Focus 580; A Shot at the American Dream

Good morning welcome to focus 580 our morning talk show. My name's David Inge. Glad to have you with us. Just before we get going here I would like to run very quickly down a list of school closings that we have this morning. All of them because of the heat. And here we go St. Joe Ogden great and high schools will dismiss at 1:00 this afternoon. Ogden grade school and Prairie View a grade school dismissed at 1:10 the Mahomet Seymour schools will dismiss early in this schedule on the schedule Sangamon school at 01:00 Lincoln trail school and the high school 115 the junior high 130. And there will be no afternoon kindergarten and no pre-K today. Heritage School District 8 that's Homer broad lands will dismiss it when 25. And in Danville the following schools will dismiss early. East Park Elementary at 2:45 Northridge and South View middle schools at 1:55 Danville high school. One twenty five East Park. Evening care classes at 2:45. Otherwise all the schools will dismiss at the normal time and all that's because it's a little warmer than we expect this time of year. If we receive more information along these lines of course we'll

pass it on to you throughout the day here on AM 580. In this part of focus 580 will be talking with a journalist who has become well-known for writing about issues of poverty welfare and welfare reform. His name is Jason DeParle and he is a senior writer at The New York Times. He's here visiting the campus to talk about these issues and will give a talk in Miller come series this afternoon at 4 o'clock. This is at the Levis center on the UI campus. It is sponsored by the School of Social Work and other units on the campus. These events are always free and open to the public and so anybody who was interested in attending can do that. We're also pleased to have him here with us on the program this morning so we can bring him to a much larger larger audience audience outside of Champaign Urbana. He's the author of a book that was published a couple of years ago titled American Dream Three women ten kids and a nation's drive to end welfare it's now available in paperback. It's published by Penguin. And we'll talk about some of what you will find in the book

as we talk. As always questions comments are welcome the only thing we ask is people are brief just so we can keep things moving along but anybody who was interested in calling in contributing their thoughts questions are welcome. 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5 Those are the numbers. Thanks very much for being here. One things I want to do to start as a way of getting into the topic was to ask you to share whatever thoughts you have about Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath and I ask because I know that before going to work for the times you lived in New Orleans and you worked for the paper the Times-Picayune which by the way is still publishing on line. And if people are interested in reading some of the local coverage or reading stories there from the reporters who live and work in that city and you have internet access you can go to their website and you can read the stories and maybe just in a general sense on a what what sort of

stuff was going through your head when you saw the images and you read some of the coverage of this place where you had lived and worked as a reporter. Well anyone who spent time in New Orleans retains us a special place in his heart for the city it's it's an American gem and it's a place that stays with you long after you leave so to see the utter devastation of any American city is it would be heartbreaking but all the more so when it's a place that seems so irreplaceable is as New Orleans. If you had asked me. Three weeks ago could I imagine a story that would put the subject of racing class front and center in American life on the front page of every newspaper on the top of every protest. I would have said impossible you know he disappeared for the last five six years for reasons of maybe to some extent understandable with with the threat of terrorism and the war. But his fists come back with a vengeance. So if there's one thing from my own

particular perspective on the world that that's stood out to me it's how many people focused on that so quickly on the disparate racial and class impact of the hurricane. You know it's something that I'm sure that we will be talking about for a long time and there will be who knows how many. Commissions and studies and I'm sure that there will be people who are writing about it for a long time and already one of the consuming questions or at least the const questions that has consumed the chattering classes is. Who's responsible. Where was the failure here in the response. And depending upon people's ideological orientation you know they're they're saying that the failures everywhere from the president of the United States or the entire country on the one hand to the local authorities and the mayor and the municipal government on the other end and everything in between. And I'm interested in your thoughts on

that question particularly on the way that the government in the city of New Orleans and perhaps than one step up of the state of Louisiana responded You're right will be untangling that question for a long time although I think it's fairly clear already that there was evidence that there was failures at all three levels. The mayor didn't have a viable evacuee evacuation plan there were no buses getting people out. The governor was was extremely slow to work the system in calling outside help and in FEMA's breakdown is been obvious to anybody watching the TV. I think if you're a resident of New of New Orleans or a resident of Louisiana the first two are of particular concern to you. But I think the federal responses is the one that the rest of the country is going to be focusing on I mean you can you can say yes the city should have responded better yes the stator should have responded better but the federal government's response is one that affects all of us potentially because any of us could be in that

situation so I think that's where the where the bulk of the focus will go. Yeah I'm interested in what you think about the way that the story has been covered and particularly the way that the media has looked at the themes that you touched on what I just asked you for your first sort of in a response that is class and poverty. And it seems that that that's something right away that in a lot of the reporting was put right front and center. And I have to say I'm surprised a member somebody who's covered race and poverty in one form or another for two decades and I didn't it would not have predicted that that would be the the the thing that everyone would seize on and I'm struggling a little bit to explain and I'm wondering if maybe there is a an undertow of it. Guilt maybe or if that's a that's a bit too strong. Some sense that there really hasn't been any era of shared sacrifice in American life there. I think there's this. I think it

crystallized some latent sense of that American life had been had been particularly inequitable in the last few years and this kind of brought it out in some very vivid fashion that there's something more playing into it I think than just this moment you know connecting that then to the subject of welfare reform. I wonder to what extent you think that in fact what has been called a welfare reform or contributed to moving the issue of poverty and welfare kind of off the off of the front page and off of the agenda of people in politics because whether it it was successful or not I think some people pointed to it and said it was successful and that then that led people to say well we took care of that problem and they went on to something else and that in fact welfare reform helped to push. The needs of poor

families particularly working poor and it's just pushed them off the agenda. I think it did help push the subject of poverty out of public conversation in ways good and good in bad. That's not entirely entirely bad. If you go back to the early 90s go back 10 15 years ago welfare was an extremely divisive subject in American life the subject of a lot of really ugly rhetoric a lot of poor bashing race racial code vituperative red rhetoric and the good part I think of Clinton's hope in signing the bill was that he would change the poverty conversation once people were so poor as workers not shirkers as people contributing American life to be more sympathetic they'd be more likely candidates for a strengthened safety net for health care for childcare. That was a genuine hope he had. And I think it proved about half right. We remove the anger from from the conversation about poverty but we largely

remove the subject of poverty altogether I think by and large people decided hey the bill worked to get people off of welfare and and the second part of the conversation the what can we do to make sure they make a living wage and that their families are on some upward trajectory that got lost in part because the externality of the attacks of September 2001 and the focus on the war on terror but. I do think the tragedian in New Orleans has the potential of putting the social safety net back on the national agenda in a positive way. I suppose the alternative would be that as as often happens with so many big stories we become consumed with it for a while and then something comes along to displace it and we forget. It seems that that people often have a pretty short memory and the media often has pretty short. That's one potential although this seems such a large story I don't think we're likely to completely lose track of it. The other worrisome

potential to me is that once people are displaced in communities across the country that including champagne you have the potential for some real racing class conflict ongoing and you've also already seen some. Some hints of sort of of racial ugliness about it there was a Baton Rouge Congressman quoted in the papers over the weekend saying we've been trying to clean up public housing in New Orleans for for decades and now what we couldn't do God has done so there. The subject I think is going to be out there whether it's out there you know. You know way in which the victims of the storm continue to seem sympathetic as they have to now or whether a backlash ensues. I think that's a big question. I saw that same quote in the newspaper it was was this person astonished. Well it was it was pretty strange was this person damed. Oh yes it was Representative Richard Baker of. So it was not just an identified member of Congress the name was identified a number of times he did that on the record as I'm not positive but this as I recall he was overheard saying it to a group of lobbyists I think it was it

was overheard and meant to be meant not to have been in public. Our guest in this hour focus 580 Jason DeParle He's a senior writer at The New York Times he lives in Washington D.C. has worked for The Times for a while and before that worked for the newspaper in New Orleans the Times-Picayune and has been writing for quite a long time now about issues of poverty and welfare welfare reform. That's the subject of his book American dream. It's now out in paperback is published by Penguin. It's also the thing that I'll be talking about in a Miller calm talk this afternoon on the UVA campus so get in if you're here in and around Champaign Urbana you can hear him and hear on the program questions are certainly welcome. 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5. Let's talk with a caller here someone in Champaign. One number one. Hello. Yes I had a. A comment that I had to challenge one of your early comments about state officials being slow to ask for help if I remember the governor of Louisiana did request

assistance as early as Saturday requested a state of emergency and was quite adamant about needing assistance. During And certainly after the hurricane that was one coming in the other in terms of revealing sort of the endemic racism that that this event has his. Revealed. You probably noticed AP believe it was AP wire to photograph both of people waiting in the waters in one of them was a white woman and it said that she found food in the other one was of a black man and he also had food under his arm you could tell that it was sodas and it said later. I was wondering if you would care to comment about that. On the first point I did some reporting last week on the state emergency management system. There is a.

There was a wire that went out from the National Sheriff's Association calling for sheriffs across the country to prepare to deploy as first responders down to Louisiana. But before they could do that they had to have a official request out of Louisiana from Baton Rouge to their own state capital. Otherwise the responders going down wouldn't be. Well they would be subject to reimbursement by theme and they also wouldn't be covered by the liability protections you know that he didn't just have sheriffs driving in from from across the country. There was a 48 to 72 hour delay I believe out of Baton Rouge to get that paperwork out to the other states so that's one example one of what I suspect will be a number of examples where there are there were delays and follow follow ups in in the in the state system as well. I think when you go through the three levels of federal state and local you'll you'll end up seeing bureaucratic fault at all three. As for your second whether you know the weather. Whites and Blacks were perceived to be behaving in different fashions I think

that's actually true there is probably some of that although by and large I think most of the victims of the storm have been portrayed to date as very sympathetic and not a clue clearly looting has been part of the story but I think by and large people are being seen as victims rather than as a loss. Thank you very much. Well let's go to another caller here this is something in Chicago on our toll free line line for Hello. I think the example of racism that you have the story so confused. You're talking about the problems of systematic racism. The demographics of this country and you keep coming. Using it with poverty you have yet to talk about true poverty in this country because if you talk about poverty then we really need to look at the rural poverty and the fact that the people in the rural areas were attended to. Even later then the people in New Orleans and I think that to me the fact that the braces I'm of

the news media is so strong and that you always concentrate on urban property. But the real poverty in this country is the extensive rural poverty that affects all groups of people in this country particularly poor why since they're the largest number. And to me I find that very upsetting. And my second point is President Bush declared a state of emergency on Saturday. The fact that the lesson from 9/11 was supposed to be that everything was centralized under homeland security if he declared a state of emergency on Saturday then that should have been waiting for the governor once the governor requests it on Friday that a state of emergency be declared and the president did it on Saturday. Then if they are centralizing everything on homeland security really worked. No one would have been waiting around for requests out of Baton Rouge. So it just showed the fact that for years and I don't know how many billions of dollars were wasted. Will in

terms of the race story of which I'm a New Orleans and New Orleans about 85 percent of the poor people in New Orleans are African-American so you were off the puck about poverty in general and I don't know when I join the conversation you were talking about welfare reform and poverty in general. And that's not just the story of New Orleans that's affects the entire country. As I said before it particularly affects the rural areas. And I really think that you need to look and all of your comrades in the media really need to examine your own racism and the fact that you are ignoring the rural poverty which mainly has a white face. When you talk about poverty and I think that helps for people to be not to be sympathetic because this country is still so racist and so prejudice that's very hard for them to relate to black poor black people. And that's also encourages them not to act on poverty. Well in fairness I think we should say that I started out I asked the question about New Orleans that's

why we started talking about New Orleans specifically. And I ask that because the guest had been a reporter there for the for the newspaper but you can you can respond however you like to talk about when you talk about poverty in New Orleans you are largely talking about African-Americans. You know when I and we were talking about poverty in New Orleans which is where the hurricane hit I'm sure as far as your other comments I don't imagine that the guest would disagree or disagree with it with it with the other things that she said. Would you would you be substantially in agreement with the other comments of the caller made about the nature of poverty or are not that well we are with a with a with a withhold judgment on that. OK well you want to follow up I want to. And that is simply that the news media went through the 2 0 4 election and you allowed the politicians to talk about everything they were going to do for the middle class and no one

spoke about the working class of the poor that wasn't even in the gender in 2004. So we shouldn't be surprised that the poverty level in the United States has increased for the fourth year in the row. And what we saw and haven't seen in the rural areas that were also damaged. So I just feel that the media is woefully in adequate. Even people who write about poverty like to write in cold words about urban poverty which is really a very racist way to patrol it. And I'm not attacking you personally I'm talking about you feel what you know even better than I do and you know what I'm saying is true. And I think that there really is a need to stop living in La-La Land because I think that's what I mean I know why people no longer buy newspapers because I feel that they're just so woefully inadequate covering the true issues and everything is spin spin spin. OK. Well I appreciate the comment. You want to respond to that Howard. Generally I guess what do you think about the idea that

broadly speaking the media has done a really poor job in reporting on issues of poverty of class of race and how all those things come together. I'm not sure I entirely agree with that. The media is covers a large A.U. subsumes a lot of different there are different mediums within it. But my newspaper The New York Times last year did a 10 part series on class in America 10 very long articles very in-depth with reporters. Each had months and months and months with different people to portray the effects of class in America. In 1900 2000 the paper done a similar thing with with race in America. I think that I think most large metropolitan newspapers spend a lot of time writing about race and class. Now if you're talking about. The glossy women's magazines.

If that's your idea of media that's going to get a different perception I think. I think most big papers continue to spend a lot of time on. We're almost the midpoint here. Again question welcome or continue to talk with Jason DeParle He's a senior writer at The New York Times 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 2 2 2 9 4 5 5. I want to make sure that we talk some about welfare reform which has been something that occupied you as a journalist for quite a few years and the book that I mentioned a couple times American dream is one of the results of the welfare reform that President Clinton talked about when he was running that then eventually came into being rested on a couple of basic things one was that it said that if you're going to receive benefits you're going to be required to work or at least made progress toward working. And the other was that there would be a time limit on how much how much you could receive in benefits and eventually that the clock would run out and that would be that that seem to rest on this idea that that some people had that

people were who were on welfare weren't working. They weren't interested in working. They wouldn't work unless you force them to. And that somehow working was the key to upward mobility and success for them and for their children. You spent time with the with these three women and their kids women who had moved from Chicago to Milwaukee. Really just just on the eve of welfare reform went to the state that had been hailed as a great success story in Wisconsin. How well as a general question then maybe we get some into some particulars how well did it work. Did it do the thing that everybody said maybe not just one thing the many things that everybody said that it was going to work far better than I would ever have guessed as an employment program. It got people off the rolls and into jobs the main character of the book is a woman named Angela job she had been on welfare for 12 years. She had no high school degree.

She had four kids she had few skills she was exactly the kind of person that so many of us including me I would say I dad thought would be unable to find jobs you know who's going to hire her will take care of the kids where the job's going to come from and within six months she was off the rolls and on the job as a full time steady worker she now even has a 4 1 k. So if I just told you that alone you would say My God is the best thing that's ever happened in the government program it got lots and lots of women just like Angie off the rolls and into work on the other hand. Here's the but. She remains the war. She lost her lights three times in three years she lost her electricity and without health care she ran short on food she remained just as physically poor materially poor as she had been before. That's one disappointment and I think maybe even the larger disappointment is it didn't do anything for her kids it did not put her kids on an upward trajectory our real hope is this law would pay off in the kids buckling down in school getting

degrees going on the better lives. It didn't change that at all. All it did was get her off of welfare into work it left her poor and left her kids floundering as well so whether or not that success depends on is really a foreshock it depends on which of those things you think is most important. Well it's certainly for when people pointed at the numbers the reduction in the numbers on the welfare rolls people simply took that number and pointed to and say well there's a success right we move people off welfare and they're working. It sounds as if there wasn't. It is not completely illegitimate. I mean it's you know that yeah that's a marker. I don't think there is one marker of success I think getting people off of welfare and into jobs is generally a good thing. Angie likes working. She's happier that she's off the rolls on the job. And yet the taxpayers of Wisconsin should like it too I mean. Yeah I don't want to denigrate that that's a that's a good starting point but one would hope it would go beyond that eventually. It hasn't to date.

And why just because the the kind of jobs that are available good jobs are low paying experience education and so her wages her earned income should always work a little bit off the books. So but our earned income went way up and her welfare and food stamps went way down. And when you factor in taxes and factor in some work expenses it's about a wash. So you could say All right well you know she's on our own She's off welfare and she's working. She didn't fall backwards there's some good news in that she didn't fall backward She's now making it on her own but for me that the part that really disappoints me is that her kids don't look to her as a role model and say hey that's what I want to I want to do better than mom. They don't. They just sort of experience her as being gone more. Her oldest daughter got pregnant dropped out of high school. Her two sons have now dropped out of high school to the. He just didn't change the dynamic in the family. And and there was this expectation before had that that would happen on the part of policymakers or policy on the part of many.

Yes. You know when I was working on the book if I just ran and on the public to the general public you know if I just rent an old friend from high school and say we name William write a book about this woman who used to be on welfare the first thing they would say is that the kids are proud. I mean it's a natural expectation we like all of us who are working parents like to think are our work conveys something to our kids you know that the kids take a moral object lesson away from us and it's a natural thing to hope for but I have to say it's where what I saw on the ground most diverge from the from the from the policy conversation in Washington. That did not happen to kids and a social science which I think shows it's not happening to the population as long as our guest in this part of focus 580 is and Jason DeParle He's a senior writer for The New York Times he is here visiting the campus. He's giving a talk in the Miller come series it's also sponsored by the School of Social Work to talk about some of what he has seen as he has reported on welfare welfare reform over a number of years now. His talk is a shot at the American

dream of this afternoon at four o'clock on the campus at the Levasseur center. And it's free and open to public anybody who is interested should stop by. Also if you're interested in reading the book it's out now in paperback it's titled American Dream Three women ten kids and a nation's drive to end welfare. It's published by Penguin and has gotten a lot of positive reviews a lot of positive attention. Questions comments are welcome 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. We'll go back to the phones talk with some more people who are listening here. Champagne is next in line number one. Hello hello. Yes yes. Hi good morning. I was a welfare mom in the 80s. I was a single mom I had my son and I became a welfare mom because at that point in time in my life I didn't really have an education all I had was my high school and the kind of job that I would get paid so little that being on welfare paid maybe a little bit less. But it allowed me to stay at home with my son because he was very young at that point in time

and having had experience of working at daycare centers and watching these working moms drop off their kids very young children into strange environments unknown environments with unknown grown ups and and people and how traumatic the experience had been for the mothers and the children you know I think that I decided that I wanted to be on welfare but I was I was on welfare on and off throughout maybe a 10 year period. And it was very difficult even back then because there was I mean I would go to the grocery store and I'd be embarrassed to show my food stamps. And I would even move to the states where they paid more welfare. I was living in Colorado and then I found out that California paid better welfare. And so I moved to California so that I could improve my my lifestyle with my son. And it was a struggle but I mean I think that I'm something that is. Talk about that much anymore which was I know that in the 80s most of the folks on welfare were

single women with children. There were those that put the father figure was no longer present and I had to get a sense that it's still like that now. And another thing that when welfare reform was being talked about I was very upset because obviously I've been affected by it personally with the fact that I just wondered. I don't these people who were doing these policies on welfare reform how many of these people were actually ex welfare moms who had maybe at some point succeeded in raising their parents and seeing what kind of advice policymakers could get from these women. I always feel that mothers and single women are like the invisible citizen in this country who's never really. You know I allowed or given the opportunity to express and the fact that we were the ones that are raising the future workers quote. And citizens of

this country were pretty really treated as second class citizens you know and I've taught at our community colleges in this area now and I've come across. You know young women who are trying to go to school and they have kids and they're buying their own and it's still really hard for them and I just feel like this our system our country being like the one of the richest countries in the world pretty pick when it comes to helping single women with kids and we have all this thing about you know have your baby no abortions you know so they want you to have your kid but then you're not helped in providing the support and assistance economically and it's mostly economically I mean if it was up to me every every single mother would have a vehicle and would have a decent income so that she could at some point you know do what she needs to do to get herself ahead in her in her child you know and I don't really think that the reform system or even

the one before that really did that they just pretty Picton says Katie just enough to survive. So I guess you know yeah I appreciate counsel. Let's see what your guest asked. One to two thoughts about that you know the welfare system was originally created in order to help women stay home with their kids help women stay home with their kids which is what other women were doing it with the idea was to give the low income others the opportunity to same thing that middle class mothers were doing. Two things happened. I mean that was the that was the model in the 1930s in the 1940s most of those women were widows. The classic welfare recipient was a West Virginia coal miner's widow who a husband killed in the coal mines and now I wanted to do something to allow her to stay home and raise the kids rather than having to go off to a mill or something and work. The two things that happened I think is the number one most middle class women started to go to work so that by the mid 1980s the majority of women mothers with

preschoolers were in the workforce. Now you you had a system where you were paying allowing poor women to stay home when it's increasingly less and less the norm as middle class women are going to work even more than. So there's a there's a inequity there and middle class women are paying taxes are starting to resent it. Even more than that I think there was a sense that the kids were not being raised in successful ways I mean if it sounds like the woman who just called him was a very devoted mother who took the time to really be with her kids. I think there was a perception in many cases a reality that those kids were not growing up to do well in school and to go on and have successful lives but were being being damaged by being home with women who had lost focus and lost ambition so the sense was I think by and large that this was really bad for kids. And both of those things combined to produce the 1996 bill that you know this was supposed to be fair to other women who were going to work it was to be better for the kids.

To what extent particularly for the women that you got to know when you were writing the book and in the more generally do you think that lack of childcare is a big issue and a big problem. Here I'm going to say something potentially controversial much less than one would think from the policy conversation in Washington in particular when usually when we talk about this that child care is front and central the policy issue. Yes it's important. It's in one of the things some women need when they go to work. But it was never the crucial issue why the women I wrote about didn't work they did have access to childcare they had each other they had informal networks they used the formal childcare system much less often than then. I think when policymakers think that the reasons they weren't working had to do. It was never the reason that they didn't. They didn't go to work it was. It's an important part of the puzzle but it's just not essential I think as it's made out to be in many policy conversations. Let's go on let's Next take the next caller champagne line too. Hello. Good morning gentlemen. I guess I

started out when I got online to talk about something else but I'm really really impressed with the young lady to call just prior to my getting on. I think she made a point that is very classic. And we we tend to just ignore it. But it comes home to I'm a very conservative people and Republicans are always talking about. Anti-abortion. Well you know what happens when that child is born. It's they're going to be a support system there for that child after its moment. And for me I think that is the reason why I think men yeah I know we are Americans but I think men. And put on abortion are not. It should be very limited because a lot of those women that have those

babies they can have them with a man and a lot of times they walk away from them. And I think that I am pro-choice obviously but I was really impressed with her. And one more comment and and I'll go on. I thought the lady previous to that brought out the point which I totally agree with that. You know poverty is not only in in urban settings it is certainly in rural settings. But it it I think if if we don't recognize that the delay of government going in to new all and and supporting those people initially wasn't a racial thing then. I think we're just putting our heads in the sand.

Thank you. Thanks. Bush in point there's a one story that he and he told me a story in the book that was most. Touching or gripping to me involves her getting her decision not to get an abortion at a certain point. She moved to Milwaukee. She had three kids she was on her own. She had just struggled back on her feet. She got a job. She was working she was pulling out together a new life in the world in Milwaukee and she discovers she's pregnant and she decides she just can't do it she can't have a fourth baby she has no way to support it. It's just not fair to the other kids it's not fair to her. She summons her gumption she gets up the money she goes to an abortion clinic it's surrounded by protesters. They're screaming baby killer. You know Jesus doesn't want you to do this she makes her way through the crowd she gets in she pays her money. She actually gets up on the table and she decides she can't go through with it and she gets down. She climbs off says she

can't kill her baby these are her words I can't kill my baby and goes home and has this fourth child that she really really doesn't want and really really can't afford. But her own code of morality came into into play there. It was a moment that really captured me because I think we tend we know that society at large tends sometimes of you poor people as being expedient and being governed by immediate self-interest in gaming the system and doing doing having babies to get more money just here was such a clear example of this woman who really perceived this to be against her self-interest but you had this personal moral code that she felt she had to follow that was a brave decision on the engines part I think. Yeah. I want to ask you to talk about something else and it's a big piece of this puzzle that no one seems quite to know what to do about and becomes highly politicized and that is what could be done to get the men. Yeah thanks who are the fathers of these children to be more involved with their

with their kids and possibly go on to form the form. Stable families and to form a family is incredibly important if I learned one thing if I came away from the open jewel that the three were in for seven years I think if I came away from from it with one message in mind it was just the incredible importance of bringing the men back into the family lives in some productive way. You know the subtitle The book is Three women ten kids in the nation's right to end welfare. You know what's missing from their lives is what's missing from the subtitle is it the men they were just they were really absent. I have to say the men I met I found them much more sympathetic than I would have expected. They were almost all selling drugs. They almost all had been in and out of prison. Most of them had kids by more than one women. Why the woman on the butt. I would get these descriptions before we meet them you know from NGO Bojo about their latest boyfriend then you know if you got the sort of resume so to speak you would think these are not particularly

sympathetic people. When I would meet them and experience them Les's deadbeat dads then come on did sons guys who had been abandoned by their own fathers and had always said they wouldn't do the same even as they were now doing the same. I sensed some potential some desire to want to do better so strangely I feel a for all the terribly discouraging statistics that are out there about the employment prospects of inner city particularly African-American men. I feel sort of some strange optimism just coming from my own time with them of the sense that they do want to do better by their kids and other families. Well is there something that government can do. I think so I think so to me if you look at I mean look let's go back 20 years right. And when we said how will we ever get of women like Angie off the rolls and into work. Who's going to hire you know what can they do. And the employment rates of weeks. We had several decades of experimentation and then the employment rates of those women shot up by by magnitude we would've imagined possible. To me that's a.

A confidence building measure you know to borrow a term from diplomacy to me that says if we could do for the wound we can do it for the men but I think we're I think we're several decades behind what we have with the woman it's going to take a period of experimentation. The way we have with women. Well that if if though if what we've seen with the women is that while they are working they're working at marginal jobs maybe paying minimum wage or slightly above and that it's it's certainly not a living wage is the thought though that if you if you had a man who had that same job. That's exactly what manageable. That's you know there was a natural experiment unfolded with with Angie and Jewel to the women in the book. Angie poured her heart into her work and tried desperately to keep working her way up in her cars kept breaking down she kept getting ten cents an hour raises and she in the end she's kind of burned out and felt disrespected and she She plateaued. Jewel put her work just as much as and she made just as much as me or as little but really put her heart into a guy named Big Ben who was a drug dealer and

pimp and went to jail and as I'm watching this you know unfold over the years something jewel don't do it. I'm just this is a terrible mistake. I'm convinced the book is going to end with Ken getting out of prison and dropping her and going off to back to his drug life. Well to my amazement he gets out of prison comes back home and decides he's done with a drug deal and he becomes a pizza delivery man. He's now been out of prison for five years no new arrests. Yeah he's got to did an entry level job as more or less does she but they have two incomes now they're appreciably better off than Angie they've had a baby he's home to help raise the baby there's just a life feels palpably more hopeful in joules household there's twice as much income in it. It made a huge difference. We have five six minutes left we have some other callers here. We'll continue to talk with our guest Jason DeParle. He's a senior writer for The New York Times. We'll go next to a caller here I believe on line number for our toll free line. Hello. Yes. Well you've kind of focused mainly on block property although I think family said the poverty of

poverty a cut across the board. But a number of years ago I took a college class. You know there was kind of a dichotomy and I guess black thinking of George Washington Carver points up by the bootstraps and then later two boys come along it was kind of more into activism and you know it has a problem with that as with most anything in life. You know we tend to kind of throw the baby out with the bathwater. When we make a shift and in our thinking and we see this in all facets of life and there's always good things that can be retained from the past and I think that that perhaps that was something that the black community leadership could focus a little more on is that you know keeping children in school encouraging that and being of encouragement to parents is as long as there's the support of too because we see the government it doesn't matter who it is they're looking out for the greater picture and kind of their own self-interest and and the individual. Well then they kind of just fall through

the cracks. Frequently no matter what. And I I think a good example of this is when Jesse Jackson came down to Decatur Decatur had a phenomenal dropout rate and he came down and did his thing. And you know if he had along with that said we need to keep these kids in school we need to have a long term thing here and I need it to be encouragement to these kids stand school. But you know one because publicity was over he laughed and the dropout rate is still on not quite as bad as it was and still hideous and and the voters voted on a referendum that was badly needed. There are two as probably part of the fallout. Another. Thing that kind of goes along with this in mind I was taking these college classes. There was a lady that I sat next to from central Noi and her granddaughter was graduating from high school her parents had sent her from Southern California to live with her black grandparents. They were all black in central Illinois because one she was being ostracized in her

school for excellence and prevent having family values. And also they want to keep her away from gangs and keep her from harm's way and I thought that was a really sad commentary on life that that family had to send their child halfway across the country for those reasons. Thank you. You can reflect on that. Maybe it gets us back to the issue of what's happening with the kids. And why it is that there was this there was this expectation that somehow if Mom's went to work that then there would be sort of a spirit of rising aspiration somehow and that somehow there would be this connection between women going to work and children doing better in school and being more successful and then if hopefully then the next generation would get a better leg up and somehow this everybody was supposed to rise and it just didn't happen. Yeah I think it is the mechanics of it are entirely clear I think

part of it was that when we feel better about themselves it be a new rhythm of discipline in the house and that the kids would look at the mother to see how hard their work and think hey I don't want to do that I want to do better. That was the that was the theory and in practice I think it just largely meant that the mothers are gone more often in Angie's case her kids were absent in school more often after she went to work them when she was at home. I want to say things were great when she was home as a lot of chaos in the house but their absentee rate rose from about 20 percent to 25 percent after she went to work. And you know what else happens is sometimes the older kids become the caretakers of the younger kids when mom's away at work. And so you see the older kids missing more school. You have two problems with the other kids one them they're less supervised so there's more opportunities to get into trouble and the second is they have to in turn supervise the younger kids which means they often the school. Something else I think it's an important point is that there also was this idea that somehow the children would would look at their mother and see their mother working and that somehow that that would be novel

inspirational Well in fact if you found out that these women the grown women who had the children there when they were kids they had their mothers working as Absolutely. So that doesn't mean that since there wasn't this there was all the three ultimately fell through the three winter cousins all three of them grew up with working mothers in the house. What they didn't grow up with was fathers and that was the missing ingredient going back a number of generations. We'll see if we can quickly get one last call in in time remains a lean one here is champagne alone. Oh yes. This goes to the plight of people who've been driven off. The welfare rolls into low paying jobs with no insurance and I'd like to make a modest proposal that if we tie congressional salaries to a multi multiple of the minimum wage and make members of Congress have the same kind of health care that people who are poor have we would have a living wage in this country. Minimum wage and we have national health care yesterday.

That's that's a delightfully mischievous suggestion. I'd love to see the amendment offered on the House floor and be made for some interesting discussions. You know there's been an effort in the sentence in the Senate to raise the minimum wage and the Republicans have kept it from coming to a floor vote through parliamentary measures. But the parliamentary means. I think if it ever came to a vote it would pass. And that's why it has come to a vote. Well earlier I asked the question about childcare and how much. A problem. Lack of access is and you said yes it is a problem but perhaps not as much as we might. Not the problem. What about health insurance and access to health care and lack of it is that a big problem. I would say there are more people who stayed on welfare for the peak because they feared losing health insurance and there were people who stayed on welfare because they couldn't get childcare. Yeah well people stayed on. Yes there were there were significant people stayed on welfare in order to get to because if they left they would lose that medical.

You know we are just about at the point that we're going to have to finish because we've we've worked through our time as as a way of finishing up. AR would you say that you were optimistic given what you've seen. I'm optimistic because. Of the character of Angie and Jewel themselves because you you just can't spend the time I spent seven years with Angie and Jewel without coming away with the sense that these are smart capable resilient people. You don't think I think you don't come away thinking Josh These are just people who are wards who have to be products of the state there's all these poor people who just got to take care of them the rest realize there's nothing they can do. You feel like these are people with a lot to contribute to life. And if we can continue to figure out how to unlock their potential that that these are are these are these are smart capable people able to achieve. Life has conspired against them so far in a way that's kept them from doing it. But they had I came away feeling you know solidarity

with him at that at that level I did. Our guest Jason DeParle He's a senior writer at The New York Times. His book is American Dream Three women ten kids and a nation's drive to end welfare. It's now available in paperback published by Penguin. He'll be talking on the U of I campus on this subject a shot at the American dream. Afternoon four o'clock at the levels center it's part of the miller com series and parts and in part by the School of Social Work at the University of Illinois it's very open to the public anybody interested in attending should feel welcome. Thank you very much. Thank you.