Word: underclasses
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that the dramatic concentration of superstudents has peaked, talented young Asian Americans have already shown that U.S. education can still produce excellence. The largely successful Asian-American experience is a challenging counterpoint to the charges that U.S. schools are now producing less-educated mainstream students and failing to help underclass blacks and Hispanics. One old lesson apparently still holds. "It really doesn't matter where you come from or what your language is," observes Educational Historian Diane Ravitch. "If you arrive with high aspirations and selfdiscipline, schools are a path to upward mobility." Particularly when there is a close working...
Theories abound, but answers remain elusive. Perhaps the most promising approach grows out of the work of Black Sociologist William Julius Wilson of the University of Chicago, who popularized the concept of the underclass in his 1978 book The Declining Significance of Race. Wilson and his philosophical allies reject the simplistic single-factor theories of cause and effect, which range from the permissiveness of welfare to the pervasiveness of racism. Instead, they stress the ever widening social and economic gap between ghetto residents and the rest of American society, both white and black...
...ghetto: the shockingly high jobless rate among young black men. Unskilled and ill-educated, these young men are the true victims of America's dramatic transition away from a manufacturing base. Even when there is decent-paying work available, Wilson contends that social isolation excludes the black underclass from the "job- network system" that permeates other neighborhoods. One statistic tells it all: in 1985, 43% of all black male high school dropouts in their early 20s reported earning no money whatsoever. As recently as 1973, that figure was just...
...magic formula can end this cycle of poverty and social pathology. More money for social programs, a welfare system with stronger incentives to succeed, the teaching of values in the schools: these are the familiar answers of policymakers. But compared with the gravity of the problems of the black underclass, almost all the standard remedies amount to little more than changing the bandages on a festering wound...
...housing, point to a depressing conclusion: little will be done to make the ghetto an acceptable place to live and raise children. This by no means suggests abandoning those trapped in the inner city. Rather, the emphasis of both government and private philanthropy must be on helping the black underclass escape the social isolation of these inner-city wastelands. What successes there have been come not through cosmetically improving the ghettos but by providing residents with opportunities through jobs and education to rise out of them. Saving people, not inner-city neighborhoods, may be the only way America can redeem...