Culture of poverty, culture of success

Writing in The New Republic, Brink Lindsey shows why personal and familial culture is the greatest determinant of whether or not someone gets out of poverty. He surveys studies showing that a family's income is a peripheral contributor to the success of their children -- which means that pouring more money into education is not likely to help raise student achievement much. Excerpt:

If more money isn't the answer, what does have an impact? In a word: culture. Everything we know about high performance in all fields of endeavor tells us that, while natural talent is a plus, there is no substitute for long hours of preparation and hard work. That commonsense notion has been confirmed by the findings of the so-called "Expert Performance Movement," led by Florida State University psychologist Anders Ericsson. Ericsson and fellow researchers have spent years studying top performers in a whole host of different domains, and they've found a common denominator: practice. Chess grandmasters, concert pianists, and other superstars are distinguished from less-accomplished performers by two main things: starting their chosen fields earlier in life, and logging more hours per day of training over the course of many years.

Apply these lessons to doing well in school, and it becomes clear that the class divide in academic achievement is fundamentally a cultural divide. To put it in a nutshell, the upper-middle-class kid grows up in an environment that constantly pushes him to develop the cognitive and motivational skills needed to be a good student; the low-income kid's environment, on the other hand, pushes in the opposite direction.

Child psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley have tested the effect of class on the differences in how parents interact with their young children. After observing several dozen families with toddlers over the course of a couple of years, they were able to document dramatic differences in the intensity and nature of the verbal stimulation the kids were getting: Professional parents directed an average of 487 "utterances" per hour toward their children, as compared to 301 for workingclass parents and only 176 for welfare parents. The quality of those utterances was also very different: Among professional parents, the ratio of encouraging to discouraging utterances was six to one; for working-class parents, the ratio slipped to two to one; and welfare parents made two discouraging utterances for every encouraging one. The consequences were predictable: By the time the children in the study were around three years old, the ones from professional families had average vocabularies of 1,116 words; the working-class ones averaged 749; the welfare kids, 525.

Money isn't the issue here, since talking to your kids is free. What does matter is the parents' inclination to nurture their child's development and the resulting verbal practice that the child gets. Kids from well-off homes get more chances to interact verbally, and that practice is an essential ingredient of developing a large vocabulary.

Once kids reach school age, the growing influence of peer groups reinforces the early patterns established at home. The relative clout of parents and peers in shaping personality and values is a subject of hot debate, but here they generally work in concert. College-educated professional parents make sure their kids are in college-bound peer groups, while working-class and underclass kids tend to gravitate toward others like them. Consequently, children on either side of the class divide grow up with very different attitudes about the importance of school achievement — which leads to different expectations about future life plans and different self-conceptions in relation to larger society.

Which brings us to a recent news report from the Omaha World Herald, posted by Mighty Favog on his blog, and aptly titled (by him), "Why do you think they call it 'screwed'?". Excerpt from the World Herald story:

Both Keyana and her mom, Samona Jones, were pregnant before high school. Samona was 13; Keyana, 14.

Samona dropped out of eighth grade, never married and had more babies.

Keyana adores her mom but dreams of a different life. She wants to travel. Move to a bigger city. Maybe become a lawyer.

She can't do that with a house full of kids.

"Who's got my brush?" Samona yells.

Today mom and daughter are both getting ready.

Keyana is taking daughter Lauren for her 18-month well checkup.

Samona also is seeing a doctor. She's 31 and soon to deliver her 12th child.

[snip]

And more than 75 percent of blacks in Douglas County who gave birth were not married. That compares with 24 percent for whites and about 49 percent for Hispanics.

In 2002, the most recent year for which comparisons are available, the Omaha area ranked seventh worst in teen births among blacks. More than 22 percent of blacks who had babies were teens, a share that beat New Orleans and Chicago.

Of about 800 births to Douglas County teens in 2007, 36 percent, or 283, were to black teens. Overall, the county's population is about 13 percent black.

Says Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research: "As long as half of black families with children under 18 are headed by a lone female and as long as a quarter of young black males who are out of prison and out of school are not even looking for work, the poverty numbers for blacks are not going to come down much, no matter how good the economy is and no matter what new social programs the politicians try."

Teenage pregnancy has become so accepted, sometimes even planned, that a counseling center in north Omaha dropped crisis from its name. Ads now emphasize its quality medical professionals.

Poor teenagers who get pregnant are almost always going to be stuck in poverty, whatever their color. Children raised in a culture in which out of wedlock pregnancy, especially among teens, is normative are going to have a hell of a time trying to get out of poverty themselves. Children raised in a culture in which the broader set of values that would lead one out of poverty are mocked and disdained are being morally and psychologically by the adults whose job it is to help them, are going to find themselves stuck. It's a vicious circle, and there's not a lot that the government can do to break it.

Don't get me wrong: I believe we have a moral obligation to provide for the basic needs of these citizens. But I don't believe all the government programs we could possibly imagine will fundamentally change their condition, because their condition is not fundamentally a matter of material deprivation.

Culture is more important than politics, as Moynihan said. But he also said that politics can save a culture from itself. What kind of politics could save inner-city black culture from itself? Ideas? Because we certainly need them in society at large, not just the black inner city. The Hispanic out of wedlock birth rate is going through the roof. And demographer Nicholas Eberstadt says the white family today is exactly where the black family was a generation ago, when Moynihan issued his famous report predicting disaster if the trends toward illegitimacy weren't arrested (they weren't):

Forty years after the Moynihan report, the tragic saga of the modern black family is common knowledge. But the tale of family breakdown in modern America is no longer a story delimited to a single ethnic minority. Today the family is also in crisis for this country's ethnic majority: the so-called white American population.

The crisis in the white family has attracted curiously little attention from commentators and policymakers. Yet by many of the criteria of the Moynihan report, today's white American family looks to be at least as troubled as the black family of the early 1960s.

Consider trends in out-of-wedlock births. By 2002, 28.5 percent of babies of white mothers were born outside marriage in this country. Over the past generation, the white illegitimacy rate has exploded, quadrupling since 1975, when the level was 7.1 percent. The overall illegitimacy rate for whites is higher than it was for black mothers (23.6 percent) when the Moynihan report sounded its alarm.

Moreover, with 75 percent-plus of their babies born outside marriage, white teens now have much higher illegitimacy rates than the black American teens of the early and mid-1960s. Indeed, in 2002, a white mother younger than 30 was more likely to have an illegitimate child than a black mother was in 1970.

White illegitimacy rates look somewhat lower if the non-Hispanic white population is examined apart from Hispanic Americans. Even so, in 2002, the illegitimacy rate for "white Anglos"--as Euro-Americans are sometimes called--was 23 percent--virtually identical to levels 40 years earlier for black mothers.

It's the culture, stupid. It's the stupid culture. Since the 1960s, we've torn down almost every fence our moral and religious tradition erected to help people thrive over generations, especially those in adverse material conditions. Surprise!

Here's what I don't understand: where are the churches in all this? By and large, the only churches I see doing anything about this at the congregational level are the Evangelicals. Often their efforts at chastity-promotion look goofy, but at least they're trying. I almost never saw the challenges even acknowledged straightforwardly in the Catholic parishes of which I'm a part. The biggest misconception non-Catholics have about the Catholic Church, at least in America, is that it talks about sex constantly. Nothing could be further from the truth, at least in my experience.

And though I'm still new in Orthodoxy, I'm not aware of any efforts to counter the challenges of a highly sexualized culture (esp. youth culture) directly. Seriously, if you're Catholic, Orthodox or mainline Protestant and know of such programs, or clerics that take this seriously, by all means let us know in the comboxes -- these priests and parishes need to be praised and encouraged.

Where is the black church? Seriously. It's 2008, not 1958; white oppression is not what's keeping poor and working-class black folks down. It's poverty culture, and its poisonous fruits. Are these values being confronted with the Gospel, or is black Christianity analogous to much of contemporary white Christianity, and saturated with sentimental bromides that avoid hard teachings?

In the Hispanic community, are Catholic priests as mum about sexual matters as their white counterparts? How about among Latino Protestants? I know a Latina immigrant from Mexico who holds on to her Pentecostal congregation as the only anchor she and her girls have to moral sanity. That church is working for her. How common is this? Again, I mean these questions seriously, not rhetorically.

As ever, discuss.