Mikala Streeter 17.523 Essay 2: American Poverty The United States is a country with vast diversity. Americans have a wide range of opinions, personalities, and cultures, and differ in socioeconomic status and how this manifests itself in everyday life. It is the responsibility of the U.S. government to create policy for this diverse group of people. Policymakers can either decide to write policy that benefits one specific group or to write policy that benefits everyone. Social activists have studied the benefits of both for many years and made arguments for both sides. In my opinion, the more successful policy is one that benefits people of all socioeconomic groups because it will gain wider support since more people benefit, allowing it to last longer and have a better chance to improve the life chances of poor black people living in American urban centers. William Julius Wilson, author of When Work Disappears and The Truly Disadvantaged, suggests a framework of long-term and immediate solutions to help poor people. His long-term solutions place emphasis on the “the relationship between employment and education and family support systems, and in the metropolitan context, the relationship between the cities and the suburbs” (Wilson, 208). Wilson suggests an improved educational system and more interaction between the cities and the suburbs as specific long-term solutions. His immediate solutions aim to “either revise current programs or create new programs to decrease joblessness among disadvantaged adults” (Wilson, 208). He recommends job placement centers as a specific immediate solution. 1In When Work Disappears, Wilson offers the educational systems of industrial democracies like Japan and Germany as models for the U.S. Their policies established a performance standard for students to meet before they can graduate from secondary school. This policy increased the number of workers with “higher-order thinking skills,” meaning they are better prepared, regardless of their socioeconomic background, to compete in the job market and be successful in technical training schools and other kinds of postsecondary education. By creating a national standard for education in the U.S., the government would be forced to assess the quality of struggling public schools and develop programs, such as teacher development and equal allotment of resources, to help them improve. With these programs, students, regardless of race or class, would ideally have more equal access to a good education, which would lead to better preparation and more opportunities after graduation for jobs and postsecondary education. In my opinion, this idea is not guaranteed to be successful. President Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” policy attempted to set national standards for public education by offering more funding to schools as a reward for doing well in reference to certain criteria (e.g. graduation rate) established by the government. This policy has been largely unsuccessful in improving the public school system because it does not offer struggling schools any support to improve. The success of this idea depends on implementation, meaning whether or not the government creates a support system for all schools to improve and maintain success. Wilson also suggests that by increasing the interaction between suburbs and cities, the life chances of poor black people living in American urban centers can be improved. He suggests that the U.S. do this by restoring the federal contribution to the city budget 2and increasing the employment opportunities. This would help because by increasing the city budget, public transportation to the suburbs could be improved and more businesses could be brought to the city. These improvements would create more employment opportunities, helping poor neighborhoods become financially stable. According to Wilson, there is evidence that cities and suburbs are economically interdependent. Without a thriving urban center, the surrounding suburbs will, over time, experience a decline in growth and financial stability. Without access to the surrounding suburbs, people living in urban centers will have greatly decreased employment opportunities, which will eventually lead to increased poverty and financial instability. I agree with this idea because Washington, D.C. is an example of how cooperation between the suburbs and cities affects the two. The positive side can be seen when looking at the thousands of people who commute to the city every day in cars and public transportation to get to work. For the most part, the places where these commuters live and the areas where they work are thriving financially. The negative side can be seen when looking at the areas of Washington, D.C. where there is very minimal public transportation and very few businesses. These areas and the immediately surrounding suburbs are not thriving financially and are largely comprised of low-income families. Interaction between suburbs and cities is beneficial for both areas and improves the life chances of poor black people living in American urban centers. As an immediate solution, he suggests the creation of job placement centers that get potential employees “job-ready.” Job placement centers would be beneficial because employers would be confident that these candidates “understand and appreciate employer expectations such as showing up for work on time and on a regular basis, accepting the 3orders of supervisors, and so on” (Wilson, 224). Having job placement centers in the inner city would also help improve the informal job information network that is meant to keep people informed of job openings not advertised publicly, but that is lost as more and more people in a community lose work. I agree with this idea because it would help eliminate assumptions the employer might have about the candidates from the job placement centers. Interviewing with someone who has not already assumed negative things about a candidate’s abilities would improve that person’s chances of getting and maintaining a job. This success would benefit the candidate and the candidate’s community, by helping support the informal job network. Wilson has many good suggestions for how to solve the many problems faced by poor blacks in America’s urban centers. Many of them, if implemented in a way that the poor and non-poor benefited, would be successful. It is important though that the programs are