Underneath the recent upheavals in American politics is a growing sense that the economic promise that the nation has long made to its citizens is increasingly a mirage. Seventy-three percent of Americans don’t believe in the idea that hard work is a path to the middle class, to achieving the American Dream. And they’re not wrong.
Low-, moderate-, and even many middle-income families are facing an affordability crisis. Economic mobility has declined, and class boundaries have become more rigid. If you’re a child growing up in households with fewer resources, you face long odds of making it to the middle class, let alone surpassing it.
Spend time listening to the experiences of people in low-income communities or studying the vast literatures on unequal opportunity in America and the causes of our present situation are no mystery. At every stage from birth through adulthood and across every sector shaping life outcomes—housing, education, employment, healthcare, criminal justice, and more—our systems present barriers to opportunity for those from low-income backgrounds.
Children are less likely to access high-quality pre-schooling, attend strong schools, or participate in enrichment opportunities outside the school day. They are more likely to experience housing instability, limited access to healthcare, and unsafe neighborhood conditions. As they move into adolescence and adulthood, these patterns persist. They are less likely to enroll in and complete college, more likely to take on debt, and more likely to encounter a labor market defined by low wages, instability, and limited upward mobility, while housing and living costs further constrain their ability to get ahead.
These are concrete, measurable mechanisms that shape people’s life chances. People feel them, data bear them out, and together they help explain why so many Americans no longer believe in the promise of the nation’s economic system.
After two decades focused on one part of the opportunity equation—K-12 education—I’ve spent the last five years focused on that bigger picture, using systems analysis and predictive modeling to help civic leaders in several cities address the way barriers in education, housing, health care and other systems conspire against many young people. The work looks across those social sectors to understand how different policies and program interventions combine to improve the odds for low- and moderate-income young people in their communities.
Encouragingly, it’s clear that there are solutions to the social mobility problem.
There’s substantial research showing that a wide range of policies and programs can improve families’ future outcomes, everything from children’s access to nutrition assistance through SNAP, the federal food-assistance program, to Promise Scholarships that make college affordable and intensive, skill-based workforce development programs that open up access to living wage jobs. It’s even possible to gauge the magnitude of expected effects on economic mobility. Some interventions are more effective than others, research shows, but no intervention drives transformational improvement by itself.
As a result, it’s important to “stack” strategies for promoting social mobility, to build a set of supports that work together across time and context. Policymakers need to combine interventions longitudinally along the cradle to career continuum. It’s not difficult to picture how young people’s trajectories could shift if they have access to strong supports at multiple stages of development: meaningful early learning, effective teachers, targeted academic supports like high-dosage tutoring, access to enrichment opportunities, and guidance into and through postsecondary education and the labor market.
It’s also necessary to stack interventions across the main environments where development occurs during childhood—home, school, and neighborhood—and across multiple domains of life in adulthood. Direct supports for young people across the cradle-to-career continuum are critical, but so are efforts to stabilize families and improve the conditions in which they live. Examples include policies that increase household resources, reduce financial burden, and decrease economic segregation by lowering neighborhood poverty rates and expanding access to mixed-income communities. In adulthood, strategies need to address worker skill but also the ways workers are treated in the labor market by increasing worker protections, while also reducing costs for housing, transportation, and childcare.
Even the strongest interventions only work if they are delivered effectively to the populations they are intended to serve. That requires careful attention to quality, coordination across agencies and organizations, and the ability to scale. It also requires a long-term commitment. The conditions that shape economic mobility developed over generations; reversing them will take sustained effort over time.
Encouragingly, communities like Spartanburg, South Carolina, and Highlander in Omaha, Nebraska, are already undertaking comprehensive initiatives to promote social mobility. They have recognized, as I did, that we can’t move the nation’s most vulnerable students far enough or fast enough by working in policy silos.
Josh Anderson is co-founder and chief executive of Opportunity Modeling Partners and a FutureEd senior fellow.