Unit 2: Poverty & Place- Gas Prices

During the summer of 2008, gas prices reached a national average of $4/gallon for the first time. Gas prices are on the rise again. American families across the country are feeling the pinch of rising gas prices; however none may be feeling the stress of these price increases more than rural families in the U.S. who have found themselves choosing between paying the electric bill or filling the gas tank so they can drive to work

Use your sociological imagination to think about how geographic place shapes families’ experiences related to shifts in the economy, and specifically what it might be like for families living in Mississippi, experiencing rising gas prices. How and why have the high gas prices disproportionably affected rural families? Discuss the specific issues related to poverty that surround people living in rural areas. Are there any ways that the government should aid families and individuals in these situations? What are your ideas for how to solve this disparity?

Unit 2: War, Loss, & Child Development

As we discussed in class, voluntary military service can be an important option for families with few resources. Regarding ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are just beginning to understand the longer term impact of deployment on family life in the United States. For many families, the current rotation of personnel in and out of deployment has resulted in dramatically shorter stays with families and children. The inability to predict when deployment will occur may lead to instability in marital relationships and parent/child relationships as well. As a result, some members of Congress have pushed for longer home stays between deployments for members of the military.

A lingering concern is the effect of injury or loss of life on military families. Research shows that rates of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injuries (TBI) will climb dramatically, even years after deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan. Moreover, as this article in the New York Times shows, we are beginning to see the effects of a parental loss on children who were toddlers at the beginning of the wars. Pauline Boss, a professor at the University of Minnesota, has conceptualized "ambiguous loss" to describe these circumstances for many children, who struggle with loss of a parent who remains psychologically present despite their physical absence.

After reading this article, consider the impact of parental injury and loss on children and adolescents in military families. What kind of resources to these family members need, both in the short term and the long term? How will these families survive daily challenges for jobs, housing, and health care? What is our responsibility as a society to military families who suffer loss during the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan? How do these efforts relate to the efforts to end poverty for families in the US?

Unit 2: Suburban Poverty

In our lecture on Poverty and Place, we discussed implications for family life in conditions of rural, urban, and suburban poverty. Of these, suburban poverty was noted as the newest historical phenomenon, and rates of suburban poverty have increased noticeably in recent years. Please click here to read an article from The Nation about trends, causes, and implications of suburban poverty.

How does the information in this report challenge our notion of the geographical distribution of poverty and affluence? How do you make sense of this information in light of our previous discussion of the outmigration of the middle class from the cities to the suburbs? How are trends in suburban poverty perpetuated by the continued progress of the wealthiest Americans and the increasing inequality that this phenomenon creates? What are the implications for class and family life for suburban families who are not members of the middle or upper classes? Dreier calls for a restructuring of public policy to address the relatively new challenges presented by suburban poverty. What kinds of changes are necessary to address these, and how might they best be implemented?

Unit 2: An Odyssey for whom?

David Brooks, in a recent op-ed in the New York Times, summarized findings from new research on the study of the transition to adulthood. He focuses on "the odyssey," or the "decade of wandering that frequently takes place between adolescence and adulthood." Like in our class discussion, he notes that the pathways through this decade are diverse, and that markers of adulthood are increasingly delayed. In 1960, roughly 70 percent of 30-year-olds had left home, achieved financial self-sufficiency, married, and had children. By 2000, fewer than 40 percent of 30-year-olds had done the same. He even suggests that "with a little imagination it's possible even for baby boomers to understand what it's like to be in the middle of the odyssey years. It's possible to see that this period of improvisation is a sensible response to modern conditions."

After spending some time in FMSC 381 this semester, you might ask yourself, what is missing from Brooks' reflection on the odyssey period? One letter in response to this article came from Laurence Steinberg, a professor of psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia. He wrote:For young people from the upper-middle class, whose parents can afford to bankroll them while they experiment with careers, relationships and identities, the period between adolescence and adulthood may in fact be an odyssey of the sort that David Brooks has described. But research shows that this trend is far from universal, and before we accept the notion that a new stage of human development has emerged, it is informative to ask just how widespread it is.

Recent empirical analyses indicate that about 40 percent of American young people follow this pattern. Poor inner-city and rural youth, as well as young people who live in the so-called red states, are far less likely than their advantaged, suburban and blue-state counterparts to delay the transition into conventional work and family roles, both because they choose not to and because they simply can't afford to. Perhaps over time, the odyssey stage will come to characterize the life course of the majority of young Americans, just as adolescence began as a middle-class institution and spread to less affluent groups, but it hasn't happened yet.

Read Brooks' article first. If this decade of odyssey isn't common for all youth, how would you describe the transition into adulthood for young adults with few resources? What does fluidity and improvisation mean for young adults who do not have a support net of a promising career; an undergraduate or graduate degree; family members who will help with a downpayment on a home; or a potential partner with equal or greater earning potential? Is the transition to adulthood a time period in which, increasingly, the lives of advantaged and disadvantaged young adults diverge? How and why?

Unit 2: Making Sense of NCLB

In January 2002, President Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act, an attempt at standards-based education reform intended to hold states, districts, and schools accountable for the performance of students in elementary and secondary schools. Under the law, teachers and administrators at chronically failing schools can lose their jobs, and the management of schools can be taken over by private organizations or by the state. The leniency period for the policy has now ended, and consequences for failure at the school wide level are now supposed to be enforced with a heavy hand.

Areas of the country in which there are high rates of poverty and other social problems have experienced negative effects of NCLB, and significant controversy exists in some communities -- Los Angeles, CA is a prime example. You can read about what's going on in that school district by reading this article from the New York Times, published in October 2007. Schools in that district are in real danger of being shut down or taken over, but even such drastic penalties and changes would not likely bring about effective or swift positive change. Thousands of students are falling further and further behind by the year

How have the requirements of NCLB changed the face of public education in the US? What are the results of these changes for families, especially poor families? How has the quality of public education been altered? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the NCLB? How might the NCLB be altered to more effectively serve and protect all participants in the US education system? Is a federal policy an effective way to address what's going on in the widely diverse schools and school districts in the US? If you were a member of Congress, how would you work to address the problems present on this issue?

Unit 2: 'The Lost Generation': Young Adulthood and The Great Recession

In the near future, you will venture out into the exciting world of work! Well, hopefully…

Amidst the United States economic crisis, countless jobs are being slashed and young people are being hit especially hard, which have significant implications on their future and the economy. No matter their education level- high school-drop-outs to college graduates- eager and motivated young individuals are facing unemployment.

Read the following BusinessWeek article, entitled “The Lost Generation” by Peter Coy. To what extent are you concerned over the unemployment status in the US? How do you anticipate you will be affected, if at all, by the current trends? And finally thinking in terms of solutions- how responsible do you believe the US government should be in terms of support for its workforce?

Unit 2: Growing up on Chicago's South Side

In 1993, LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman - both 14 years old - reported for an NPR radio documentary on their community. The boys taped for ten days, walking listeners through their daily lives: to school, to a bus ride that takes them out of the ghetto, and to friends and family members in the community. The candor in Jones and Newman's diaries brought listeners face to face with a portrait of poverty its effects on childhood in one of Chicago's worst housing projects. Ghetto Life 101 (30 min audio) became one of the most acclaimed programs in public radio history, winning almost all of the major awards in American broadcasting, including: the Sigma Delta Chi Award, the Ohio State Award, the Livingston Award, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Awards for Excellence in Documentary Radio and Special Achievement in Radio Programming, and others. Ghetto Life 101 was also awarded the Prix Italia, Europe's oldest and most prestigious broadcasting award. It has been translated into a dozen languages and has been broadcast worldwide.

One year later, 1994, the young men reported on the death of 5-year old Eric Morse in the Ida B. Wells Housing Projects in a documentary entitled Remorse: The 14 Stories of Eric Morse (39 min audio). As the website Sound Portraits asserts, "They set out to learn about the story from the inside, to see how a tragedy like this can touch a community, and to bring to light the scars it left behind." This project won the Grand Prize Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and a Peabody Award in 1995.Listen to one or both of these radio documentaries.

Contrast them with the documentaries we've seen in class (Throwaway People, 30 Days) and Kozol's Amazing Grace. Most importantly, consider that the creators and narrators of this perspective on a Chicago South Side neighborhood are two actual residents - and two young boys at that. How is their perspective valuable in understanding the lived reality of this community? How would Kozol, journalists, social scientists or politicians describe the lives of LeAlan and Lloyd's families and friends? Where do you note discussion of "culture and structure" as related to issues of poverty and poor people?

Unit 2: "Whatever it takes" for Children

The Harlem Children's Zone, writes New York Times reporter Paul Tough, is "the first and so far the only organization in the country that pulls together ... integrated social and educational services for thousands of children" — all under one umbrella, all in one place, all at one time. It's the brainchild of education and social-services reformer Geoffrey Canada, and it's nothing less than an audacious poverty-eradication effort that, as Publishers Weekly explains, is "predicated upon changing everything" in the New York City neighborhoods it targets, "creating an interlocking web of services targeted at the poorest and least likely-to-succeed children."

The agency, with an annual budget of $58 million, serves 8,000 kids in a 97-block neighborhood of Harlem. Tough, who's spent five years reporting on Canada's organization, and who's written a new book on the project, writes that "as students progress through an all-day prekindergarten and then through a charter school, they have continuous access to community supports like family counseling, after-school tutoring and a health clinic." All of that institutional structure is "designed to mimic the often-invisible cocoon of support and nurturance that follows middle-class and upper-middle-class kids through their childhoods." Both Tough and Canada discuss the genesis and the implications of a program whose ultimate goal is "to produce children with the abilities and the character to survive adolescence in a high-poverty neighborhood, to make it to college and to graduate.”

Listen to the interview on NPR, and discuss how this project compares to No Child Left Behind. What is needed for innovative approaches to combat poverty and really address educational opportunities for low-income children? What do you think of a comprehensive approach like Canada's?