“The Kids Are in Charge: On Downward Mobility," part 1

A Clockwork Orange

Back in the 1950s America had plenty of rich people. I don’t mean the now-legendary individuals who were richer than Croesus and, like that king, had names with multiple vowels. I am talking about people who might have been our neighbors and whose wealth was within our comprehension: they didn’t marry movie stars or ski on the slopes of Switzerland. No: they were the first ones who could afford private phone lines and color TVs. In essentials, however, even the life style of the well-off did not diverge profoundly from that of ordinary folks. For instance, the bank manager might have been able to afford a Cadillac, but he didn’t set himself off by driving one. He and his family didn’t travel to Paris for their vacation. His kids went to the same school as the kids of workers.

Consider the situation in the new millennium: Not a single big city mayor or other politician, no prominent hedge-fund manager, attorney, or corporate executive, not to mention investment banker or actor, sends their kids to non-competitive public schools. High earners are no longer in sync with ordinary working folks, and this difference is reflected in the educational outcome of the mass of American children today: except in the richest districts of the country, the process by which schools produce successful children has been reversed since the 1950s.

Here is a comparison that brings the difference down to earth. Consider a boy who began school in 1950 and who, upon graduation from high school twelve years later, became a New York City bus driver or an employee of Con Edison. He and his wife––the one he married not long after high school–– now undoubtedly own at least a second car. (If she also worked after the kids started school, how would she get to her job otherwise?) If they have been sensible in their habits, they own their home, travel by air on vacation, perhaps to Paris if they are interested, and may even have sent their children to college. If seriously ill, they are treated in the same hospitals as wealthier citizens and have reached retirement without a diminution in their lifestyle. If they have been judicious in their spending and with his municipal pension, their children will have to deal with inheritance taxes after their deaths.

 Can the same be said about someone who becomes a New York City bus driver in the new millennium? Most Americans today do not think so.

The change in the educational landscape since 1950 has made all the difference. In the 1950s, kids mastered the three R’s, learned to write in a comprehensible hand, and absorbed the ability to sit quietly at their desks for several hours straight. They developed lots of inner starch and were ready to step into adult jobs on graduation from high school. By the millennium, in contrast, if you aren’t able to read at third-grade level after eight years in school, you move on to high school anyway. Parents  can no longer spank their own children, teachers can't fail them, and everyone agrees that competition is bad for the psyche. What prospects to such children have?

It is not the case that parents today are happy that their children receive a high school degree while possessing inadequate skills. They know, however, that their kids will be passed without doing their homework and even with a poor attendance record. It would take a lot of spine to discipline their kids and make them study when no one except the offspring of recent Asian immigrants is doing so. Kids always win if they scream loud enough. One only has to watch a screaming two-year-old to know this.

There is no way around it: kids are now in charge of the institutions. They determine public policy, including that of education. The result is that, year by year, the window of opportunity for success has narrowed — and it is not because mothers now work and are no longer de facto guardians of their neighborhoods.

To be continued.