Studying Robert Putnam's _Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis_: Part 4 -- A Conceptual Note to Ruin It All?

Below is the last installment of my series of reflections on the first chapter of Robert Putnam's 2015 release Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. I hope to offer commentary on the remaining chapters as well and invite you to read my previous three installments. I see this book 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 4; Chapter One: “The American Dream: Myths and Realities” – A Conceptual Note to Ruin It All?

In the latter pages of the first chapter of Harvard public policy professor Robert Putnam’s Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, the author defines his research terms and discusses his methods. Two worrisome facets emerge which could be enough to turn some readers away or to call his work into question.

Putnam mentions that many who study socioeconomic mobility use a “lagging indicator” (43) approach in

which they compare children’s income and education to those of their parents when all parties are or were in their 30s or 40s. I worried Putnam used a similar method. The result would be that we couldn’t really know what “now” looks like for several decades. So, Putnam’s work would feel dubious and conjectural. I was vexed critics and the reading public would look at his work in such a way that it might actually increase a sense of “inequity disbelief” among powered, like-classed cross-sections of the population.

Luckily, Putnam does not use the lagging indicator model of research, instead “examining directly what has been happening to kids the past three decades – the family into which they’ve been born, the parenting and schooling they’ve received, the communities in which they’ve been raised” (44). He does, however, use an indicator of social mobility that might be seen as flawed as researchers apply their lagging indicator- or “rearview mirror”- (44) approach to Our Kids in the coming years.

Generally, when Putnam speaks of class breakdowns, he uses education alone as a delineator, or, sometimes, a composite model based on income, education and occupation (44). The latter is more appropriate, as education does not automatically signify higher salaries and thereby more economic mobility. One need have only a baseline awareness of the adjunctification of the professoriate to know this. Unfortunately, he appears to rely more on the former:

So when I speak of kids from “upper-class” homes, I simply mean that at least one of their parents (usually both) graduated from college, and when I speak of kids from “lower-class” homes, I simply mean that neither of their parents went beyond high school (45).

He explains that in the book, “poor” equates to those who are high-school-educated (or have less than high school educations, one presumes); “college-educated” and “rich” refer to those with college degrees.

I have apprehension that these criteria aren’t accurate enough for 2015 realities. I find It odd that, given his position as an Ivy League professor, Putnam fails to consider his set terms as flawed, especially given the plight of many doctorate-wielding individuals scraping and clawing to put enough adjunct work together each semester to make a decent but many-times still poverty-level wage. Certainly outliers exist to suggest Putnam uses a faulty system. Perhaps too few outliers exist to make a difference statistically (which would fit a denotative definition of “outlier”); perhaps Putnam makes a mistake via his defining terminology.

If further analysis of the issues he raises reveals that – as I am experiencing and as I have a hunch a significant amount of others are experiencing, especially those with terminal academic degrees – he has overlooked the poor who (though I hate this term) “over-achieved” to get to college only to remain poor or return to poverty upon graduation or later in life, I fear the entirety of Our Kids can be called into question in ways that might undo the good I assume Putnam wants to enact via writing on the subjects. Ironically, the model of research he disfavors, one using lagging indicators, might be what helps cement the book’s validity or seriously challenges its credibility.

I admit a sensitivity to this possible methodological blemish. Three years ago I was was earning approximately $66,000 annually (base salary plus summer teaching) in a tenure-track position in the English Department at the University of Texas at El Paso.  When five years of dirty politics, shaky leadership (I worked under three department chairs in those five years) and departmental backbiting at UTEP became untenable to my mental health and the health of my family, and I felt I might be denied a fair tenure process after publicly calling into question the methods my colleagues took in ousting the second chair under whom I worked and abstaining from the final vote to expel him, I took a significant pay cut by moving cross-country to Washington State University – Pullman. My position in WSU’s English department was a visiting assistant professorship with a salary in the $40Ks. I hoped to reinvigorate my career and outlook, only to find a new breed of toxicity and mismanagement at my new employer.

Now, having left two academic positions -- albeit obviously noxious ones – in two years (not to mention that WSU fired me when me cleaning out my office and informing the departmental secretary I’d done so and where she could find my office keys, after having completed all duties assigned to me, was not considered a formal enough resignation notice!) of my own accord blends with my public criticism of the current education reform movements, Common Core State Standards, Teach for America, Value-Added Models of teacher evaluation, do-nothing professional organizations, excessive and harmful standardized testing, and colleagues taking the “C.Y.O.A.” approach to dealing with these things that they know are detrimental to children and students to make a perfect storm of unhirability (or so it seems) in my field of preparation (teaching/teacher education).

I am a first-generation college student who rose from divorced parents, neither of whom completed high school, to not only complete college but to earn a doctorate from a Public Ivy and earn a tenure-track position at a university ranked in the top echelon of Washington Monthly’s college rankings. But I am also a person who had to look at the life he had at that institution and the one that came after it and let it go, once again in hopes of more stable, positive environs. Having spent a year on the job market and getting only a nibble or two at K12 positions and university positions, I have to wonder if that quotation attributed to Voltaire isn’t spot-on: “To determine the true rulers of any society, all you must do is ask yourself this question: Who is it that I am not permitted to criticize?”

By Putnam’s definitions, I came from a background of poverty. By his definitions, I was poor, but I am no longer poor and will never be again because I am educated. Educated, indeed. Putnam makes no room for the Icarus crowd in Our Kids. Further, academic neoliberalism embraces concepts of white privilege and white superiority which suggest I truly screwed the pooch in my recent decisions to seek better working conditions/leave my academic positions, and American exceptionalism, Rugged Individualism. Bootstrapping and American Dreaming suggest the weight to make it work, to remain successful, was on my shoulders and mine alone. I made my decisions to relocate, criticize, and quit bad jobs to look for better jobs. My new economic status reflects a self-made individual.

Further, regardless of my possible current poverty (luckily I have a working spouse, but she’s in K12 education too, so you can image how tight our budget is for our family of four), strings of critical race theory, probably misapplied, suggest that as a white, straight, male, I was born rich and privileged. Putnam does, at least, offer a decent job of revealing that white privilege only gets poor whites so far. As well, he reveals that white superiority could be rebranded accurately as class superiority, since the opportunity gap within races has widened too and middle and upper-middle class people of color are pulling ahead as their poorer peers fall further behind, just as is the case among and within white populations.

I suppose my reach exceeded my grasp – my grasp of what it took to stay in the middle class once I got there; my understanding of upper-middle class culture and the upper-middle class culture of academia; my (mis)understanding that a doctorate in education and an established record of scholarship and publication granted me enough authority and security to speak out against K12- and higher education ills. Well-educated scholars and researchers might look at me and see the “White Supreme,” and notions of individualism suggest that I must have messed up handily to feel like a pariah or reject or object of erasure and be straight, white, and male. 

Putnam helps me see – could help any willing reader see—that white supremacy seeks to keep many more of us under thumb than critical race theory or theories on gender and sex inequalities might allow. White supremacy is not the domain of whites; it is the domain of the small, exclusive white ruling class – and of the people of color in those upper classes too.  

American Supremacy Systems vs. Upward Mobility?

To affect social change, people of color and those advocating for specific marginalized groups rather than for wholesale socioeconomic reform will need to decide if that is a reality they can accept; if acknowledging their own socioeconomic privilege and the growing class gaps positively changes their perspectives and benefits. Ideally, a Putnam-informed perspective would help whites and people of color work together to the mutual benefit of all regarding upward mobility and a reconsidering of “Supremacy.”  

When the stakes are so high that one risks returning to poverty and hardship upon critiquing the systems of socioeconomic Supremacy and being erased as a recognized poor person due to limiting definitions, and so much weight is on the individual’s shoulders in terms of culpability within America’s mobility apparatus, can those on the precipice of privilege or comfortably within it find ways to answer the call of addressing inequities without being crushed by the machine that gave them the silver spoon-, or perhaps just the sliver-, of-a-chance to do well?