Rich kids don’t just go to better schools. They have a growing edge in access to extracurricular activities — in part because many schools now charge to play sports. Rich families have always outspent the poor on activities like camp, but the spending gap has tripled. Rich and poor kids used to attend church at comparable rates. Now “this class gap, too, is growing.”

Image Credit... Brian Stauffer

On it goes as Putnam charts class advantages that start in the womb and widen at every stage. He is particularly troubled by the class differences in the prevalence of family meals, citing evidence that family dining promotes good grades and behavior.

Education is supposed to help level the playing field. Horace Mann called it the “great equalizer.” Now it’s closer to the great fortifier — compounding the advantages of class, since the affluent come better prepared and more able to pay. A few decades ago, the gap between rich and poor kids in finishing college was 39 percentage points. It’s now 51 percentage points. Even poor kids with high test scores are slightly less likely to get degrees than rich kids with low scores. Putnam rightly calls this “shocking.”

Putnam more than makes his case; no one can finish “Our Kids” and feel complacent about equal opportunity. Still his perspective is modestly skewed by two tendencies. One is nostalgia. In terms of college access, Putnam says there was “no trace of bias against kids from humbler backgrounds” in 1959 when he graduated from high school in Port Clinton, Ohio. None? “Few of our families were poverty-stricken,” he writes, though child poverty was 7.4 percentage points higher nationwide than it is today.

Putnam also invites quibbles by choosing families drawn from extremes to illustrate his case, especially among the poor. They include a girl being raised by her sister after their mother, a prostitute, died, possibly of AIDS; a homeless teenager with nine half-siblings and a father in prison; and a boy raised in the New Orleans projects who committed arson at 13 and who boasts, “I just love beating up somebody.” The rich kids mostly have model dads and Tiger Moms.

The poor families he profiles lead heartbreaking lives, but for most the troubles seem to date back generations. The recent growth of inequality, which began in the 1970s, would be glimpsed better a few rungs up the ladder, among the besieged working class. Oddly in a book about inequality we never learn how much money any of the families have.

Though Putnam is a political scientist, his account is politics-free. He bemoans low turnout among poor voters, but says nothing about new laws that make it harder to vote. He rues the difficulties of a father who earns the minimum wage, with no mention of the opposition to raising it. He criticizes proprietary schools that crank out worthless diplomas, but not the political spending that protects them.