)By its conclusion, Our Kids has provided vivid and disturbing answers to the first two questions while also beginning to address policy debates about how to alter our ''cursed state.'' It is a book that will appeal to everyone concerned with increasing inequality and its accelerating impact on American children's diverging life trajectories.
Referência(s)