Improving Poor People: The Welfare State, the "Underclass," and Urban Schools as HistoryPrinceton University Press, 02/04/1997 - 191 من الصفحات "There are places where history feels irrelevant, and America's inner cities are among them," acknowledges Michael Katz, in expressing the tensions between activism and scholarship. But this major historian of urban poverty realizes that the pain in these cities has its origins in the American past. To understand contemporary poverty, he looks particularly at an old attitude: because many nineteenth-century reformers traced extreme poverty to drink, laziness, and other forms of bad behavior, they tried to use public policy and philanthropy to improve the character of poor people, rather than to attack the structural causes of their misery. Showing how this misdiagnosis has afflicted today's welfare and educational systems, Katz draws on his own experiences to introduce each of four topics--the welfare state, the "underclass" debate, urban school reform, and the strategies of survival used by the urban poor. Uniquely informed by his personal involvement, each chapter also illustrates the interpretive power of history by focusing on a strand of social policy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: social welfare from the poorhouse era through the New Deal, ideas about urban poverty from the undeserving poor to the "underclass," and the emergence of public education through the radical school reform movement now at work in Chicago. |
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The Welfare State, the "Underclass," and Urban Schools as History Michael B. Katz. Improving Poor People Introduction THERE ARE places where history feels irrelevant, and America's.
... American social institutions, public policy, and reform. Why have American governments proved unable to redesign a welfare system that satisfies anyone? Why has public policy proved unable to eradicate poverty and prevent the ...
... American education an extraordinary—indeed, impossible—load, which is one reason why with regularity since the third quarter of the nineteenth century critics have alleged the failure of public schools. As the history of education shows ...
... American history, leaving them more social and political constructions than fixed spheres. However defined, their relations with each other have remained tangled, difficult if not impossible to dissect, giving American social ...
... America's welfare state, despite its limits, as evidence of government's capacity to tackle major social problems. Government has shown it can lift people out of poverty, reduce hunger, and improve housing. Is it possible to criticize ...