The previously reviewed book, Tightrope, reminds me of Robert Putnam’s Our Kids (2015). Putnam compares outcomes for students in his Port Clinton, Ohio, HS graduation class of 1959 with those of the kids of his classmates. He lived in a suburb of Cleveland at a time when there were lots of good jobs at good wages for people who didn’t have advanced educations. The richest guy in town made only three or four times more than the typical worker, and everyone pretty much could afford a middle-class lifestyle. Many of the parents had not even finished high school, but 50% of their kids went to college.
But the two big local factories started to close in the 1970s and faded by the 1990s. While wages in his town were above average when Putnam was in school, by 2012 the typical worker made 25% less than the average wage, and a lot of people did not have jobs. Over 40 years, the divorce rate quadrupled, the percentage of children born to single mothers quadrupled (9% to 40%), as did the percentage of children in poverty (10% to 40%).
The rest is similar to <em>Tightrope’s</em> take: a huge widening of the income and wealth gaps; schools that do not educate all students to high levels; lots of drug and alcohol use; lots of despair. Putnam’s solutions are a bit different. He sees public education as something that needs to be reconfigured to meet the needs of all kids, especially those from challenging circumstances that may need more time to learn and more intensive teaching to be successful. That means negotiating with teacher unions for longer school days and for hiring teachers with the specific skills and training needed to reach all children. He, like Kristof and WuDunn, sees early childhood education as essential to keep kids from falling so far behind before they go to school that they cannot catch up.
Bob in the Basement in Boston actually had an interesting email exchange for a few months with Professor Putnam about his <em>Bowling Alone</em> book that came out in 2000.
