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Sharing information and reporting on all that reeks in American education, especially corporate reform in K12 education, the agenda to privatize the right to a free public education for every child, and general corruption in K12-higher education. Calling out and exposing rather than cowering.

AND eager for your help. Have a story of power, manipulation, self-interest or injustice which needs attention? Let me know and we'll let the world discover "what's that smell."

"If you're a profession of sheep, then you'll be run by wolves." -- David C. Berliner

"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: Everything else is public relations." -- George Orwell

"Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral." -- Paulo Freire


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Monday, August 10, 2015

Studying Robert Putnam's _Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis_: Part 6 -- Families (2 of 2)

Below is the latest installment of my series of reflections on  Robert Putnam's 2015 release Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. It represents the second of two reflections on the book's first body chapter. I invite you to read my previous four installments on the book's introductory chapter. Access them here: Part 1: http://tinyurl.com/pavebjj 
Part 2: http://tinyurl.com/pxxoejvPart 3: http://tinyurl.com/o7od67w Part 4: http://tinyurl.com/poaa345 

As well, scroll below this entry to read the first of two segments on Putnam's "Families" chapter. I see Our Kids as central to understanding contemporary exigencies regarding education policy and essential to building and actualizing an egalitarian social justice agenda. I see and hope to reveal connections to education and schooling, education reform, and my own experiences.

Part 5; Chapter Two: “The American Dream: Myths and Realities” – Families (2 of 2)

As if aware of possible imbroglio regarding traditionalist and sexist undercurrents in the first two-thirds of the “Families” chapter of Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, author Robert Putnam offers an admission of the perplexing connections among poverty and women’s health issues. “Whatever the reasons,” he says as if doing so might offer a tabula rasa, “children of less-educated parents are increasingly entering the world as an unplanned surprise…while children of more educated parents are increasingly entering the world as a long-planned objective” (65). This difference, Putnam feels, affects the resources a parent or parents have to raise those kids.

Regarding non-marital births, Putnam informs that numbers remain low for college-educated women and that “the racial gap within classes has narrowed, while the gap within races has widened,” echoing overall trends in American economic mobility. Putnam also explicates issues of cohabitation, divorce, and multi-partner fertility, which is a term to describe “blended families” (68).

Apparently, less-educated families are more likely to have elements of the “impermanent structure” of multi-partner fertility. My own childhood can act as an example of what this means. From the time I was nine until I was nineteen, I saw my mother marry twice after divorcing my birth-father. I saw my father marry three more times. Along the way, I picked up and kept two half-brothers and a step-sister on my mother’s side. I caught and released, so to speak, three step-brothers from one step-mother and have retained two step-sisters and a step-brother from my dad’s current marriage. I “lost” a step-dad and two-step mothers along the way, though I hardly regard them as losses. 
Buy this representation of impermanence here: http://boutique.tibetart.fr/Impermanence/en 

Among siblings with the same mother, I count a set of twin boys with whom I share a father, one half-brother half my age whose dad was my second step-father, and a half-brother whose dad is my current step-father and who is two decades my junior. Our family rule is to count half-brothers as brothers, but given we were close to grown when the latest “steps” entered our parents’ lives, we tend to see them and their children as relatives but not necessarily brothers and sisters. In between the courtships that lead to marriages were itinerant partners, flings, cohabitators, false starts and mistakes. As the oldest child, I am witness to them all and often had to intervene in some way for some manner (I know that’s vague, but even I deserve my secrets). One can imagine the uncertainty and instability surrounding my our childhoods. Male figures in particular, given our mother had custody of us, were ephemeral presences and not always good role models.

In this regard, I lived like many kids, “especially from less affluent, less educated backgrounds” in that my father
Family matters when it comes to upward mobility.
wasn’t always around (69). He was somewhere, though, and often telephoned if he was not nearby. Putnam informs that many men who have children with whom they do not live have “no contact with their children” (69).

All the changes to the family structure have resulted in a “class-biased decline in the number of children raised in two-parent families” (69). Notice within this quotation Putnam does not define “two-parent” to signify heteronormativity, per se. However, he later states that “College educated moms are also more likely to have a male breadwinner in the household” (71), even if they work too, and this results in “a substantial class disparity in the financial resource available for childrearing” (71). Readers will have to draw their own conclusions about whether Putnam’s research and explanations skew toward a prickly conservativism, but he admits to a messiness considering family factors’ impact on poverty and mobility:
[C]ause and effect are entangled here: poverty produces family instability, and family instability in turn produces poverty. A similar kind of mutual reinforcement occurs between affluence and stability (75).
Moving from cultural shifts as explicatives for “family breakdown” to policy shifts, Putnam says three “probably” contributed (76): The War on Drugs, 3-strike legal proceedings, and increased incarceration. Having just heard Bernie Sanders reveal *his plan* for racial justice and equity, I can’t help thinking about these three factors and how they have affected the lives of people of color and poor Americans of every color.   

The “two-tiered family pattern” (77; also see my previous blog post on "Families") has consequences for children. Affluent kids tend to live in two-parent homes and have access to the resources two incomes affords. In the lowest third of poor American families, most kids live with only one parent or in the “kaleidoscopic” realities I mentioned in part 1 of this chapter’s reflection and in this installment’s paragraphs detailing my own upbringing. Even within the kaleidoscopic mode, the dominant theme is that only one person has an income (76-78).

Divorce and absent birth-fathers take their tolls on children. Regardless of race,
Children who grow up without their biological fathers perform worse on standardized test, earn lower grades, and stay in school for fewer years....They are more likely to demonstrate behavioral problems such as shyness, aggression, and psychological problems such as increased anxiety and depression (78).
So does stability.
Again, problematics are apparent. Many education experts know better than to rely on standardized test scores as meaningful metrics of anything more than poverty and/or parents’ income or educational background. Standardized test scores may reveal more about zip codes, given increased segregation among class lines, than they do about intelligence or ability. Further, neither a proclivity toward shyness nor an assertive nature need labeling as problematic except in extreme examples.

Of all the body chapters in Our Kids, “Families” reads as the one with the writerly voice most different from the others. Putnam reveals his book is influenced and informed by a team of researchers. While the book lists him as the single author, I hear someone else’s imprint in this chapter’s tone and penchant for entering a quagmire while trying to top-toe in and out of damning quicksand. To be sure, liberal, vociferous social justice warriors may struggle to remain objective in reviewing this chapter’s timbre. Throughout, though, the veteran scholar’s voice remerges to soften claims with qualifiers, as in this summary from the penultimate paragraph:

Since family fragmentation is, as we have seen, powerfully fostered by economic hardship, in one important sense family structure can be seen as merely an intervening variable between poverty in one generation and poverty in the next. Nevertheless, it is a prominent part of the picture (79).
While definitions of family evolve and the importance of a “birth-mother-and-birth-father-centric”/neo-traditional model of the two-parent home faces multiple critiques and interpretations, one thing is clear: When it comes to poverty, affluence, and economic mobility, family matters. When family is defined with stability, it encompasses better affordances for children than when it is not. Regardless of whether or not Putnam and/or other speakers in this chapter are justified targets for critique for cis-centric, heteronormative, traditionalist definitions of family and marriage/healthy pairings, smart readers can, at least, agree on that.

 Next: “Parenting”

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