When Harvard Professor Robert Putnam began working on his new book, “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis,” five years ago, his goal was to make income inequality and the opportunity gap the dominant domestic issues of the 2016 presidential election. The book appears to have done its part. It’s probably no coincidence that soon after Putnam briefed Jeb Bush on the issue, the GOP presidential candidate-in waiting soon declared that closing the gap should be a national priority. Putnam is also a longtime acquaintance of President Obama, who has recently stepped up his call for both political parties to address the crisis of poverty.
In “Our Kids,” Putnam (whose best-selling 2000 book “Bowling Alone:The Collapse and Revival of American Community” also stirred conversations)  uses personal narratives and a wealth of compelling data to weave together a grim and sobering picture of what it is like to grow up poor and isolated in the United States. While the book may not offer up the kind of sweeping proposals that many believe are necessary to tackle inequality, Putnam’s primary objective is to bring the crisis into focus for the average citizen, who is not keenly aware of the plight faced by millions of American children.  
While the picture may be bleak, Putnam believes, as he recently told NEA Today, that the U.S. could be on the cusp of a new era of shared responsibility and “return to being a nation where there are only ‘our kids,’ not just ‘my kids.'”
The discussion about inequality, especially in the media, has usually been focused on the “1 percent” or the anti-Wall Street protests. Was the motivation behind “our Kids” to refocus the dialogue to make the issue more compelling to the wider general public?  
Robert Putnam: Yes, I thought the underlying problem – growing economic inequality – was not getting adequate attention, but especially how it affected our children. There are two big things that have happened that deeply affect kids. One is growing economic inequality. The second – well-understood by scholars but not at all by average Americans – is the growing social segregation along class lines. This is rich and poor people increasingly living in different neighborhoods, increasingly going to different schools, increasingly marrying within their own socioeconomic group. So we are living as two separate Americas.
The implications for children, however, have not been fully understood and I want people to understand how bad it’s gotten for them. So if you frame the issue around its impact on kids, that would make it easier for people to appreciate what it means and, more importantly, make them act on it.
Many Americans have a fairly strong resistance to any economic idea or proposal that smacks of being “European.” Isn’t it hard then to have a real national discussion when even the suggestion of a small tax increase on more affluent people gets tarred as “socialism.”
RP: I would say that we are living in probably the most individualistic, the leastsolidaristic time in our history. Now many people think that this is simply how our country is, but that’s just not accurate. We go through big waves of emphasis on individuality and then a wave of emphasis on community. At the turn of the 20th Century, right after the Gilded Age, the public philosophy at the time was Social Darwinism – the idea that everybody would be better off if they just looked after themselves. This is deeply similar to the Ayn Rand libertarianism that seems dominant today.
So we began the last century with extreme individualism, but during the next few decades through the 1960s, we focused more on our shared interests and our obligations to one another. We became much more egalitarian. So we’ve turned this around before and we can do it again if we really begin to focus on the plight of these kids.
students in poverty
Source: Southern Education Foundation
The book has a long chapter on schooling, but it’s hard to talk about public education and the opportunity gap without getting into the education reform movement and the policies of the past decade or so. What in our view has been constructive and harmful about this debate?
RP: Well, I should first say that when I wrote this book, it certainly wasn’t my intention to get into the “education wars” but now I find myself in the middle of them!
But Americans have a very bad habit: they blame our schools for everything. The source of our problems are not in our schools. Schools today marginally narrow the opportunity gap. Could they close the gap some more? Of course, and that is the debate we should be having – a fact-based discussion, not based on ideology, that would help narrow the opportunity gap, recognizing first that the sources for the problem lie outside the schools. I don’t know why that idea should be so controversial to many reformers.
It has a lot to do with money, right? How we fund our schools is inherently unequal but changing those formulas is enormously complex and politically America Closed the Opportunity Gap Once and 'We Can Do It Again', Says 'Our Kids' Author - NEA Today: