Right now there is little we can do to improve the economic lives of the new working class. But we can improve the lives of their children.

One way to help these kids is well established. It’s universal pre-kindergarten. The other, which is more speculative but quite possibly just as significant, is character education.

Universal pre-K and character education appeal to both conservatives and liberals. Liberals like character education? Really?  You’ll see why later.

Students walk to a classroom at the Ka ‘Umeke Ka’eo charter school in Hilo.

PF Bentley/Civil Beat

The problem for the new working class is a combination of non-marriage and non-work. (See my previous column.)

Many working class jobs have disappeared and are not going to come back. Cultural attitudes about pre-marital sex and out of wedlock births have changed. It is more acceptable to have pre-marital sex and to have children out of wedlock.

The results are unstable family relationships and more single-parent households typically with the mother as the sole parent.

Children in these families are more likely to face serious problems that might even begin before birth  (low birth weights that often foster other health problems) and continue well into adulthood.  

Poverty triggers many problems that go beyond money.

Of course many single mothers and fathers have the courage, perseverance and grit to overcome these challenges (more about grit later).

Still, the challenges are enormous. Ron Haskins, the director of the Brookings Institution’s Center on the Family, gives a useful accounting of the sad consequences for many single-parent children.

Poverty is the most immediate one. Almost half of the single-parent households headed by women live below the poverty rate. That’s over four times the rate of two-parent households.

Poverty triggers many problems that go beyond money. Compared to children living in two-parent families, single-parent kids are more likely to be delinquent, act out in school, and fail to graduate.  They are more likely to have mental health issues and to serve time in prison, which is a permanent bridge to nowhere.

I don’t want to sound dismissive about those economic troubles, so let’s take a minute to look at why so little can be done about them.

The economic future for working-class folks is bleak both short term and long term. The trend toward fewer good jobs and declining wages is stable and hard to change.

On a small scale, you can see the problem in Hawaii. Post-recession employment is up, but wages are not. Construction jobs, a good source of both union and non-union working class jobs, have failed to increase as rapidly as predicted. 

But the problem is far more encompassing and historically fixed than that. Income inequality is increasing. In fact, in the U.S. there has been only one period (from the end of World War II until the mid ’70s) when income inequality diminished.

In short, there is nothing on the horizon either nationally or in Hawaii that is going to stop the hollowing out of the stable working class and reduce income inequality. 

There are government policies that could help, like raising taxes on the wealthy, making it less difficult for unions to organize, raising the minimum wage, or, as President Obama recently recommended, using government money to make community colleges, which are training grounds for the newer high tech working-class jobs, more affordable.

Democrats tend to favor such policies. They have been part of a progressive agenda for a long time, but they are inimical to the Republican-controlled Congress. Polarization and gridlock, the usual lethal combination, make these progressive policies non-starters.

Cultural Intervention

If we can’t do much right now about economic vulnerability, there is much that can and should be done to reduce the harm that children suffer from growing up in these kinds of family situations.

These interventions are much more cultural than economic.

Strategies for cultural change rest on shaky political terrain. For progressives they can smack of McGuffey Reader traditionalists and religious zealotry. They worry about what  Andrew Cherlin calls “cultural absolutists” who want to return to the sexual abstinence and gender roles of the “Leave It to Beaver” days.

“People who possess certain character strengths [grit and prudence] do better in life in terms of work, earnings, education and so on, even when taking into account their academic abilities.” — Richard Reeves, director, Brookings Institution Center on Families

For many conservatives, government’s involvement in fostering cultural change connotes a nanny state and the deprivation of individual liberty.

Two important child-oriented programs, universal pre-kindergarten and character education, manage to mitigate both liberal and conservative concerns.

Let’s take the easiest one first. Universal pre-kindergarten is probably the most significant and popular way to overcome some of the challenges of single-parenthood. Universal pre-school programs are already popular. Forty-three states have them. Hawaii does not. The pioneer is Oklahoma, a heavily conservative state.

Universal pre-K clearly works. Kids who go to pre-school not only show a higher and enduring level of educational attainment. They also improve in a variety of other ways.

So what’s not to like? 

Performance as a Form of Character

Character education is nowhere as far along. You can’t even call it a program yet. Through an impressive and growing body of literature, we know far more about the impact of character. But we know little about how to take this research and make it work. 

So what is character? In this case it is not the kind that worries progressives. It is not about morality but rather performance.

In fact two performance character skills, grit, which is the ability to stick to a task, and prudence, which is the ability to postpone gratification, may have as much impact on successful life outcomes as cognitive skills do.  

As Richard Reeves, the director of the Brookings Institution Center on Families and co-author of an important study on the subject, put it, “A growing body of empirical research demonstrates that people who possess certain character strengths [grit and prudence] do better in life in terms of work, earnings, education and so on, even when taking into account their academic abilities” (my emphasis).

There is nothing on the horizon either nationally or in Hawaii that is going to stop the hollowing out of the stable working class and reduce income inequality.

The problem right now is that it is still not clear how to impart these skills to children. Is it possible to cultivate these character skills? Can they be a part of school curriculum? Can they even be explicitly taught?

There have been some tentative, small successes in teaching children these character traits, nothing close to definitive.

The findings about character themselves are significant. Equally significant is the way this approach sidesteps liberals’ anxieties about cultural absolutism and conservatives’ concerns about the nanny state.

Things could go sour. Keep in mind that originally the Core Curriculum had a similar consensus, but then the issue became political and divided along ideological lines.

Nevertheless, an approach that sees the importance of cognitive skills as well as character skills is one of the few rays of hope at a time when things look so dismal for the new working class and their families.