Doing Right by Kids: Leveraging Social Capital and Innovation to Increase Opportunity

This is a timely and provocative look at how America can truly do right by its kids, as AEI scholar Scott Winship and a team of leading thinkers, including Yuval Levin, confront the stubborn gap between falling child poverty and stalled social mobility, examining the War on Poverty, the safety net, family and education policy, community violence, and child welfare to make the case for rebuilding social capital and reviving the American Dream through bold, innovative experimentation.

Material hardship among American children has never been lower. This seeming victory in the War on Poverty, however, has failed to loosen the connection between family origins and where kids end up. Children born to the most disadvantaged parents today are no less likely than in the past to become the most disadvantaged adults when they grow up. Indeed, because of the perverse disincentives in our safety net, policy may have simultaneously reduced hardship while impeding upward mobility. More generally, the progressive assumption that what poor children need to advance primarily involves more money is a dubious one.

But if progressive proposals to expand the opportunities of poor kids have disappointed, the challenges those children and adolescents face have never sufficiently preoccupied the right. Conservatives are appropriately skeptical of government’s ability to influence behaviors and values or to manage initiatives effectively. Their concerns about the federal government’s proper role in social policy are well-grounded. But the moral imperative to do right by kids—to affirm the American Dream—remains.

This volume provides a set of ideas to do just that. The proposals are grounded in the insight that greater opportunity requires shoring up the relationships of children and adolescents and the strength of the institutions to which they are connected—in short, rebuilding social capital. And they embrace a spirit of innovation. Expanding opportunity requires experimentation with new approaches, many of which will fail, to identify scalable effective policies. But identify them we must.

Beth Akers is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she focuses on the economics of higher education.

Preston Cooper is a senior fellow in higher education policy at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity.

Joshua Crawford is the director of criminal justice initiatives at the Georgia Center for Opportunity.

Chester E. Finn Jr. is a distinguished senior fellow and president emeritus at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a Volker Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

Robert Lerman is an institute fellow at the Urban Institute and a professor emeritus of economics at American University.