Once Again Our Kids Chapter 4 Summary

Chapter 4
In this chapter Putman focuses on the schooling and how a family’s socioeconomic status (SES) can determine whether or not the children will advance in the educational arena. We again shift our gaze cross country to Orange County, California another perfect example of the huge gap between the rich and the poor. The author explains this clearly by saying, “as the twenty-first century opened, a family’s socioeconomic status (SES) had become even more important than test scores in predicting which eighth graders would graduate from college”(189). Once again Our Kids establishes a setting for stories where extremes of wealth and poverty can now be found in close quarters. The chapter breaks down key features of the junctures between

economic class and education. Schooling might be where the gap is first noticed but it is not where it begins, it starts well before kindergarten (162). One driver for that early difference is the growing physical separation of classes by housing, “residential sorting” (163). Local micro-social differences produce very different child-rearing practices and also shape how kids learn once they get into school. “Whom you go to school with matters a lot” (166).

Chapter 5
In this chapter we change focus from individual families and schools to the wide-ranging social networks, addressing community.

Again Our Kids changes location, this time we head to the east coast, the Philadelphia area. Two more families located in close proximity are the basis for Putman’s contrasting stories. Putnam uses the two stories to demonstrate a number of arguments about how communities function. First, better-off and better-educated people tend to have “wider and deeper social networks”, while “less educated Americans have sparser, more redundant social networks, concentrated around their own family” (207). Second, the wealthy and better educated “have many more ‘weak ties’, that is, connections to wider, more diverse networks” (208). Why is this important, what can we learn from this evaluation? Simply put, the better one’s social networking, the less likely they will be negatively affected by adversity, and the more range of breaks. The chapter closes by mapping out economic inequality through neighborhoods (217-223) and religion (223-225). The author describes how the increase in economic gaps can be a determining factor in academic and career

success.
Chapter 6
The book’s final chapter reflects on the problems diagnosed so far, and asks simply, classically, “What is to be done?” The chapter begins by swiftly summarizing the book so far, then deducing from those points.

The more inequality in the American economy could end up costing our society to lose many opportunities (231-4). On top of that, the broadening class gap may lead to decreasing political participation and civic engagement, which could further split the classes (234-7). Putman believes the gap between rich and poor has now become epistemological – the wealthy simply don’t know much about the lives of the lower classes. The chapter offers multiple solutions to the problem but they are small and would with no doubt have little effect on the upward mobility of lower income

families.
Reflection
A child born in America has many advantages compared to those born in, say, Iraq, India, or the Philippines. But those advantages are far more reliant 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 assets 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 gaps between wealthy and deprived, are growing, suggestive of whatever amount of social mobility has existed in the U.S. in the past may now be disappearing. 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 book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. Through a series of interviews and family portraits of today’s teens, backed up by an impressive range of data and a blend of the available research, he shows that we are dividing into two very different Americas. As a society, we are arranging ourselves by earnings, 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.