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

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

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