The Growing Opportunity Gap in the US: Examining the Concentric Circles of Influence
Understanding the Interplay between Families, Schools, and Communities in Shaping Outcomes
Urie Bronfenbrenner
The Evolving Family
Family life over time evolves unguided, most recently driven by the grand process of social change in the family, schools, and communities, such as the drastic cultural change that was initiated in the 1960s and continues to evolve in the present. We are both actors and subjects in the creation of our social history. Our individual and collective behavior, over time, reconstructs the life patterns of ordinary people in our communities by creating the social and physical environments in which we live and behave. This process is going on in spite of most of us not being aware of it. This process of unguided social change impacts our human experience such as growing up, schooling and work opportunities, dating and finding a mate, getting married, having and raising children, living with families, growing old, and dying. It creates opportunities to succeed or fail in life. Family life is that important. The family is the principal context in which human development takes place. We need to take a historical look at this unguided process of family life changes that are behavior driven.
David Brooks wrote The Nuclear Family was a Mistake in the March 2020 issue of The Atlantic. He concluded, "The family structure we've held up as the cultural ideal for the past half-century has been a catastrophe for many. It's time to figure out better ways to live together." His article is a must-read in order to understand the unintended consequences of the nuclear family. Brooks declares, "This is the story of our times - the story of the family, once a dense cluster of many siblings and extended kin, fragmenting into ever smaller and more fragile forms." He concluded, "the fragmentation continued. In many sectors of society, nuclear families fragmented into single-parent families, single-parent families into chaotic families or no families." He noted, "By the 1960s, there's no extended family at Thanksgiving."
Brooks describes, in a very brief but on-target paragraph, this unguided cultural evolutionary process change: "If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: We've made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We've made life easier for adults but worse for children. We've moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children), which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options. The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor." We may add, it also has shaped our behavior so that we have become isolated, lonely, and possibly more self-centered.
The facts are that our culture has evolved unguided and, in the process, our family structure and parenting practices, schooling of our children, and our communities have also changed as a consequence. Many of the unintended consequences, driven by behavior leading to cultural change, include changes in parenting styles, schooling segregated by social and financial class (thereby assuring unequal opportunities), and disconnected communities segregated by social class.
Selection by Consequences: One Unifying Principle to Understand Cultural Evolution
We have previously discussed selection by consequences. Here we provide a brief synthesis to create the context needed to analyze how our culture evolves. The social environment is the "culture" of a group that contains the contingencies of reinforcement (rules and consequences) that guide our behavior. Behavior and culture have a reciprocal relationship.
Skinner published Selection by Consequences, in Science in 1981 and it remains one of his most important contributions to the natural science of behavior. In it, he proposed that behavior is a product of selection happening at biological, behavioral, and cultural levels (see our November 30th post). Biological selection involves changes in the genotype associated with contingencies of survival. Behavioral selection involves changes in behavior contingent on environmental interactions and consequences. Cultural selection involves changes in the practices of the group based on large-scale consequences. The characteristic demands of the environment drive selection at all three levels. We need to focus on the environment in which we collectively behave (society/culture) and not solely on individual behavior to understand what is happening around us.
In his book This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution (2019), biologist and evolutionary scientist David Sloan Wilson propose the development of practices for the intentional evolution of our social environment - the culture. He urgently warned us that evolution that is not guided and monitored can produce unintended consequences. And sure enough, our social environment - cultural evolution over the past several decades, which has been unguided and unmeasured, has brought us to where we are today.
The Growing Inequality of Opportunity and Social Mobility
Dramatic changes in family life have happened in the United States over the past half-century. Marriage and family life has become less central to the life of individuals. We tend to marry when we are older or not at all. The divorce rate continues to climb. Cohabitation instead of marriage has become more widespread, nonmarital childbearing continues to rise. This has contributed to rising union instability (as a consequence of the high rates of cohabitation, nonmarital childbearing, separation, and re-partnering) in the context of persistent fertility rates. These factors increase family complexity. These changes and trends in family life are important for understanding both the causes and consequences of poverty and they also have significant implications for evaluating the rising inequality associated with the growing opportunity gap in the U.S.
Robert Putnam’s Our Kids - The American Dream in Crisis (2015) is a must-read for those who want to understand the growing opportunity gap that families and children face in the US. In this book, he applied two accepted research methodologies. He analyzed extensive longitudinal social, educational, family structure, parenting styles, and financial datasets to dissect, evaluate and synthesize his findings. In addition, his team of researchers traveled throughout the USA to bring the data alive. They conducted interviews with a large number of diverse children and families. They provide first-hand accounts of their lives. The synthesis of their datasets demonstrated that the United States of America is actually a country divided in two. Children who are raised in wealthy and educated families have access to more opportunities than ever before, while children raised in working-class or poor families are frustrated by increasing barriers that impede their growth and their ability to catch up. This creates inequality in opportunities from the start, and at this time, there is no clear way for them to catch up.
We need to know why this divide is happening and growing. A good place to start includes looking within what Putnam describes as the concentric circles of influence - families, schools, and communities. The practice of parenting is significantly influenced by these psycho-social and ecological factors. As adults, we pass it on. The fact is that the environment you grow up in affects every facet of your life. It is the quality and context of the child's environment that sets the stage for the child to take advantage of the opportunities provided.
Families, Schools, Communities - Concentric Circles of Influence
In Our Kids, Putnam documents that "Poor kids, through no fault of their own, are less prepared by their families, their schools, and their communities to develop their God-given talents as fully as rich kids." This is the country where our founding immigrants wrote, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…" It is time that we live up to those goals, equally. We have to intentionally guide and evolve changes in our social environment (society/culture) and our individual and collective behavior to achieve the equality in opportunities we should share with each other.
Putnam describes the unguided cultural evolutionary process that has brought us to the present: "it took several decades for economic malaise to undermine family structures and community support; it took several decades for gaps in parenting and schooling to develop; and it will take decades more for the full impact of those divergent childhood influences to manifest themselves in adult lives. Moreover, this sad sequence started at different times in different parts of America." What Putnam describes and identifies are the unintended consequences of unguided cultural evolution. If we pause and look, we can actually see some of these changes like the increase in violent behavior in our society. Some may say it is their free will, their personal freedom, or their rights. Do we want more of that? We have to find a way to structure our culture so that we design strategies that make behavior that benefits the culture rewarding for the individual. Making prosocial behavior, which benefits culture, rewarding to individuals can increase its frequency and, through a guided evolution, become the norm in our social environment. Like the Beach Boys sang, 'Wouldn't it be nice…”
The Importance of Family Life
Urie Bronfenbrenner was a developmental psychologist from Cornell University. He published extensively for 60 years on what really matters in the development of human beings. His book Making Human Beings Human (2005) has shaped the field of human development. He was one of the primary architects of the Head Start Program in the 1960s with its primary objective of breaking the cycle of poverty by providing preschool children of low-income families with a comprehensive program to meet their educational, emotional, social, health, nutritional, and psychological needs. The program was culturally responsive to the communities served, and the communities had an investment in its success through the contribution of volunteer hours and other donations as non-federal shares. It continues to this day. Lillian Mongeau, in her August 2016 article in The Atlantic, reports that Joan Lombardi, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, stated that Head Start has been underfunded and struggled with quality throughout its history. Lombardi suggested that it's time to fully fund Head Start to realize its potential. However, like many government programs, it falls short due to a lack of funding and consistent support. These programs often lack direction and evaluation.
Bronfenbrenner developed a model of the ecology of human development. His basic premise was that humans don’t develop in isolation but in relation to their family and home, school, community, and society. Each of these concentric circles of influence is ever-changing creating multilevel environments, as well as interactions among these environments. They are the key to human development. We create the social/physical environment that, in turn, shapes human development. Bronfenbrenner proposed that we, as humans, have the potential to shape our world in intricate physical, social, technological, and cultural ways so these actions will nurture positive development. Sounds familiar!
Bronfenbrenner emphasized that the family is the principal context in which human development takes place, however, it is but one of several settings in which developmental processes can and do occur. In his later years, he gave us frequent warnings that the process that makes human beings human was breaking down as disruptive trends in American society create ever more chaos in the lives of our children. His obituary presented us with the following quote: “The hectic pace of modern life poses a threat to our children second only to poverty and unemployment... We are depriving millions of children - and thereby our country - of their birthright… virtues, such as honesty, responsibility, integrity, and compassion.” He again warned us, “The signs of this breakdown are all around us in the ever-growing rates of alienation, apathy, rebellion, delinquencies, and violence among American youth.” He added, “It is still possible to avoid that fate. We now know what it takes to enable families to work the magic that only they can perform. The question is, are we willing to make the sacrifices and the investment necessary to enable them to do so?” He died on September 25, 2005.
We have previously addressed the importance of a child's early experience with their environment and healthy/unhealthy brain development. The fact is that early life experiences and the socioeconomic environment influence their neurocognitive development. Neuroscience research has shown that the child’s brain is biologically primed to learn from experience, so early family environments powerfully affect the neuro-architecture of the developing brain. In his article The Environment of Childhood Poverty (American Psychologist, February/March 2004), Gary Evans found that healthy brain development in American children is closely correlated with parental education, income, and social class.
Putnam in his book Our Kids notes that “good parenting” has become time-consuming and we add “expensive.” As a consequence, the less educated and less affluent have been less able to adopt those practices. Both time and financial constraints play a major role in this gap. Putnam discusses the broad differences in parenting norms and instructs us “well-educated parents aim to raise autonomous, independent, self-directed children with high self-esteem and the ability to make good choices, whereas less educated parents focus on discipline and obedience and conformity to pre-established rules.” He concluded, “The evidence strongly suggests that the parenting style typical of affluent and educated parents, characterized by nurturance, affection, warmth, active involvement, and reasoned discipline - in short, more hugging and less spanking - leads to greater socio-emotional competence among children.” Putnam adds, “The fact is that class-based differences in parenting style are well established and powerfully consequential.”
There are many parents that are economically disadvantaged yet, under very difficult circumstances, raise incredible children who as adults become highly successful. We need to find the creative ingredients in that sauce. Most likely they are to be found in the early experiences of the child, either by the influence of one of the parents, a member of the extended family like grandparents, aunt, uncle, a minister, or a tutor. It can happen and it does happen. Putnam informs us “The disadvantages facing poor kids begin early and run deep - and are firmly established before the kids get to school.” The inequality in opportunities for that child is already in place way before they go to school, and with time it will grow, very likely increasing the gap in his lifelong inability to catch up. Family life, parenting, and early childhood experiences are that important!
The Evolving Role of Schools and Education
In Our Kids, Putnam argues that schooling does not provide a level playing field for children from different economic classes but punctuates the class divide. He also warns us, “The American public school today is a kind of echo chamber in which the advantages or disadvantages that children bring with them to school have effects on other kids.” It is the inequality in opportunities determined by financial class. He points out that wealthy kids who do poorly on tests have a better shot at graduating from college than poor kids who test well. He also documents “There is little evidence that the growing gap between low-income schools and high-income schools can be attributed to bias in the allocation of public resources.” He concludes, “We’re increasingly becoming separate societies living in the same country. We thought this was about race. It isn’t - it is about social class.”
Sean Reardon is a sociologist at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. He has done extensive research evaluating the widening income achievement gap in the United States. In a special volume of Educational Leadership (May 2013) dedicated to Faces of Poverty, he published a comprehensive study of the relationship between academic achievement and family income in the U.S. over the previous 50 years. These are some of the key trends he found:
Income inequality has risen dramatically in the last 30-40 years, making the gap in income between high-income and low-income families much greater. This rapid growth in income inequality means that high-income families now have far more resources, relative to low-income families, to invest in their children's development and schooling.
Upward social mobility has become far more difficult and far less certain than it was 50 years ago, partly because of rising income inequality and partly because of declining economic growth and opportunities.
The economy has become increasingly bifurcated into a low-skill, low-wage sector (i.e. service jobs) and a high-skill, high-wage information sector (i.e financial analyst, engineering). Mostly gone are the manufacturing jobs that built the middle class of wage earners without a college degree. The unintended consequences of killing manufacturing in the U.S. has been that now education success and a technical or college degree have become increasingly essential for economic advancement.
Popular notions of what constitutes education success have changed. In the last few decades, test scores have become increasingly central to our idea of what schools are supposed to produce. As test scores have played a more dominant role in education policy over the last decade (and have become more important in college admissions), they have become increasingly salient to parents concerned with their children's education.
American families have changed in several important ways in the last four decades. Children in high income families are increasingly likely to be raised by two parents, both with college degrees. whereas low-income children are more likely than ever to be raised by a single parent with a low level of education. This means that family income has become increasingly correlated to other family characteristics and resources that are important for children's development.
Public schools K-12 are presently not an opportunity equalizer - when a child from a poor and disadvantaged family starts school, it is usually too late. In fact, public schools, unbeknown to them, are contributing to maintaining and expanding the opportunity gap. We need to invest in public school pre-elementary early childhood education. Properly guided and outcomes measured will be an investment in creating an opportunity equalizer environment. That is the only way the opportunity gap can be reduced.
It Takes a Village to Create a School, Family, and Community Partnership
It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us is a book (1996) published by Hilary Clinton. She presented a vision for the children of America. She emphasized the impact individuals and groups outside of the family have, for better or worse, on the child's behavior and well-being. She advocated creating a society that can strive to meet the needs of our children. She also noted the importance of a shared responsibility that society has for successfully raising children so that they can become accomplished citizens. There were many controversies about the book, but the message is clear, families are important, but the family is embedded in a complex social environment and that community is essential for human development. The health of the environment shapes the outcome - good or bad behavior.
Urie Bronfenbrenner, in his Bioecological Systems Theory of human development, has emphasized the importance of the social environments in which children are raised and noted that the breakdown of the family is the leading cause of the ever-growing rates of alienation, apathy, rebellion, delinquency, and violence in our youth. He proposed that to understand these behaviors he observed, one needs to look at the environment where the behavior occurs and that includes the family, the school, and the broader community. He informed us that families interact within multiple environments that mutually influence each other. Each of these environments has roles, norms, and rules that can powerfully shape behavior and development. Collaboration across the stakeholders - family, schools, community - is needed to maximize results. When families and educators and the community at large become more aware of the complexities of the factors that affect behavior and make intentional efforts, they are more likely to create an effective partnership for facilitating an environment that enhances learning and healthy development. Intent, cooperation, and trust are essential. So is providing positive reinforcement for those who engage in activities that benefit the culture, like acting prosocially.
Robert Putnam has been warning us about the gradually evolving decline of our communities in the U.S. He has written extensively on this subject and in 2000 he published another important book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Communities. He documents the gradual, evolving decline of community life in the U.S., documenting in detail evidence of the decline in the social engagement at the community level. More and more people are becoming more focused on “I” over “We.” Putnam argues that the decline in working together is associated with a decrease in social capital that he defines as, “the connections among individuals’ social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them.” He points out that social capital “has many features that help people translate aspirations into realities, such as making collective problems easier to resolve” We work together towards the greater good when there is a high degree of social capital. Social capital creates greater opportunities.
In Putnan’s Our Kids, he documents that wealthier and better-educated people tend to have “wider and deeper social networks.'' In contrast “less educated Americans have sparse, more redundant social networks, concentrated around their own family.” He also argues that the wealthy and better educated “have many more ‘weak ties’, that is, connections to wider, more diverse networks.” It matters because the better one’s social networking is, the more defenses one has against adversity, and the greater the range of opportunities. It also provides access to supportive mentors for their children.
Putnam also demonstrates that neighborhoods increasingly break down along economic gaps. This divide becomes self-reinforcing as they shape the academic and life achievements of the children as they mature and move on. Class divide and its consequences are found in our neighborhoods. Putnam concludes, “The greater the inequality across neighborhoods, the lower the rate of upward social mobility and the greater the opportunity gap.”
Parental involvement is an integral component of a child's educational success. The high rates of success seen in many exceptional schools are generally the result of collaboration between teachers, parents, and communities. Studies consistently have demonstrated a significant positive correlation between school, family, and community involvement, and student success. Here, children from poor neighborhoods are at a substantial disadvantage. The opportunity gap continues to widen!
Our Kids also documents that “poor neighborhoods foster behavioral problems, problems in mental and physical health, delinquency, crime, violence, and risky sexual behavior.” Putnam also reminds us, “That poor kids are increasingly living in untrustworthy social environments is confirmed by trends in social trust among high school seniors over the past four decades…”
Putnam makes a strong statement to make a very important point; “In short, it does indeed take a village to raise a child, but poor kids in America are increasingly concentrated in derelict villages.”
Equality of Opportunities is Better for Everyone - Investing in Early Childhood Education
Richard Wilkenson and Kate Picket, both social epidemiologists, wrote a book published in 2009, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better For Everyone. They argue that the weight of the evidence demonstrates that income inequality is not good for society and us. The major flaw we find with this book is its emphasis on income inequality. That is not where it is at. Their book reflects most likely the most common views and opinions of most politicians and citizens. Income inequality is a direct consequence of inequalities in opportunities, influenced by many of the factors we have previously discussed. Inequalities in opportunities directly influence income inequality. We need to develop a behavior-based intervention to change the playing field of the newborn child who is born in an environment of decreased opportunities. What can we do? It will require significant transformational changes, with major government and personal investment, not only financial but also in actions.
Lyndon Johnson presented his vision for a Great Society in 1964 during a commencement address at the University of Michigan. He presented a framework for his domestic agenda that, in our opinion, is quite relevant today. The main goal was the total elimination of poverty and racial injustice. It was the largest reform plan in modern history. What did it take? It took someone that guided and led us in the process of a gradual cultural evolution of change - that is, change our behavior - to benefit the greater good.
Under Johnson’s leadership, The Office of Opportunity was conceived. The Job Corps was created for 100,000 disadvantaged men who received education and skills training in special training centers. Johnson tasked state and local governments with creating work training programs for up to 200,000 men and women. A national work-study program was also established to offer 140,000 Americans who could otherwise not afford the chance to go to college.
To strive towards equal opportunities, Johnson also proposed and enacted the War on Poverty initiatives that included:
A Community Action program for people to tackle poverty within their own communities.
The ability for the government to recruit and train skilled American volunteers to serve poverty-stricken communities.
Loans and guarantees for employers who offered jobs to the unemployed.
Funds for farmers to purchase land and establish agricultural co-ops.
Help for unemployed parents preparing to enter the workforce.
Johnson and his team were fully aware that the war on poverty wouldn’t be easy, but he said “...this program will show the way to new opportunities for millions of our fellow citizens. It will provide a lever with which we can begin to open the door to prosperity for those who have been kept outside.” Notice the focus on changing the behavior of the participants by building skills and self-reliance, unlike the most common government program that involves providing assistance, usually financial, with good intentions but the unintended consequence of reinforcing and keeping them where they are - poor.
Other important programs were also implemented, including Medicare and Medicaid, Urban Renewal, support for the Arts and Humanities with the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts. There were Environmental initiatives like the Water Quality Act, the Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Act, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission including the Child Safety Act. One of Johnson's major accomplishments was the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Investing in Early Childhood Education: Head Start and Project Follow Through
Head Start
Probably the most important and relevant program initiated by LBJ was the promising Head Start program and subsequently the Follow Through program. Urie Bronfenbrenner was one of the architects of Head Start. Head Start was first launched in 1964. It was designed to help break the cycle of poverty. It provided a comprehensive instructional program to meet the educational, emotional, social, health, and nutritional needs of poor children living in poverty and their families. The goal was to create a program that would eventually meet the needs of all children with unequal opportunities. Presently it serves about 1 million children and their families. In our opinion, this is not enough, and there are some serious concerns about the quality of the services provided. Further, the enthusiasm that was present early on is no longer there. One hardly hears about Head Start anymore. However, what news there is, is good.
The Brookings Institute, in their June 14, 2019, Brown Center Chalkboard Newsletter, discussed Does Head Start Work? They noted many methodological problems that are inherent in performing field and educational research that may contribute to spurious findings. They re-analyzed the data available and concluded “The Head Start Impact Study reanalyses and the decades of research on Head Start show that on a variety of outcomes from kindergarten readiness to integrational impacts, Head Start does work, particularly for students who otherwise would not be in a center-based care.” Some studies show that the effects of Head Start extend beyond cognitive skills and persist into how participants parent their children overall and particularly among African-American participants. The Brookings Institute Analysis also concluded, “we find that Head Start also causes social, emotional, and behavioral development that becomes evident in adulthood measures of self-control, self-esteem, and positive parenting practices." Some of these studies have been replicated by others that also demonstrate reduced teen pregnancy and criminal engagement and increased educational attainment.
The Kresge Foundation, in their August 19, 2015 newsletter, published Head Start’s successful alums are a measure of the program’s success. They noted, “Alumni include entrepreneurs, artists, musicians, doctors, teachers and luminaries such as basketball player Shaquille O’Neal, comedian Chris Rock, U.S. Rep. Loretta Sanchez, D-Calif., and Ford Foundation President Darren Walker."
Project Follow Through
Project Follow Through, originally conceived in 1967 as a social action program to extend Head Start into primary grades, became an educational experiment with the goal of finding effective methods for educating at-risk children from kindergarten through grade 3. The research involved 200,000 children in 178 communities. The sample consisted of a full range of demographic and ethnic variables. There were 22 different models of instruction compared. Nine years after the project started, in 1977, the outcomes of the project were evaluated. This was the largest and most expensive experimental project in education funded by the federal government. The environment created by Johnson’s initiative facilitated the context for such a great opportunity to systematically evaluate, over time, the effectiveness of so many different approaches to instructional practices.
A very comprehensive and well-researched compendium and summary of the findings of such one-of-a-kind and most important educational research was written in a monograph by Cathy L. Watkins, Ph.D. She is professor emerita of special education at California State University Stanislaus. Her monograph, Project Follow Through: A Case of Contingencies Influencing Instructional Practices is accessible from the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies at behavior.org.
Watkins informs us, “Meaningful school reform will not be achieved until we acknowledge that how well students learn is a function of how they are taught.” This is quite powerful, it is up to the education establishment to really believe that every child can be taught if we identify and apply the most effective instructional practices. That is the value of the data gathered from the most comprehensive educational research ever done; the data from Follow Through that are summarized in her monograph. According to Watkins, “The evaluation of Project Follow Through was the most costly evaluation study in education ever financed by the federal government. The results of the evaluation indicated that the Direct Instruction model and, to a lesser degree, the Behavior Analysis model provided viable solutions to the problem of teaching disadvantaged children. These two models demonstrated that the technology exists by which the academic achievement of disadvantaged children may be raised to ‘self-sustaining’ levels.”
Watkins argued that these findings, the identification of effective technologies that can be applied to teach academic skills to poor and disadvantaged children, have significant implications for the comprehensive reform of educational policies and practices. She notes, “Yet, the results of the Follow Through evaluation have been virtually ignored by the educational establishment.” She discusses many of these important issues as to why educators are slow in making changes in their instructional practices. We have previously advocated looking at education as a science and to implement research strategies to find the best instructional approaches to teaching with the brain in mind. There is obviously a lot of politics and special interest in government among many of our elected officials and this seems to be spilling over to many professions and that includes the teacher training programs of many educational institutions. Vested interest and maintaining the status quo trump experimentation and innovation on many fronts. Thus, a lot of opportunities and money are wasted. Effective teaching methods exist to improve education and many are being ignored, and according to Watkins, “it seems imperative to understand why this is the case.”
In summary, many studies consistently document the reality of the common and for many selective poor educational performance of low-income and minority group children. The hard facts are that these children start school at a disadvantage. Worse yet, the school that is deemed to be the equalizer in providing the academic skills that contribute to equal opportunities won't be able to do it successfully since the child is entering into the process of learning already ill-prepared to catch up due to their early environmental history - it is then too late. The educational establishment knows it and it is time to do something about it.
We are excited about Princess Kate's initiative to support early childhood education. She brings to our focus that "not enough attention is paid to how children's first five years shape the adults we become." Right on target. Maybe we can get our first lady, Jill Biden, to join her in making this urgent call. Let us all, together, invest in our young children by providing quality early childhood education to all our disadvantaged children raised in poverty. We should stop continuing our prevalent practices of delay discounting that continue to lead us to more of the same later by not doing something effective now. We need to be as bold as LBJ was when he dreamed of a Great Society. He proposed it as a reality where there is a future ahead where all the children truly will have equal educational opportunities that can finally make the reality - all people are created equal. The lack of opportunities is what divides us. Making early childhood education a reality for poor and disadvantaged children is a start to creating real equal opportunities.
Where do we go from here?
The challenge ahead of us is monumental and the obstacles seem insurmountable. But if we do not do something about it, we will soon be, as Jane Jacobs who was an American-Canadian journalist, author, theorist, and activist who influenced urban studies, sociology, and economics, predicted in her book, Dark Age Ahead (2004).
The Dark Age is defined as a culture’s dead end. She posits that families are rigged to fail because communities and families are intertwined and families these days have come under intense economic and social strain. She was concerned about dumbing down education citing her observation that universities were turning into a mass-production factory model. She worried that we were abandoning science, and saw the failure of fiscal responsibility personally, institutional and in government that has contributed to the concentration of economic and political power among the so-called elites. She also argued that we are not building cities “with a human face.” Many ills that seem to be present today. All driven by our behavior.
We propose that what is needed is to engineer and rebuild our human infrastructure with a human face. We need to become prosocial and we will be rewarded for engaging in behavior that benefits the greater good. Future essays will address these issues in greater depth. You can also find these topics addressed in our book Engineering the Upswing (2022). It can be bought at behavior.org or at Amazon. All proceeds benefit the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies.
Pass it on and see you next week.
The Growing Opportunity Gap in the US: Examining the Concentric Circles of Influence
Excellent thinking, gentlemen. Here in New Mexico, 70% of us voted in November to make New Mexico the first state in which early childhood education is a universal right. I encourage other states to do the same thing. If we don't help children from low-income families to read and develop other early-learning skills, they will be held back all their lives, diminishing us all. Universal pre-K is the most important policy change we can make.