To see how the circumstances of childhood shape the lives of young adults, Karl Alexander and his colleagues followed a sample of nearly 800 children from the start of first grade at Baltimore public schools into their late 20s. Their findings, documented in a new book, The Long Shadow, illustrate just how family background can impede a young person’s ability to get ahead. Students who fought through a set of socioeconomic disadvantages were rarely able to advance in life by performing well in school.
The Chronicle spoke with Mr. Alexander, who recently retired as a professor and department chair in sociology at the Johns Hopkins University and is now a research professor of sociology there, about the research that went into the book. What follows is an edited version of that conversation.
Q. The book takes issue with some conventional views of poverty. What are popular depictions of the urban disadvantaged missing?
A. Low-income whites living in poverty in our cities tend to be missing from action; that is, you rarely see discussion of their experiences. One of the things that we do in The Long Shadow is compare the experiences of low-income, near-poverty-level whites and African-Americans whose family profiles and neighborhood profiles are practically interchangeable.
So one revelation is not all urban poor are people of color. A lot of things follow from that realization because the ways their life trajectories unfold are really quite distinctive. You get a useful perspective on the experiences of poor urban minorities by contrasting them to the experiences of poor whites.
Q. Did you expect from the outset of your research that the families children grow up in would cast this long shadow over their lives?
A. We expected we would see that play out more in the setting of the school. And there was a long shadow of family background that was school-related, but it mainly had to do with families’ social-class background and with middle-class parents versus working-class parents.
The children in the middle class were much more successful in school all along the way. By virtue of that, when they moved on into college and beyond, many more of them had higher-level professional, technical, managerial jobs that paid well and were high-status.
There are two narratives about upward mobility and success in the modern economy. One has to do with middle-class family privilege that’s most evident in the educational sphere, and the other has to do with working-class white privilege, which is most evident in employment opportunities. Working-class white parents are better able to open up doors to employment for their children than are working-class African-American parents.
Q. You do offer recommendations for improving education as a way to help children like the ones you followed. But how much of a difference can schools really make?
A. Too often when we work toward school reform, we try something that we think is the solution, and when that solution doesn’t yield the results we want as quickly as we want them, then we get frustrated and we give up and turn to the next quick fix.
But the challenges that hold these young people back don’t lend themselves to quick-fix solutions because they’re ever-present in their lives. They start school already behind academically.
In the ideal world, at least, a good preschool experience would help poor children begin first grade with a stronger skill set, more comfortable with what’s expected of them in terms of the behavioral conventions of the classroom.
Then they hopefully have better prospects for keeping up along the way.
Rates of college dropout are much higher than rates of high-school dropout nowadays, but we tend not to think of it as the same kind of social problem, although in fact it is. And so we talk about not finishing college in more sanitized language: It’s attrition, it’s retention. But it’s dropout.
When we asked them at age 28 whether they expected to get more education, 85 percent—this seems to me really quite extraordinary—of those who did not even have high-school certifications of any sort said that they intended to get additional schooling. But for the kind of youngsters that we focused in on in this book, the follow-through is very challenging. There’s a broader agenda here than just remedial education, when they get to college to help them make up deficiencies in writing or whatever.
Q. There’s some debate over whether higher education reduces or increases inequality. What does your research tell us about that?
A. There’s an interesting duality here. The role of schooling in society, K-12 plus higher education, serves two broad functions. It is a vehicle for upward mobility. Poor children who do well in school realize the advantages that come from that. But it’s also a vehicle for preserving privilege across generations. Children of middle-class background are more successful at school than poor and working-class children for a whole host of reasons.
And so at the very same time, and without contradiction, schools facilitate upward mobility and also impede upward mobility. There’s no necessary inconsistency in that; it’s just a complicated idea. But on balance, which of those two wins out? Certainly in the experiences of our study, it’s the perpetuation of advantage across generations.