Abstract
It is 1959. In Port Clinton, Ohio, Robert Putnam, the future Kennedy School Professor at Harvard, is graduating from high school in this medium-sized, Midwestern city on the shores of Lake Erie. He recalls those days as ones filled with opportunity for his classmates, regardless of their economic station in life—boys and girls from economically well off families as well as those from very modest circumstances. They were in school together, dreamed about future career opportunities, and many, across class lines, fulfilled those dreams. They went to college, raised families, had successful careers and economic success, and created bright future opportunities for their children. The civil rights movement and the women’s rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s were yet to take off, with the significant opportunities they would open up in the last quarter of the 20th century. So, any casual observer might argue that times certainly were not so rosy, for, say, African American youth or female youth. Nevertheless, Putnam claims, that even so, 1959 was a much brighter time, in general, for youth on the verge of adulthood to realize the “American Dream” than it is now. The problem, as Putnam sees it, is that the United States, in the 55 years since that moment, has become increasingly divided by class in all facets of how families and their children live and experience the world. This difference, this inequality in America is largely, but not alone, about income and wealth. Many contemporary economists have documented the recent historical trends on growing differences in income and wealth (eg., Piketty, 2014; Stiglitz, 2012, 2015). The central question for Putnam, however, and the focus of his book is: How do those differences and the powerful factors associated with this inequality impact opportunity and social mobility for children? To summarize the main conclusion, it is a starkly negative and bleak impact—a morally unacceptable trend that puts our society in grave danger for the future. Putnam takes pains to document that Port Clinton and its half century journey since he finished high school looks remarkably like the journey taken by most all other metropolitan areas throughout the United States during that same period of time.
To make his case, Putnam reports the findings from (1) a qualitative study of 107 young adults and their families, drawn from all regions of the United States, over a two-year period from 2012 to 2014, using in-depth interviews and conversations with the participants; (2) a quantitative survey of his Port Clinton high school classmates, some 53 years later, in 2012, at least all of those who were still alive and could be found. Finally, as he unpacks his claims about the role of social class, in successive chapters of the book, respectively, on how families function, how adults interact with their children as parents, how children experience school, how communities are organized and work, and finally, how the identified problems created by class differences could be reduced by a range of possible public policy interventions; and a (3) third research strategy is employed, in which he synthesizes existing research (experimental, observational, survey) from a variety of related disciplines, to illustrate both the historical claims of change in social class as well as how it impacts children (e.g., neuroscience research on brain development, class differences in parenting styles, class-based differences in school experiences and where children live, etc.).
Underlying all these approaches to studying social class differences, Putnam chose to use educational attainment as his measure for social class and a simple division—comparing youth from families with a parent who completed college with youth from families in which no parent completed college. He acknowledges that social class is typically defined and understood to be a composite of educational attainment, income level, and occupational category. However, by comparing and contrasting participants with college-educated parents (the well to do) and those with parents who have not completed college (the less well off), he has created a strong proxy for the other elements of class difference, and it seems to work, repeatedly, in his analyses across the different types of evidence assembled. That is, the class difference defined this way is repeatedly associated with large differences in children’s lives and outcomes in the expected direction for each of the domains he considers.
In the qualitative study, postdoctoral researcher, Jen Silva, first visited Port Clinton, Ohio, in the spring of 2012. She was in search of Bob Putnam’s remembered high school world, where the city was a place where parents, shopkeepers, teachers, pastors, principals, and coaches offered advice, opportunity, and support to all kids—rich or poor, black or white. But the Port Clinton of the 1950s—with its shared prosperity, strong sense of community, and remarkably equal opportunity—was nowhere to be found. . . . Instead, Jen sent back a tale of two Port Clintons (representing two Americas)—upper middle-class kids growing up with college funds, traveling soccer teams, and caring godparents, while their working class peers faced a deluge of unanticipated obstacles—abusive stepmothers, incarcerated fathers, unplanned pregnancies, and juvenile detention. Bob’s initial shock at what had become of less affluent kids in his hometown in just half a century made us wonder if we had stumbled upon atypical working—class kids in Rust Belt circumstances far worse than the national average. (p. 264)
It proved to be a bogus worry. In the next two years, she visited youth and their parents in Duluth, Minnesota; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Atlanta, Georgia; Birmingham, Alabama; Austin, Texas; Bend, Oregon; Orange County, California; and Waltham and Weston, Massachusetts. What they found in Port Clinton in 2012, they found everywhere in the next two years.
The account that emerges from the first two strands of research—the interviews with living classmates of Putnam’s 1959 high school graduating class and the in-depth interviews across the country with parent child pairs representing one upper-middle-class and one working-class case in each geographic setting—are powerful portraits of the two Americas in which we now live, the different fortunes faced and opportunities available to the children and youth in those two Americas, and the writing is exceptionally powerful and nuanced. Virtually any reader, taking periodic breaks from the reading, will inevitably put the book down, steeped in these stories of chilling unequal fortunes and opportunity, and quickly ask herself, “So, what do we do about it? Putnam is not the first contemporary observer to reach this general conclusion. Beyond his chronicling of the mind-numbing unfairness he sees, does he propose any actions to fix the problem?”
Yes! Putnam has thought long and hard about this question. In Chapter 6, titled, “What Is to Be Done?,” he first recounts the findings of inequality and the problems they will engender for our society in the future if we choose to ignore them (i.e., weak economic growth, a failed democracy with lack of civic engagement, and lack of meeting our moral obligation to fairness in opportunity). He then proceeds to propose a detailed, rich, and multifaceted suite of levers to address the problem—more or less following the earlier outline of the book that details inequality on dimensions of family experiences, parenting differences, schooling opportunities, and community resources. He offers numerous strategies on each front. Here we describe a few of them to give the reader a sense of his thinking. With respect to families, he suggests policies that would put modest additional sums of money into the hands of poor families in the form of tax policies (expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit) and antipoverty programs, arguing that modest increase in resources for these families have a demonstrable effect on student school achievement. With respect to parenting, his suggestions focus on parent supports that will help poor parents do a better job of providing effective authoritative parenting and school (especially language) readiness skills through coaching skills and expanded preschool opportunities. What to do about school inequalities among the rich and poor, of course, could be the subject of an entire book. Briefly, Putnam proposes a number of the solutions that readers will be familiar with elsewhere (e.g., school funding for better prepared and trained teachers, extending school hours, building closer community-school engagement). Finally, in the arena of interventions at the community level to deal with inequality, he details strategies to increase community mentors for students, increase opportunities for school-based extracurricular activities by eliminating fees that disadvantage poor children, and investing in services for families in these communities
Many consumers of the Educational Researcher who read Putnam’s book may likely conclude that they already know about social class inequality in the contemporary United States and its widespread effect. Note the many books written recently by economists, the anger over the financial meltdown from 2007 to 2011, the anti–Wall Street demonstrations that sprang up around the country several years ago—all linked to increasingly divergent income and class opportunities in our society. But what is exceptional about the book is that simultaneously it is exhaustively and compellingly researched (running to over 500 footnotes and references), comprehensive in detailing the dimensions of the problem on its many fronts as it impacts the opportunities facing current and future generations of American children, and compelling as it provides the often heartbreaking, human face of the challenges facing so many families, their children, and communities across the country. And by contrasting pairs of families that are not at the very bottom or at the very top of our society, the social class divide in question is made even more compelling. (As the present reviewers discussed the contrasting cases in the book in a recent graduate seminar, they concluded that most of the cases represented the 25th to 50th percentile on the low end of the contrast and the 80th to 90th percentiles at the high end of the contrast based on estimated family education and wealth.) No bottom and top one percenters featured here.
For all of its merits, the book can be faulted for interview methods in its first two strands of research that strongly suggest national representativeness in the argument but fall short of a more rigorous sampling methodology that might capture such representativeness more effectively. There is also reliance on “educational attainment” of parents as a proxy for “social class,” which despite the author’s repeated argument and disclaimer is still an incomplete way to capture social class. Finally, given the extraordinary amount of information about “ethnicity,” “race,” and “gender” as powerful cultural forces that shape the lives of children, the author may be criticized for placing these aside, sometimes arguing to the effect “I know these other forces are present, but I am interested only in social class here, and social class plays at least as important a role or more so than the other cultural considerations” (Nota Bene: our words, not his).
Nonetheless, the present reviewers are great fans of Our Kids and believe it is one of the most important books written in the past decade about the opportunities facing American school children because it is both so well researched and so compellingly written. It should be a must read for anyone who cares about the future of opportunities for American school children. As a group, the reviewers thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and discussing each chapter and the insights it brought to life in our advanced research methods class in educational psychology. As he accomplished in his earlier book, Bowling Alone (2001), Putnam makes a compelling argument that the social investments we make in one another (our social capital investments) pay off handsomely for those who receive them and conversely create mighty impediments for those who do not.