James M. Quane

Operating within the Rules: Welfare Recipients' Experiences with Sanctions and Case Closings

This article examines the experiences of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families recipients with sanctions and administrative case closings, as reported by respondents in a survey of families in low‐income neighborhoods in Boston, Chicago, and San Antonio. Among those who said that their welfare benefits had been reduced or eliminated for noncompliance with the rules, the most common reasons provided were missing an appointment or not filing paperwork. In comparison with other families that had received welfare in the previous 2 years, families that were penalized were more disadvantaged in a number of respects, including lower education and poorer health.

Neighborhood Poverty, Family Characteristics, and Commitment to Mainstream Goals The Case of African American Adolescents in the Inner City

A causal model is used to understand the direct and mediated effects of neighborhood disadvantage and family structure on youth expectations. Using data obtained from face-to-face interviews with African American mothers and their children, we demonstrate that the employment expectations of adolescents are significantly lower in both nonintact and welfare homes in comparison to youth in other households. In addition, neighborhood disadvantage is shown to be indirectly related to reduced expectation by exposing youth to nonnormative peers. The findings have important implications for social policy, especially in light of the recent welfare reforms that place considerable emphasis on a work requirement for single mothers.

Critical Commentary. Making the Connection between the Socialisation and the Social Isolation of the Inner-city Poor

Recently, two entire volumes of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (Vol. 621, 2009; and Vol. 627, 2010) were devoted to the resurgence in academic focus around the ‘culture of poverty’, which had receded into the background of academic discourse following the charged rhetoric that accompanied its introduction in the 1960s. In these volumes, several social scientists, writing from a reformulated culture perspective, allow for a more nuanced interpretation of how the poor interpret their world in ways that some earlier culture of poverty frameworks extrapolated on but fell short of clarifying (see also Lamont and Small, 2008; and Small and Newman, 2001). However, given its volatile pedigree, it remains to be seen whether a culture argument, in any of its iterations, will gain traction as a useful paradigm for considering the conditions of the inner-city chronic poor in the US or the social policies to ameliorate them. Left unresolved in much of these current debates is a deeper interrogation of how individual agency engages with the restricted range of social and structural constraints in socially isolated inner-city neighbourhoods (Wilson, 1996; Small and Newman, 2001). It is in such socialising contexts that the cultural experiences of life in poverty are selectively reinforced, including understandings and expectations about how the world operates and what skills and motivations one needs to get by (Ross, 1997). We argue that more emphasis should focus on the link between the socialisation, or the adaptive aspects of culture transmission in the mode of Hannerz (1969), and the social isolation of the inner-city poor. This approach considers how norms, attitudes, cultural repertoires, meaning making, decision-making

Improving Grades: Urban Public Schools, Racial and Socioeconomic Segregation, and the Promise of Innovation

Increasingly, public schools have student populations that are overwhelmingly minority, disproportionately poor, and more likely to drop out or have below grade-level skills in academic performance (Orfield and Gordon 2001). The path to this juncture has been well chronicled in the vast literature on urban education, which describes decades of racial and socioeconomic shifts in neighborhood composition, misguided policies, ill-informed intervention strategies, blatant neglect, and well-intentioned but ultimately unsuccessful attempts to compensate for past indifferences. Going forward, we face the prospect of a trove of innovations and policies that address the academic attainment of minority youth who are overrepresented in poorly performing urban public schools. Whether these efforts will have a fundamental impact on the school outcomes of poor urban Americans or will register as just another piecemeal approach to system change is unclear. Ultimately, however, the likelihood of success will depend in large part on a coordinated approach to change, one that addresses the root causes of inequality, including socioeconomic and residential segregation as well as the disconnect between the out-of-school and academic experiences of urban, minority families.

Residential Segregation: Experiences of African Americans

The United States has a long history of racial segregation, which contributed to the physical and social isolation of minority groups in disadvantaged neighbourhoods across the country. To understand how these disparities came about and continue to affect the housing experiences of African Americans in urban areas, this article considers earlier discriminatory practices that limited opportunities for economic advancement. In addition, we consider how residential patterns over the past several decades resulted in the concentration of chronically poor black families in segregated inner cities and the implications of the recent recession on homeownership in these vulnerable communities.

‘Inner City,’ The: Cultural Concerns

This article begins by describing the formation of inner-city ghettoes in US metropolises. It then turns to the recent social transformation of the inner city, a transformation characterized by a growing concentration of joblessness and poverty. The factors that account for this trend are presented, as are the social and cultural consequences for inner-city neighborhoods and families. The article concludes with a discussion of the social policy implications.