A Growing Chasm of Opportunity for American Children: A Review of Putnam (2015) (original) (raw)

Abstract

It is 1959. In Port Clinton, Ohio, Robert Putnam, the future Kennedy School Professor at Harvard, is graduating from high school in th i s mediums i z e d , M i d western 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, classbased 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. 679181 EDRXXX10.3102/0013189X16679181Educational ResearcherBooks et al research-article2016