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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... Social history. 5. Social policy. I. Title. HV91.K348 1995 362.5′0973—dc20 94-31111 This book has been composed in Palatino Copyright.
... social agency or in community economic development. Would historians committed to social reconstruction give more to the causes they champion with degrees in social work or public policy or as public interest lawyers? Since the early ...
... social science and social policy often have highlighted obsolete or distorted versions of history that undermine the conclusions of research or recommendations for policy, especially ones relating to cities and their people. In response ...
... 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 institutions, such as welfare and education, a ...
... social research on poverty that fails to incorporate a grass-roots perspective in its design. As an unreconstructed democrat, I remain committed to local democracy, excited by the potential of community economic development and the ...