Title: Taking on the Opportunity Gap: Solutions Must Target Home and School
Abstract: Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis by Robert D. Putnam Simon & Schuster, 2015, $28; 400 pages. A child born in America has many advantages compared to those born in, say, Somalia, China, or Mexico. But those advantages are far more dependent on family background in the U.S. than we might wish. It's not only that some kids are rich and others are poor. It's also that some have educated parents, including both a mother and a father in the home, who possess the social capital as well as the resources of time and money to ensure that their children are prepared for school by the time they reach age four or five. At the other end of the spectrum is a group of children whose early home life, or lack thereof, makes it far more difficult for them to succeed in school. These are the kids whose fathers may be incarcerated, whose mothers may be working long hours at low-wage jobs, who live in troubled neighborhoods with little to occupy them in their free time, and whose parents lack the connections and knowledge needed to put them on a path to the middle class. These gaps between rich and poor, between the privileged and the disadvantaged, are growing, suggesting that whatever degree of social mobility has existed in the U.S. in the past may now be threatened. Such growing gaps also have profound implications for educators and for the idea that schools can compensate for what children do not receive at home or in their communities. To me, this is the message of Robert Putnam's new book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. Through a series of interviews and family portraits of today's kids, backed up by an impressive array of data and a synthesis of the available research, he shows that we are dividing into two very different Americas. As a society, we are sorting ourselves by income, by family structure and parenting styles, and by the kinds of communities in which we live. Class-based residential segregation is increasing, leading inevitably to more class-based school segregation as well. That means some schools and classrooms are filled with healthy and well-cared-for children, who are curious, engaged, and ready to learn, while others are populated with too many kids whose ability to learn is seriously constrained by a host of difficulties--from lack of proper nutrition to disruptive or withdrawn behavior. Of course, minority children, whether black or Latino, are disproportionately represented among the latter, but Putnam also sketches a portrait of large class disparities within the black and Latino communities. At one point, he compares two Latino families whose children attend high schools in Orange County, California. Both schools spend about the same per pupil, have similar teacher-student ratios, similar numbers of guidance counselors, and well-qualified teachers (as measured by education and experience). Thus, on the measures that schools can control, the two schools are roughly comparable. But they are serving very different student populations, reflecting all of the aforementioned class divisions. And the result is huge disparities in dropout rates, in truancy and suspensions, in college aspirations, and in SAT scores. The Orange County story is a microcosm of what is now a national pattern. Differences in school resources, although they matter, can't begin to explain the widening differences in educational outcomes. …
Publication Year: 2015
Publication Date: 2015-09-22
Language: en
Type: article
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