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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... education they provided. A portion of ... School Reform as History” and is used with the permission of the journal. The chapter also includes adaptations of earlier essays on the origins of public education. My work on Chicago school reform ...
... 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 Foundation. My debt to the Foundation, especially its president, Eric Wanner, is ...
... reform, do historians, in fact, distract attention from children killing ... reform. Why have American governments proved unable to redesign a welfare system that ... education? Do any hopeful examples exist? Because they traced extreme ...
... reform strategy, improving poor people did not end with the nineteenth or earlytwentieth centuries, as almost any ... education a starring role. Of all options, education has shone as the preferred solution for social problems by ...
... reform. Although, in part, this reflects my own limitations, at points the ... education, a permanently mixed economy. At one time or another, public and ... education, to justify 5 INTRODUCTION.