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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... questions, providing back- ground material, giving us precious time. Entering the educational reform community there has been one of the unexpected and great joys of the project. Chapter 4 began as a working paper for the Russell Sage ...
... questions and with the tension between activism and scholarship, which I have tried to mediate with research on a number of questions about American so- cial institutions, public policy, and reform. Why have American gov- ernments ...
... questions with many exam- ples but offers no clear or consistent answers. Nor do I see a consistent pattern in the role of government. My work on the history of education has criticized government. Actions by state and local governments ...
... questions of social policy today. The book concludes by shifting its perspective from policy makers and reformers to poor peo- ple themselves. Chapter 4 explains the origins of my interest in restor- ing agency and dignity to ordinary ...
... questions about the conventional boundaries of scholarship. As part of their professionalization project in the early-twentieth century, social scien- tists rejected the association of research with “advocacy” character- istic of an ...