Doyle McManus: The upward mobility gap

From The Dallas Morning News

Here's a familiar fact: Economic inequality is rising in the United States. The rich have gotten richer, the poor have stayed poor, and families in the middle have seen their incomes stagnate.

Here's a less-familiar fact: Opportunity in America isn't what it used to be either. Among children born into low-income households, more than two-thirds grow up to earn a below-average income, and only 6 percent make it all the way up the ladder into the affluent top one-fifth of income earners, according to a study by economists at Washington's Brookings Institution.

Thanks to globalization, the economy is producing high-income jobs for the educated and low-income jobs for the uneducated - but few middle-income jobs for workers with high school diplomas. Thanks to the decline of public schools, it's harder for poor kids to get a good education. And Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam argues that thanks partly to the rise of two-income households, intermarriage between rich and poor has declined, choking off another historical upward path for the underprivileged.

Increasingly, college-educated Americans live in a different country from those who never made it out of high school. As a group, adults with college degrees have an unemployment rate of 5 percent, steady or rising incomes, relatively stable families (their divorce rate declined over the last 10 years) and few children out of wedlock. Adults without a high school education face an unemployment rate over 15 percent, declining incomes, a higher divorce rate and have lots of kids out of wedlock. (Among black women who didn't finish high school, 96 percent of childbirths are outside marriage; among white women who didn't finish high school, 43 percent.)

"Success in life increasingly depends on how smart you were in choosing your parents," Putnam said. "And that flies in the face of the fundamental American bargain - that every kid ought to have access to the same opportunities."

But if we focus on increasing opportunity for the poor, there's plenty that can be done - beginning with education.

Brookings economists Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill studied the noneconomic components of poverty and came up with a rule. "If young people do three things - graduate from high school, get a job, and get married and wait until they're 21 before having a baby - they have an almost 75 percent chance of making it into the middle class," Haskins said.

Think of it as a stool with three legs: jobs, family and education.

The availability of jobs now depends mostly on the pace of economic recovery; the Obama administration's already done most of what it can on that score. Government promotion of stable families is an elusive goal; President George W. Bush funded programs like "marriage education" to encourage low-income couples to marry, but it's hard to measure the results.

That leaves education. Haskins and Sawhill say there's still plenty that can be done to increase access to higher education for low-income kids, including relatively easy things such as simplifying the application for college financial aid, which is an intimidating 127 questions long.

But perhaps the most important thing the federal government can do to promote opportunity, they say, is to expand its current efforts to improve public schools.

Most Americans accept inequality in the economy as long as the ladder of opportunity is accessible to anyone who wants to work hard. The best way for America to reclaim its self-image as a land of opportunity is to ensure that every kid has access to a decent education - now more than ever the first step onto the ladder. That's why bipartisan education reform isn't just about fixing schools; it's about repairing the fabric of American society.