Worse yet, on the single most fundamental form of democratic participation—voting—this yawning class gap among young people has widened in recent decades—yet another scissors gap. In recent national elections, college-educated youth have been two to three times more likely to vote than their peers who had not gotten beyond high school.16
Ironically, by many measures of civic engagement other than voting—from attending a public meeting to signing a petition—the class gap appears to have narrowed in recent years, but only because affluent kids are withdrawing from civic life even more rapidly than poor kids.17 This downward convergence, which we also saw in student government participation in Chapter 4, might be comforting, except that it means that fewer and fewer of the next generation are involved at all—and despite the closing scissors, a substantial class gap remains.
High-quality national surveys of high school seniors confirm that kids from less educated homes are less knowledgeable about and interested in politics, less likely to trust the government, less likely to vote, and much less likely to be civically engaged in local affairs than their counterparts from college-educated homes. Moreover, these class differences are much larger among whites than among nonwhites.18 Online participation has been growing rapidly, but the digital divide on political uses of the Internet is very great and shows no signs of diminishing.19
Still worse, as political scientists Kay Schlozman, Sidney Verba, and Henry Brady have shown, this class gap in political participation is increasingly intergenerational, because kids tend to inherit their parents’ degree of political engagement, just as they tend to inherit their parents’ socioeconomic standing. So across the generations, class disparities accumulate. “Having well-educated and affluent parents,” they write, “confers an advantage not only in occupational success but also in political voice.”20
Thus, the inheritance of political involvement represents a double whammy. Educated parents are more likely to be politically engaged, and kids raised in politically stimulating homes naturally become more politically engaged as adults. That is the direct legacy of parental political involvement. But in addition, kids from educated homes are much more likely to grow up to be educated adults themselves, and their greater education also favors their political engagement as adults, an indirect inheritance. Conversely, political engagement by kids from less privileged backgrounds is discouraged both by the absence of civic role models at home and by their own limited educational attainment.
This double whammy is, in turn, a double challenge to traditional U.S. ideals that we explored in Chapter 1—first, Americans generally believe that political inequality is worse than economic inequality, and second, we believe that inherited inequality is worse than inequality within a given generation. Inherited political inequality brings us uncomfortably close to the political regime against which the American Revolution was fought.
In our interviews, we found evidence of widespread and growing political estrangement among kids from all backgrounds—rich and poor. Virtually all Americans nowadays are unhappy about politics and government. But that’s where the similarities end. The lower-class kids we met were unremittingly alienated from civic life, whereas most of their upper-class counterparts have been encouraged by parents, peers, and mentors to take part in politics. Consider several examples.
In Port Clinton, Chelsea’s parents are active in the community and talk about politics a lot. “For the most part I align with them politically,” she says, “but there’s things that I’m still figuring out, because I can vote now. I’m going to be in the workforce and contributing to society, so I need to get more educated on what’s happening.”
On the other side of the tracks, David lives in a chaotic family situation with no role models at all for political or civic engagement, so our questions about those topics elicited a puzzled stare and a brief response, as though we had asked about Mozart or foxhunting.
Q: Do you ever vote?
A: Never voted.
Q: Do you know if your parents are involved in politics, or if they get involved in stuff?
A: I don’t talk to them about it.
Across the country, in Bend, Andrew says that, like his parents, he is involved in community activities, and he plans to vote (though for a different party from his dad, he adds). Though hardly an activist at this stage in his life, he’s become more interested in public issues through college debate and can imagine going into politics himself.
By contrast, politics is the furthest thing from Kayla’s mind, preoccupied as she is with her grave personal problems.
Q: Are you involved in political stuff or community stuff?
A: Not really.
Q: Are you interested in watching the news?
A: It gets old after a while. Somebody shot somebody, or somebody robbed somebody. I’m not that interested.
Q: Are you excited about the election coming up? Do you think you’ll vote?
A: Nah. I don’t care.
Q: Do you have a party that you like?
A: They all kinda suck.
Q: Are your parents involved in politics at all?
A: Not really.
This contrast between upper-class engagement and lower-class estrangement, apparent both in statistical analyses and in conversations with young people, poses two fundamental risks to American democracy, one more obvious, the second more subtle.
First, as class differences in political voice are amplified, the political system becomes less representative of Americans’ interests and values, in turn exacerbating political alienation. In fact, increasing evidence points in exactly this direction.21 Money is becoming more important in American politics today, so the absence of pressure from the ballot box enhances misrepresentation. “Elections have consequences,” politicians like to say, but if you don’t participate, the consequences of those elections are unlikely to be good for you. “If you are deprived of an equal voice in the government,” wrote political scientist Robert Dahl, “the chances are quite high that your interests will not be given the same attention as the interests of those who do have a voice. If you have no voice, who will speak up for you?”22
A blue-ribbon task force of the American Political Science Association came to a similar conclusion a decade ago. “Today,” the authors wrote, “the voices of American citizens are raised and heard unequally. The privileged participate more than others and are increasingly well organized to press their demands on government. Public officials, in turn, are much more responsive to the privileged than to average citizens and the least affluent. Citizens with lower or moderate incomes speak with a whisper that is lost on the ears of inattentive government officials, while the advantaged roar with a clarity and consistency that policy-makers readily hear and routinely follow.”23 In short, the opportunity gap undermines political equality and thus democratic legitimacy.
The growing political estrangement of American youth, especially those on the wrong side of the opportunity gap, poses a second, more subtle and more conjectural danger to democratic stability. It’s a danger that would have been salient to observers such as the political theorist Hannah Arendt and the sociologist William Kornhauser, who after World War II were transfixed by the economic and political nightmares of 1930s and the rise of antidemocratic extremism.
An inert and atomized mass of alienated and estranged citizens, disconnected from social institutions, might under normal circumstances pose only a minimal threat to political stability, with any menace muted by the masses’ very apathy. Government under such circumstances might not be very democratic, but at least it would be stable. But under severe economic or international pressures—such as the pressures that overwhelmed Europe and America in the 1930s—that “inert” mass might suddenly prove highly volatile and open to manipulation by antidemocratic demagogues at the ideological extremes.
Kornhauser argued in The Politics of Mass Society that the citizens most vulnerable to demagogic mass movements, such as Nazism, Fascism, Stalinism, or even McCarthyism here at home, were precisely those “who have the fewest opportunities to participate in the formal and informal life of the community.”24 Arendt made a similar argument in her classic Origins of Totalitarianism. “The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness,” she wrote, “but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships.”25 Without succumbing to political nightmares, we might ponder whether the bleak, socially estranged future facing poor kids in America today could have unanticipated political consequences tomorrow. So quite apart from the danger that the opportunity gap poses to American prosperity, it also undermines our democracy, and perhaps even our political stability.
So far we’ve focused on the economic and political consequences of the plight of disadvantaged kids in this country—those like David, Kayla, Elijah, Lola, and the others whose stories are told in this book. But there’s a bedrock argument underneath that: to ignore these kids violates our deepest religious and moral values.
Virtually all religions share a profound commitment to caring for the have-nots. Proverbs 29:7 intones prophetically that “The righteous care about justice for the poor, but the wicked have no such concern.” Jesus (Mark 10:21–25) admonished a religious rich man that he should give up everything to the poor, since “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” Isaiah’s angry God (Isaiah 3:15) thundered at Israel’s elders and rulers, gathered to face his righteous wrath: “How dare you crush my people, grinding the faces of the poor into the dust?”
The most important service that Pope Francis has rendered to men and women of all faiths and of no faith at all is to remind us of our deep moral obligation to care for our neighbors and especially for poor kids. “Almost without being aware of it,” he said in 2013, “we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own. . . . [When] we isolate [young people], we do them an injustice: young people belong to a family, a country, a culture, a faith . . . they really are the future of a people.”26
The foundational documents of our national history, from the Declaration of Independence to the Gettysburg Address, have espoused the fundamental precept that all humans are of equal moral worth. For much of our national history we made silent, shameful exceptions to that principle for nonwhites and women. Virtually any moral theory of fairness and justice leads to that principle, however, and it is the anvil on which the hammers of the liberation movements of the last 100 years have wrought the expansion of equal rights. As Martin Luther King said at the 1963 March on Washington, “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.”
As we saw in Chapter 1, 95 percent of us say that “everyone in America should have equal opportunity to get ahead”—a level of consensus that is virtually never reached in contentious contemporary America. The norm of equality of opportunity is complex in detail, especially because of the thorny issue of what exactly needs to be equalized. Philosophers debate whether or not genetic differences in intelligence or health or energy level could justify unequal opportunity, for example, or even whether the principle of equal opportunity means that we should try to redress bad luck.
These abstract debates seem to have implications for contemporary debate: If someone drops out of high school because they lack intelligence or grit, does that violate the principle of equality of opportunity?27 In some theoretical worlds we would need to address those complexities, but not in real-world America today. As this book has demonstrated, we are today so far from equality of opportunity, even for talented and energetic kids—so far from our own performance in the past—that there is little danger that we might apply the principle too stringently.
Even in our world, equality of opportunity needs to be weighed against other values, among them liberty and autonomy. It would be absurd (in the name of equality of opportunity) to prevent affluent parents from reading Goodnight Moon or to require couples to marry before having children. On the other hand, sometimes our principle of equal opportunity does trump other values: for example, we require parents to provide an adequate education for their kids, either through public schools or privately, on the principle that parental autonomy should not trump the child’s right to basic education.
We’re sometimes justified in blaming parents for how they’ve raised their kids. We might condemn Elijah’s parents, or Kayla’s or David’s or Sofia’s, for bad decisions—indeed, the kids themselves do! But to hold kids responsible for their parents’ failings violates most Americans’ moral sensibility.28
Equality of opportunity is not a simple guide to public action. However, we don’t need to resolve those philosophical conundrums to recognize that the growing opportunity gap between rich kids and poor kids in America today is morally unacceptable. We don’t have to believe in perfect equality of opportunity to agree that our religious ideals and our basic moral code demand more equality of opportunity than we have now.
What can we do—as individuals, as members of our communities, and as a country—to help poor kids begin to catch up with rich kids? As this book has outlined, this problem is not simple, and it does not have a simple solution. On the contrary, in our increasingly “red” versus “blue” America, it is the ultimate “purple” problem, with many contributing factors. Some causes (like nonmarital births) are seen more clearly through “red” conservative lenses, while others (like growing income inequality) are accentuated by “blue” liberal lenses. Our civic leaders will need to reach across boundaries of party and ideology if we are to offer more opportunity to all our children. In addressing the opportunity gap, we must consider the full spectrum of potential solutions.
The pages that follow offer a menu of complementary approaches that have some collective promise of changing our current course.29 It will take hard work to turn this set of suggestions into a comprehensive plan of action. Different mixes of policies may be needed in different settings—this is a vast, diverse country, so what could work in Port Clinton may well be different from what is needed in Atlanta or Orange County or Philadelphia or Bend. The top priorities for national policymakers will differ from the most effective approaches for civic or religious activists. The broad agenda for action that follows aims to stimulate reflection and action by all Americans.
My suggestions here are based on the best evidence currently available. This is fortunately an exciting area of rapid research, as both scholars and practitioners seek more imaginative solutions. We should look for cost-effectiveness, but given the scope of the opportunity gap, narrowing it will cost money. We must pursue a strategy of trial and error, learning from practical experience what works where. So my criterion is not whether any given proposal has already proven effective, but whether the best available evidence suggests that it has promise.
Fortunately, the American federal system is well designed for such a strategy, for it encourages us to try many ideas in many places and learn from each other. In previous historical periods we have successfully addressed comparably big problems this way. At the end of the nineteenth century in the midst of rapid urbanization, massive immigration, tumultuous social and economic and technological change, political strife, and high economic inequality, civic leaders from both parties across the country explored a vast variety of social, economic, and political reforms. Some failed and were discarded, but others proved unexpectedly effective. Those Progressive Era successes rapidly diffused across the country, and eventually federal legislation (and funding) extended reform nationwide. Change was both bottom-up and top-down. We must now emulate that period of successful innovation.
In our polarized public debate an unexpected consensus has begun to crystalize across ideological lines that the collapse of the working-class family is a central contributor to the growing opportunity gap, as we saw in Chapter 2. Unfortunately, agreement has also begun to emerge that (apart perhaps from reversing the long decline in working-class incomes) direct, government-based approaches to solve this problem have so far shown very little promise.
“Marriage policy”—reducing the number of single-parent families by restoring the norm of traditional marriage—has been stressed by some conservative commentators.30 Regardless of the merits of that objective, however, the hard fact is that well-meaning policy experiments to increase the rate of stable marriage have not worked. The welfare reforms of 1996 that ended “welfare as we know it” had very little effect on the steady decline of marriage among poorer, less educated Americans. The George W. Bush administration pursued an array of policy experiments designed to enhance marriage and marital stability and rigorously evaluated the results. Among them, the Building Strong Families initiative provided relationship skill training and other services to unmarried parents, while the Supporting Healthy Marriage program offered similar supports to married couples. Despite isolated hopeful signs, however, neither of these experiments offered much evidence that even well-designed, well-funded public programs can increase marriage rates or keep parents together. To be sure, religious communities can influence their members without involving government, so churches could strengthen support for marriage, parenting, and responsibility for children.31 On the other hand, other than a reversal of long-established trends in private norms, or a strong and sustained economic revival concentrated on the working class, I see no clear path to reviving marriage rates among poor Americans.32
In the absence of a revival of marriage, could we reduce the number of single-parent families by reducing nonmarital birth rates? It is almost surely too late to reestablish the once strong link between sex and marriage, even if that were desirable. But could we delink sex from childbearing through more effective contraception? The economist Isabel Sawhill has argued for this approach.
Too many young adults are sliding into relationships and having babies before they are ready to make commitments to each other and to their children that parenthood requires. Social norms that used to stigmatize unwed parenting now need to stigmatize unplanned parenting. New low-maintenance and long-acting forms of birth control make changing the default possible.33
Is contraception the answer?34 Despite strong opposition on moral grounds from some religious leaders, nine out of ten Americans support birth control. By some estimates, 60 percent of all births to young, single women are unplanned, and low-income women don’t aspire to have more children than more affluent women. We don’t really understand this large discrepancy between what people say and what they actually do. Long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs), such as IUDs or implantable contraceptives, are about 20 times more effective than the pill at reducing the incidence of unplanned pregnancies among contraception-using women, but we don’t know how many poor young women would, in fact, choose subsidized LARCs, since the empirical evidence so far comes from women who had already chosen to seek birth control.
Changing the norm from childbearing by default to childbearing by design might have a big effect on the opportunity gap. Social marketing like Iowa’s “Avoid the Stork” campaign has shown some progress, and the dramatic drop in teen pregnancy over the last several decades gives some hope that social norms can change, although so far we have no firm evidence that this approach would reduce nonmarital childbearing among adult women, especially since, as we saw in Chapter 2, many of these births are “semi-intended.”
So families headed by poor, less educated single moms are not likely to disappear soon. How can we help those families and especially their children? Money obviously matters. The backdrop to the problems facing poor families, poor schools, and poor communities is the stagnant economy that has seen virtually no real growth in decades for the less educated part of our population. The cause-effect linkage here is clear and profound. For example, changes in local economic conditions arising from plant closings in North Carolina had large measurable effects on children’s reading and math scores, especially among older kids.35 Sustained economic revival for low-paid workers would be as close to a magic bullet as I can imagine, not least because that might also delay childbearing and perhaps even encourage marriage among poorer men and women.
Simply providing relatively small amounts of additional cash to poor families can improve the achievements of their kids at school and put the children on a path toward higher lifetime income, especially if the added funds are concentrated on the child’s earliest years. Carefully controlled policy experiments have shown the power of money during the preschool and elementary school years to narrow the opportunity gap, perhaps because of the effects of reduced family stress on early brain development.
An increase in family income by $3,000 during a child’s first five years of life seems to be associated with an improvement on academic achievement tests equivalent to 20 SAT points and nearly 20 percent higher income later in life. As social policy expert Lane Kenworthy summarizes this research, “government cash transfers of just a few thousand dollars could give a significant lifelong boost to the children who need it most.”36 Getting such resources where they are most needed could be done in a variety of well-tested ways.37
• Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), especially for families with young children. Originally conceived by conservative economist Milton Friedman and expanded by administrations of both parties during the last quarter century, this program is widely regarded as a reasonably efficient way of increasing the disposal income of poor parents who are working, and it has become one of the largest antipoverty programs in America (after food stamps and Medicaid). On the other hand, this program only helps the working poor, so it doesn’t reach the poorest of poor kids.
• Expand the modest existing child tax credit (as advocated by Tea Party favorite Senator Mike Lee [R., Utah]), but make the credit fully refundable, so that it can benefit children in families too poor to owe any federal taxes at all, thus reaching the poorest kids.
• Protect long-standing antipoverty programs, like food stamps, housing vouchers, and child care support. These have not been enough to halt the widening opportunity gap, at least at current funding levels, but in the aggregate they are an important part of the safety net.
Any serious effort to deal with the family and community facets of the opportunity gap should include efforts to reduce incarceration for nonviolent crime and enhance rehabilitation.38 Incarceration, especially paternal incarceration, was part of the story of virtually every poor kid we met in this study. Crime has fallen to near-record lows, while the massive increase in incarceration in recent decades has come at great expense both in terms of taxpayer dollars and in terms of impact on families and communities. This problem is now widely recognized across party lines, both in Washington and in state capitals around the country. Among policy changes that could eventually begin to narrow the opportunity gap are these:
• Reduce sentencing for nonviolent crime and use greater discretion in parole administration.
• Rehabilitate ex-prisoners, keeping in mind that the prison population is comprised of young men with very little education, poor job records, and frequent histories of mental illness and substance abuse.
• Redirect current funding for prisons to funding for job training, drug and medical treatment, and other rehabilitation services.
In Chapter 3 we saw that childcare and parenting, especially in the earliest years of childhood, are important contributors to the opportunity gap. What ideas about solutions does that insight suggest? First, the best recent evidence is that on average the highest-quality child care, especially in the early years, comes from a child’s own parents. Child development specialist Jane Waldfogel summarizes these findings: “Children do fare better on average if their mothers do not work full-time in the first year of life.”39 Thus, if we want to close the opportunity gap, we should allow parents more options for workplace flexibility and for parental leave (at least part-time) in the first year of life and avoid policies (now pursued by some states) that require welfare recipients to work during a newborn’s first year. Virtually all other advanced countries provide much more support for parents (especially low-income parents) during their children’s first year of life than we do.40
As children move into day care, research clearly shows, quality matters. Moreover, leaving aside care provided by parents, the research also shows that center-based care is generally better than informal arrangements with relatives, neighbors, or friends.41 To be sure, quality varies greatly within each of these categories, and measuring quality itself is complicated and controversial. Yet access to high-quality, center-based day care is another dimension in which the class gap that we have seen so often in this book is widening—rising among kids from affluent homes, stagnant or falling among poor kids. So figuring out how to provide affordable, high-quality, center-based day care for low-income families should be high on the priority list for anyone who wants to narrow the opportunity gap. Among the most notable initiatives in this area are so-called Early Head Start programs and Educare, a comprehensive nationwide network of nonprofit day care centers subsidized by private philanthropists.42
Whatever day care kids have, we learned in Chapter 3 about the growing “parenting gap” between more educated and less educated families. Part of this gap is the direct consequence of material resources, but part of it is due to poor parenting skills among too many less educated parents. Teachers, social workers, and medical specialists on the front lines of the struggle to help poor kids—in poor neighborhoods that we visited in Oklahoma City, for example—stress the problems that the kids face at home and the need to provide “wraparound” family services, working one-on-one with the parents (typically single moms), especially via home visits.
Advice as simple as “read to your children every day” can be valuable, but even more powerful is professional “coaching” of poor parents. Examples of programs that have been shown to improve children’s developmental outcomes include the Nurse-Family Partnership, HIPPY (Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters), Child First, and (in the U.K.) the government’s Troubled Families initiative. What these programs have in common is regular home visits by trained professionals to help families cope with health problems, childrearing, stress, and other family issues. Though costly, such programs have a favorable “rate of return.”43
As we saw in Chapter 3, there is a growing consensus among child development specialists on the importance of preschool education. Yet in terms of enrollment in early childhood education the United States ranks 32nd among the 39 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). On average, across these advanced countries, 70 percent of three-year-olds are enrolled, compared to 38 percent in the United States.44 A few high-quality programs have been studied using the gold standard of program evaluation, with randomized controls and follow-up over decades. The classic studies of the initial Head Start program in the 1960s in Michigan and the Abecedarian Project in the 1970s in North Carolina showed remarkable effects: they boosted initial educational progress, reduced trouble with the law as the children became adults, and increased the participants’ lifetime income.45
Subsequent studies of Head Start have not shown such substantial effects, leading some to question whether the cost-benefit ratio of early childhood education is quite so favorable. Specialists generally attribute the weaker apparent effects of the later programs to a) the general improvement in parenting across all segments of American society (which raises the bar for identifying the effects of special programs), b) the sometimes lower quality of the later programs, with less wraparound support, and c) an excessive focus on short-run test scores, whereas the most positive original results showed up later in the child’s life in terms of socioemotional development and behavior, such as criminality, not just academic achievement. The quality of early childhood education programs (e.g., teacher training, duration, curriculum) varies widely, and higher-quality programs seem to have bigger effects, though measuring quality with precision has been a stumbling block.46
Nevertheless, one clear finding is that well-designed, center-based early childhood education is better than the alternatives, though it is also more costly. For example, the carefully studied, high-quality pre-K program offered in all public elementary schools in Boston has been proven highly effective, though expensive. Key ingredients of the Boston program, according to education specialists Greg Duncan and Richard Murnane, include a high-quality curriculum; well-paid, well-trained, well-coached teachers; and provisions for accountability. Duncan and Murnane conclude that “well-designed and well-implemented pre-K programs have the potential to be a vital component of a strategy to improve the life chances of children from low-income families.”47
State funding for early childhood education has grown steadily in recent years, though as I noted, America still lags far behind other advanced countries in this domain. One notable statewide early childhood education initiative was begun in 1998 in Oklahoma, one of the reddest states in America. By 2012 the program was offered in 99 percent of Oklahoma school districts and enrolled 74 percent of all four-year-olds in the state. The Oklahoma program meets nine of the ten quality standards of the National Institute for Early Education Research, and in addition offers wraparound support and guidance for parents. Initial evaluations of the flagship program in Tulsa have shown remarkable student gains in reading, writing, and math skills.48
Chapter 4 showed that while rich kids and poor kids attend schools of very different quality, the resources and challenges that kids bring with them to school explain this contrast better than the policies that the schools pursue. Thus, the most promising approaches in this domain involve moving kids, money, and/or teachers to different schools.
We have seen throughout this book that growing residential segregation by social class is a key underlying cause of differences in kids’ educational experiences. Residential segregation is deeply rooted in growing income inequality, in people’s desire to live around people like themselves, and in the financial equity that middle-class Americans have embodied in their homes, so efforts to reduce class segregation are fiercely resisted. While some government policies are designed to reduce neighborhood inequality, other policies, such as exclusive zoning regulations and the home mortgage tax deduction, indirectly encourage residential segregation. But efforts to alter such policies, as well as school district boundaries and school siting, are objects of great political contention.
Publicly subsidized mixed-income housing is one potential solution that has been tried in various forms for the past several decades. Propinquity does not automatically produce “bridging social capital,” that is, poor newcomers to a rich neighborhood are not automatically integrated into that neighborhood socially. Nevertheless, poor kids moved to better schools generally do better. One natural experiment in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, for example, showed that poor kids whose families were moved into a more affluent area achieved higher test scores and went further in school than comparable kids who were not moved, in part because their parents became more supportive of the kids’ education. For example, 96 percent of the kids whose parents moved into the new neighborhood (and schools) graduated from high school, compared to 29 percent of the kids in the control group. Sociologist Douglas Massey, who followed the Mount Laurel experiment for many years, concluded that this case of mixed-income housing
[doesn’t] necessarily provide a model of mobility for all poor and disadvantaged families in the United States. Those mired in substance abuse, criminality, family violence, and household instability are not good candidates for affordable housing developments. . . . Affordable housing developments do constitute an appropriate intervention, however, for the millions of low- and moderate-income families who are trapped in distressed urban neighborhoods for lack of anywhere else to go, but who nonetheless plug away to do the best they can at school and work hoping for a chance to advance.49
An alternative to moving poor kids to better schools is to invest much more money in their existing schools so as to improve their quality. Most fundamentally, school systems need to put higher quality teachers in poor schools under conditions in which they can actually teach and not just keep order. As our comparison of two Orange County high schools illustrated in frightening detail, schools in impoverished areas face much bigger challenges. If we care about the opportunity gap, our aim must be not merely to equalize funding, but to more nearly equalize results, and that will require massively more compensatory funding. Equal numbers of guidance counselors, for example, cannot produce equal college readiness if the counselors in poor schools are tied up all day in disciplinary hearings. In 2012 only 17 states allocated more money per student to school districts with high poverty, while 16 states had the opposite—“regressive” school funding systems.50 The 2013 Equity and Excellence Commission recommended to the U.S. secretary of education a multipronged strategy for equalizing our nation’s K–12 schools through state and federal policy changes, including substantial new resources targeted at schools with high concentrations of poverty.51
One important objective of additional funding for poor schools is to recruit better-trained, more experienced, and more capable teachers. As we have seen, teacher flight from the challenges in such schools—violence and disorder, truancy, lower school readiness and English-language proficiency, less supportive home environments—means that students in these schools get a generally inferior education. Many teachers in poor schools today are doing a heroic job, driven by idealism, but in a market economy the most obvious way to attract more and better teachers to such demanding work is to improve the conditions of their employment. On an experimental basis, the federally funded Talent Transfer Initiative paid top urban teachers $20,000 extra over two years to teach in high-poverty, low-performing schools in ten large, diverse school districts. Almost nine out of ten teaching vacancies were filled by top teachers, most of whom remained even after the bonuses expired, and reading and math test scores in the affected schools were significantly boosted.52
Other elements in the national “school reform” agenda might also help narrow the opportunity gap.53 Extending school hours to offer more extracurricular and enrichment opportunities has shown some promise.54 Several charter schools, such as KIPP Schools and the Harlem Children’s Zone Promise Academy (discussed below), have been shown to produce good results for poor kids. However, careful studies have concluded that charter schools are no panacea and generally do not narrow the class gap, in part because more educated parents are better able to manage the process of choosing a good school and transporting their kids to that school.55
Another broad approach to education as a means of narrowing the opportunity gap derives from the long tradition of educational reformers (dating back to the work of John Dewey in Chicago during the Progressive Era) who emphasize links between schools and the community.56 One strand in this approach puts social and health services in schools serving poor children. The Coalition for Community Schools concludes, “A community school is both a place and a set of partnerships between the school and other community resources. Its integrated focus on academics, health and social services, youth and community development and community engagement leads to improved student learning, stronger families and healthier communities.”57 Typically, community schools include youth activities at all hours and programs to engage parents and community members actively in the educational process, as well as to link children and families to social service and health agencies. Similar schools are found in many other countries, like the United Kingdom, where evaluations have been very positive, especially for kids and communities facing difficulties, even though the program is expensive. More limited evaluations of American community schools have so far been favorable.58
Another strand in the school-community approach involves community-based groups taking a more active role in creating neighborhood charter schools or organizing the community to press for better schools. The most renowned and thoroughly studied initiative of this sort is the Harlem Children’s Zone, created by the charismatic educator/organizer Geoffrey Canada. Begun in 1970, HCZ includes early childhood programs, after-school tutoring and extracurricular offerings, family, community, and health programs; college encouragement; foster-care-prevention programs; and many others. The central academic investment is the charter school (HCZ Promise Academy). Rigorous evaluations have shown that the Promise Academy has made major progress in closing the racial gap in test scores with other public school students in New York.59
Yet another example of the benefits to schools from close ties to the wider community are Catholic schools. In a nationwide study—later confirmed and extended by Anthony Bryk and his colleagues—James Coleman found that (even with extensive controls for the sorts of kids who attend them) Catholic schools produced higher levels of achievement than public schools, especially for kids from poor backgrounds. Coleman, Bryk, and their colleagues attributed this strong performance to the social and moral community within which parochial schools are embedded. Cristo Rey schools, for example, are a well-regarded nationwide network of Catholic high schools that offer inner-city Latino children educational support and on-the-job training.60
America once had a vigorous system of vocational education, apprenticeship, and workforce training, both in and out of schools. Other countries, like Germany, still do, but over recent decades we have disinvested in such programs. Part of the reason is the rise of the “college for all” mantra, reflecting the belief that a college degree is the ticket to success in the contemporary economy. While it is true that the “college premium” is high, it is also true that (as we saw in Chapter 4), very few kids from disadvantaged backgrounds now obtain college degrees. Efforts to improve access and completion rates for poor kids in four-year institutions are worthwhile, and those efforts must begin well before college looms, since as we have seen, the challenges that poor kids face are daunting even before they enter elementary school.
Nonetheless, the “college for all” motto has tended to undercut public and private support for secondary and postsecondary education in vocational skills. A notable example of the potential for contemporary vocational education is provided by Career Academies, as described by author Don Peck: “Schools of 100 to 150 students, within larger high schools, offering a curriculum that mixes academic coursework with hands-on technical courses designed to build work skills. Some 2,500 career academies are already in operation nationwide. Students attend classes together and have the same guidance counselors; local employers partner with the academies and provide work experience while the students are still in school.”61 A controlled trial study found that earnings for academy participants were 17 percent higher per year than for nonacademy participants, and that career academy students earn postsecondary degrees at same rates as non-career-academy students.62
Specialists in this field cite other promising experiments, such as the Georgia Youth Apprenticeship Program and comparable programs in Wisconsin and South Carolina, as well as the nationwide YouthBuild network. But robust evaluations are rarer in this area than in conventional K–12 education. Research from other countries suggests that the benefits of expanded technical and vocational education could be quite high, both for the individual student and for the economy, but the United States spends (as a fraction of our economy) roughly one tenth as much on such programs as other countries.
Fears that such programs might lead to a class-based, two-tier educational system are not unrealistic. Any effort in this area would need to erase the stigma of voc ed or apprenticeships as second-class education, by integrating quality academics and by having much tighter partnerships of industry and postsecondary schools to develop and implement quality standards. Moreover, significant investment in student guidance would be required. Rigorous research is still needed to identify which programs are cost-effective and which are not. Nevertheless the choice facing young people like David and Kayla and Michelle and Lauren and Lola and Sofia and Lisa and Amy is not between serious training leading to a vocational certificate and four years of college leading to a highly paid career. It is between quality vocational training and no postsecondary education at all. Apprenticeship and vocational education is a promising area in which states and cities should experiment, especially with high-quality evaluation.63
Community colleges were founded initially in the Progressive Era, and greatly expanded during the 1960s and 1970s, to provide access to postsecondary education for students who, for whatever reason, could not begin at the university level. Community college advocates have long been divided on whether these institutions were primarily intended to provide an avenue to four-year institutions or an alternative for vocational education. In the 1960s three quarters of their students were in the “transfer” track, but by 1980 nearly three quarters were in the “terminal” track. By now, nearly half of all postsecondary students nationwide are in community college. While more than 80 percent of them aspire to a baccalaureate degree, only a small minority will ever achieve that goal.
The advantages of community college for nontraditional students are clear: mostly open enrollment, local access, part-time (so college can be combined with a job), and above all, low costs. The limits of this avenue are also clear: nearly two thirds of their students drop out before receiving any degree or transferring to a four-year institution. Community college is not nearly so remunerative as a four-year degree, but as in the lives of the poor kids we’ve met in this book, community college is more attractive than the only realistic alternative—simply ending their education after high school. On the other hand, only 40 percent of those who enroll in community college are the first in their family to attend college, and that group is even less likely to go on to a four-year institution, so community colleges are not very effective in getting low-income kids headed to a BA.
Community colleges are asked to do many things with meager funding, and in recent years that funding has been cut back, limiting financial aid, raising tuition, and reducing student services. Counseling and instructional quality is often uneven. All these deficiencies disproportionately affect low-income students. Nevertheless, the key issue in evaluating community college performance is “compared to what?” Proprietary schools (like the one from which Lisa got her useless associate degree in pharmacy technology) have a better completion rate for certificates than community colleges, but they cost three times as much, so their students graduate with much more debt than community college students ($50,000 in Lisa’s case).
Despite their mixed record, community colleges have real promise as a means of narrowing the opportunity gap by providing poor kids with a realistic path upward. To serve that role, they need more funding, improved student support services, better connections to local job markets and to four-year institutions, and a lower dropout rate. The best community colleges in the country, such as Miami Dade College, have taken up this challenge with gusto. As two experts on community colleges, Arthur Cohen and Florence Brawer, conclude, “The community colleges’ potential is greater than that of any other institution because their concern is with the people most in need of assistance. . . . If the community colleges succeed in moving even a slightly greater proportion of their clients toward what the dominant society regards as achievement, it is as though they changed the world.”64
At the permeable boundary between schools and community are after-school activities, mentors, and above all, extracurricular activities. As we discussed in Chapter 4, America invented extracurricular activities precisely to foster equal opportunity, and we know from dozens of research studies that this strategy works. Extracurricular activities provide a natural and effective way to provide mentoring and inculcate soft skills, and we already have a dense, nationwide network of coaches, instructors, advisors, and other adults who are trained to help kids. In short, Americans have already invented and deployed a near-perfect tool to address this problem—as close to a magic bullet as we are ever likely to find in the real world of social, and educational, and economic policy. Perversely, as the opportunity gap has widened, we have increasingly excluded poor students from participation in this time-tested system by instituting pay-to-play.
So if you are concerned about the issues discussed in this book, here is something you could do right now. Close this book, visit your school superintendent—better yet, take a friend with you—and ask if your district has a pay-to-play policy. Explain that waivers aren’t worth the paper they’re written on, because they force poor kids to wear a virtual yellow star, saying “I’m so poor my parents can’t afford the regular fee.” Explain that everyone in the school will be better off if anyone in the school can be on the team or in the band. Insist that pay-to-play be ended. And while you’re there, ask if there are things you could do to help the local schools serve poor kids more effectively, both in the classroom and outside.
One important way to help is through mentoring programs. We saw in Chapter 5 that mentoring can make a measurable difference in kids’ lives, but we also saw that formal mentoring programs have so far barely begun to close the enormous class gap in access to informal mentoring. Local mentoring programs exist in many communities across America, but poor kids themselves yearn for more adult mentoring. If such programs were dramatically expanded, it could make a real difference in narrowing the opportunity gap.
To be sure, serious mentoring requires serious training, careful quality control, and above all, stability.65 The last thing that poor kids need is yet another unreliable, “drop-by” adult in their lives. Mentoring works best as the by-product of a connection that rests on some shared interest, like tennis or skateboarding or fishing.66 To focus the national AmeriCorps volunteer program massively on mentoring for poor kids would be a sign of real national commitment to narrow the opportunity gap.
Support and mentoring from church leaders was of vital value to all four of our young women from the Philadelphia area. Nationwide, however, churches are just scratching the surface of their possible contribution. For example, the national youth survey of mentorship that we described in Chapter 5 found that (as seen by kids at risk) religious institutions were not a major source of mentoring, formal or informal. If America’s religious communities were to become seized of the immorality of the opportunity gap, mentoring is one of the ways in which they could make an immediate impact.
Given the importance of neighborhood effects, as discussed in Chapter 5, neighborhood regeneration could make an important contribution to narrowing the opportunity gap. Such efforts are relevant both to school performance and to the lives of poor kids outside of school. Neighborhood redevelopment is hardly an unplowed field, since local, state, and national policymakers, as well as business and community leaders, have experimented with many revitalization strategies over the last half century. Broadly speaking, these strategies fall into two categories.
• Invest in poor neighborhoods. Many such efforts have been attempted since the 1970s, with mixed success.67 For example, the New Hope program in Milwaukee in the 1990s offered wage and job supports to poor families in poor neighborhoods, successfully improving the parents’ income and the kids’ academic performance and behavior. Jobs-Plus programs in Baltimore, Chattanooga, Dayton, Los Angeles, and St. Paul reported similar positive results.68 The key ingredient for programmatic success seems to be partnership between government, the private sector, and the local community.
• Move poor families to better neighborhoods. A number of closely evaluated programs of this sort have had mixed, modest, but generally positive results, especially on younger kids. There is some evidence that the results can be improved when combined with intensive counseling to support the families moving into new neighborhoods.69
The opportunity gap dividing America’s have and have-not kids is a complex problem that has grown gradually. That means that there is no simple, quick solution, but also that there are many places to start. Some things we can do quickly, like ending pay-to-play for extracurricular activities. Other bigger changes, like instituting nationwide early childhood education or restoring working-class wages, will take longer to implement, but we should start now. While seeking robust evidence of cost-effectiveness, we need a bias for action.
It took many decades for public high schools to become nearly universal in America, but the High School movement that made America a world leader in economic productivity and social mobility began in earnest in local communities across the nation a century ago. The essence of that reform was a willingness of better-off Americans to pay for schools that would mainly benefit other people’s kids.
This is not the first time in our national history that widening socioeconomic gaps have threatened our economy, our democracy, and our values. The specific responses we have pursued to successfully overcome these challenges and restore opportunity have varied in detail, but underlying them all was a commitment to invest in other people’s children. And underlying that commitment was a deeper sense that those kids, too, were our kids.
Not all Americans have shared that sense of communal obligation. In his essay “Self-Reliance,” Boston Brahmin Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “Do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.”70 Emerson spoke eloquently for the individualist tradition in America.
The better part of two centuries later, speaking of the recent arrival of unaccompanied immigrant kids, Jay Ash, city manager and native of the gritty, working-class Boston suburb of Chelsea, drew on a more generous, communitarian tradition: “If our kids are in trouble—my kids, our kids, anyone’s kids—we all have a responsibility to look after them.”71
In today’s America, not only is Ash right, but even those among us who think like Emerson should acknowledge our responsibility to these children. For America’s poor kids do belong to us and we to them. They are our kids.