1 Reflections on the Meaning of Success I think I'm successful now, - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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Reflections on the Meaning of Success

• “I think I'm successful now, because I'm happy, you know. I

don't have a lot of money, you know. You know, I live paycheck to paycheck, but I'm happy. Because I come home every day to the person I want to be with, you know. I pick up the phone, my parents are still there if I need to talk to them, or if I want to talk to them….. I'm happy, I'm comfortable.” [Ken]

• “I think my parents are successful. I mean, they're not rich
• r anything, but ... They were successful as far as, like,

raising all those children, you know. And, you know, even though we did, like, some things, you know, nobody did anything real major, and we all, we all still alive, you know. All of us, still alive.” [Dilan]

And this from Chip, an African American whose drug-dealing brother was gunned down in his sleep by thugs who invaded their house: “It was a month or two months... that I would try to go [to school], but I would leave cause I ... if I felt like I was ... I had to cry, I would leave. I wouldn't cry in front of nobody…. And that's a hurtin feelin when you lose somebody that close.”

Equal Opportunity as “National Myth:” “the life prospects of an American are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in almost any other advanced industrial country.” Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate, NYT, 2013

Overlapping Spheres of Influence: Family, Neighborhood and School as Institutional Contexts for Child Development

“In 1950, Baltimore was the sixth-largest city in the country, home to 950,000 people and a thriving manufacturing and shipping industry. As the economic base of Maryland, Baltimore provided 75% of all jobs to workers in the region. Many were manufacturing jobs in textiles and automobile production. The region’s economic powerhouse was the steel industry.”*

*Putting Baltimore's People First (2004)

Baltimore Then

How Quickly Things Can Change

Neighborhood Decline: Deindustrialization … Plus

A ‘perfect storm’ “… of crippling trends and tragic events – the dramatic loss

• f manufacturing jobs and tax base, the ruinous riots of 1967 and 1968; the

exodus of first white then African-American, middle class families; the sequential epidemics of heroin, crack cocaine, and HIV; the intensified crime and gang activity that fed and feasted off the drug trade; and the activities of slumlords, property flippers and predatory lenders. The end result has been an ever-deepening cycle of disinvestment and decline.” Annie E. Casey Foundation 2010

Neighborhoods in Decline

“The neighborhood (when I was young) was kind of close-knit…and the people that grew up with me were like family. Then I moved from there to West Baltimore … and the neighborhood we had moved to was a rough neighborhood…. It was a lot of drugs, drug activity, a lot of, you know, shooting and homicide, stuff like that going

• n.” [Floyd]

“Where I lived, it was more or less like, I guess you’d say family oriented. Because everybody knew everybody…. When you hear everybody talking about how someone could spank you whether they were family or not. Well, that’s what it was like on the block… and maybe one or two parents was watching us and stuff .... Then after a while the neighborhood started going down ….. Basically the kids were getting badder and badder and …the people you thought was really nice was changing, you know what I mean?” [Sona] “I saw on TV was what I had, so that’s my idea of family life. It’s as though it’s everybody all together, all loving, …that was how it was, it was family. And then … the area becoming drug-infested, is what really deteriorated my family .... It was the drug game itself that made my life what it was … I was ripped from my family…. So the pain, … it was just a homesick pain. It was, I was missing my family.” [Terry]

Family Advantage: Two Success Narratives

• 1. Doing Well in School as the Path to Moving Up

BA Completion As of Age 28: Children of Middle Class Background: 45% Children of Working Class Background: 4%

• 2. Doing Well in the Workplace without a College Degree

Working in the High Skill – High Wage Industrial Trades: White Men of Working Class Background: 45%, earning $43K African American Men of Working Class Background: 15%, earning $22K

Higher SES Origins Lower SES Origins Highest Degree

Enrolled Completed Enrolled Completed

% High School Dropout 1.3 1.3 23.2 24.5 % GED 5.7 9.6 13.1 18.5 % High School 5.1 31.2 13.4 29.6 % Certificate/License 7.6 4.5 22.9 17.5 % AA Degree 19.1 3.2 15.3 1.3 % BA Degree 61.1 45.2 12.1 4.1

Upward Mobility through School, Age 28

The Middle Class Advantage in School

Outside School: Low Poverty, Safe Neighborhoods Inside School: Low Poverty Enrollments, Strong Academic Programming The School Experience: High test scores; good grades; Low rates of grade retention and special education placements; High level academic course and curricular placements; Strong parental support; Strong academic engagement After High School: Delay parenting, and possibly partnering Fewer practical obstacles

250 300 350 400 450 500 550 Fall '82 Spring '83 Spring '84 Spring '85 Spring '86 Spring '87 Low SES High SES

Reading Comprehension Averages over the Five Years of Elementary School, by Family SES Level: A gap of .5 GE in the Fall of First Grade Increases to 3.0 GE by the End of Fifth Grade

• 10

40 90 140 190 1 2 3 4 5

• 10

40 90 140 190 1 2 3 4 5

• 10

40 90 140 190 1 2 3 4

• 10

40 90 140 190 1 2 3 4

SCHOOL YEAR CUMULATIVE READING COMPREHENSION GAINS SUMMER CUMULATIVE READING COMPREHENSION GAINS

Sources: Doris Entwisle, Karl Alexander, and Linda Olson, Children, Schools, and Inequality, 1997, Table 3.1 Low SES, School Year Low SES, Summer High SES, School Year High SES, Summer

In Pursuit of the AA Degree: Three Community Enrollment Spells Without a Degree

Through high school, Kim lived in the same blue collar Baltimore neighborhood. A student at one of the rougher city high schools, she had a baby during her junior year, but graduated on time and in the top ten percent of her class by taking turns attending with the baby’s father. After high school Kim completed two semesters toward an Associates degree at a local community college by taking advantage of on-campus day-care, but then stopped -- a combination of financial pressures and wanting to wait until her daughter was in school full-time. Employee benefits as a receptionist at a law firm later allowed her to complete a semester of law classes at a different community college. Now interested in law, she took classes in legal research and advanced law, thinking to apply her accumulating credits toward a four-year jurisprudence program, but upon marrying and relocating, Kim withdrew from school in 2004 (a decade after high school) with 35 earned credits. Still without an AA degree at age 28, Kim’s goal is a doctoral degree but she expects to make it only as far as the BA. Referring to her responsibilities as a parent, she says: “Just sometimes I get frustrated. Because I like, when I want something, I want it now. You know. I want – and there’s a lot of things that stand in my way. Like, I mean, I don’t mean to say she stands in my way, but she has to come first, you know. I’m sure if I didn’t have her, I probably would be in law school right now.”

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Blue Collar Attainment: The Foundations of White Working Class Privilege

• Workplace Advantage for Men
• Family Advantage for Women

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Higher SES Origins Lower SES Origins Occupational Type Overall White Men Black Men White Women Black Women Overall White Men Black Men White Women Black Women Exec/manag

14.7 17.1 29.0 5.1 9.7

2.1 0.0 0.0 8.5 1.2 Prof

23.5 20.0 6.5 38.5 25.8

3.0 4.3 0.0 4.3 3.7 Technical

5.9 2.9 6.5 5.1 9.7

3.0 2.1 1.6 2.1 4.9 Sales

8.1 17.1 9.7 5.1 0.0

9.3 4.3 8.2 12.8 11.1 Clerical

16.9 11.4 6.5 25.6 22.6

21.2 6.4 8.2 23.4 38.3 Protective

2.9 2.9 9.7 0.0 0.0

4.2 0.0 8.2 2.1 4.9 Service

19.1 11.4 16.1 17.9 32.3

22.5 2.1 14.8 34.0 33.3 Craft a

4.4 11.4 6.5 0.0 0.0

13.1 44.7 14.8 2.1 0.0 Operator

0.7 2.9 0.0 0.0 0.0

4.7 10.6 4.9 4.3 1.2 Transport

2.2 2.9 6.5 0.0 0.0

6.8 10.6 14.8 2.1 1.2 Laborer

1.5 0.0 3.2 2.6 0.0

10.2 14.9 24.6 4.3 0.0 (N)

(136) (35) (31) (39) (31)

(236) (47) (61) (47) (81)

Persistence of Occupational Advantage and Disadvantage by Race and Gender: Age 28

White Working Class Privilege through Vocational Development: Those in the BSS with no 4-year College Attendance

White Men Black Men Jobs During High School

• Prop. Quarters Employed in H.S.

.33 .20 % in Skilled Crafts 21.0 0.0 Jobs since High School % Full-Time Job First Quarter After High School 51.6 34.8 % Full-Time Job First Year After High School 68.0 49.2 Earnings ($/hr) First Full-Time Job $7.04 $6.54 Age 22 Employment % Employed Full-Time 70.7 54.9

• Prop. Quarters Employed Full-Time, End HS to Age 22

.73 .56 % in Skilled Crafts 30.0 8.0 Earnings ($/hr) Full-Time Job $10.30 $9.35 Age 28 Employment % Employed Full-Time 79.4 60.7

• Prop. Quarters Employed Full-Time, Last 24 Months

.80 .64 % in Skilled Crafts 45.0 15.0 Earning ($/hr) Full-Time Job $20.34 $14.75 Earnings from Work, Previous Year $41,648 $28,700

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Working Class Families in the Exercise of Social Capital: Help Finding Work at Age 22

Lower SES Whites Lower SES Blacks Family 58% 42% Friends 75% 66% Self 40% 68%

“Connections and Family are Important” (Royster 2003)

Making It in the New Economy the Old Fashioned Way: Two Tales

Immediately after high school Chip, who is white, enrolled at a four-year college away from home, but the summer before enrolling he took a job at the transport company where his father worked. He drove a big-rig tractor trailer delivering freight and he discovered he liked the physically demanding work, more than the desk work at school: "... the more I thought about it, I was like, I like doing the physical labor. I don’t want a job where I sit behind a desk, that’ll drive me nuts, cause I don’t like to sit still. ... I love my job. I love what I do." Chip left school after one semester and returned to the trucking company. When we spoke with him a decade after high school, he was earning $50,000 and had built a rewarding blue collar career without the benefit of college. Aaron is African American. His biological father was an alcoholic drug-abuser who spent many years in prison; the cabbie uncle who raised him with his mother was killed in a robbery when Aaron was 15. Aaron was expelled from high school for bringing a butcher knife to school (for self-protection, he insists) but later completed high school by way of the GED. His history includes run-ins with the law (car theft and drug related offences) and struggles with alcoholism. Aaron, like Chip, works in what’s left of Baltimore’s old economy, but making just $10 an hour as a construction laborer. When asked why love and respect for his mother wasn’t enough to keep him out of trouble, he replied: "Nothing she could have did would have stopped me from being the person that I am. Because I'm not just a product of her, I'm a product of my environment too. And she was not ... the only influence in my life."

Bonilla-Silva (1996: 470) “… the racial practices and mechanisms that have kept blacks subordinated changed from overtly and eminently racist to covert and indirectly racist.”

White Working Class Privilege Then: The WW II industrial boom and the creation of a Blue Collar Elite: good paying, steady work (often unionized) in the steel mills, docks, assembly plants (auto & aircraft), and construction crafts, but mainly for whites: “Although its industrial economy more closely resembled that of Philadelphia and New York, Baltimore even in the 1940s was most decidedly Southern in character. Jim Crow was alive and well; blacks and whites lived in separate and unequal worlds” (Bentley 1993). White Working Class Privilege Now: “Connections and family are important” among the urban disadvantaged (Royster 2003), but more usefully so among whites than African Americans (Smith 2007). The mark of a criminal record weighs more heavily on young blacks than whites (Pager 2007; Western 2006) Negative Discrimination: employer bias; “place” as code for “race;” Positive Discrimination: job referrals through network ties, family, friends, neighbors, church, ethnic associations, and bars. (Kasinitz & Rosenberg 1996)

Family Advantage and Disadvantage Among Lower SES Origin Women

Personal Earnings (Median) Family Earnings (Median) % of Group % Parents

Lower SES Origins, w/o Spouse/Partner

• W. Women

$28,000 $28,000 17% 40% A.A. Women $22,940 $22,940 55% 74%

Lower SES Origins, w/ Spouse/Partner

• W. Women

$22,800 $51,333 83% 81% A.A. Women $24,440 $44,250 45% 88%

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Precocious Development: Shouldering Adult Responsibilities Prematurely

Bess had to leave high school to care for her babies because she dared not entrust them to her mother. Here is what she said in 2000 when asked to look ahead 10 or 15 years: "I can promise you that I would have been working in one place for a while, and happy there, hopefully have my own home; would have bought a home by then, maybe two, and just being happy. Just putting my kids through school, being able to do for them in the way that I, the way that I want to. And just be a good mommy, I want to take care of my kids. That's all I really want to do. I don't ask for too much out of life, I just, right now, I just want to get a home for my kids, and get me a car, and just work and pay my bills, that's it. And be able to provide for them and teach them how to provide for theirself, you know, that's it. That's all I want. And that's not hard, and, it'll

• work. I'll do it”

Sadly, in 2005 there was still no car and no house, she was making $7.00 an hour stocking shelves in a convenience store, and living in an apartment with the father of her two youngest children, a musician who also did “street promotions” for a marketing company. And how does Bess view her life? Her children, she says, are the high point, adding that life has gotten much better since high school. And who is to say otherwise?

• K. Edin & M. Kafalas, “Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood

Before Marriage,” 2008