{"product_id":"improving-poor-people-the-welfare-state-the-underclass-and-urban-schools-as-history-9780691016054","title":"Improving Poor People: The Welfare State, the Underclass, and Urban Schools as History","description":"\u003cp\u003eThere are places where history feels irrelevant, and America's inner cities are among them, acknowledges Michael Katz, in expressing the tensions between activism and scholarship. But this major historian of urban poverty realizes that the pain in these cities has its origins in the American past. To understand contemporary poverty, he looks particularly at an old attitude: because many nineteenth-century reformers traced extreme poverty to drink, laziness, and other forms of bad behavior, they tried to use public policy and philanthropy to improve the character of poor people, rather than to attack the structural causes of their misery. Showing how this misdiagnosis has afflicted today's welfare and educational systems, Katz draws on his own experiences to introduce each of four topics--the welfare state, the underclass debate, urban school reform, and the strategies of survival used by the urban poor. Uniquely informed by his personal involvement, each chapter also illustrates the interpretive power of history by focusing on a strand of social policy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: social welfare from the poorhouse era through the New Deal, ideas about urban poverty from the undeserving poor to the underclass, and the emergence of public education through the radical school reform movement now at work in Chicago. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e Why have American governments proved unable to redesign a welfare system that will satisfy anyone? Why has public policy proved unable to eradicate poverty and prevent the deterioration of major cities? What strategies have helped poor people survive the poverty endemic to urban history? How did urban schools become unresponsive bureaucracies that fail to educate most of their students? Are there fresh, constructive ways to think about welfare, poverty, and public education? Throughout the book Katz shows how interpretations of the past, grounded in analytic history, can free us of comforting myths and help us to reframe discussions of these great public issues.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Michael B. Katz\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Princeton University Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 04\/22\/1997\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 191\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eBinding Type:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 0.64lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 9.09h x 6.04w x 0.47d\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN:\u003c\/b\u003e 9780691016054\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eMichael B. Katz\u003c\/b\u003e is Stanley I. Sheerr Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Among his many works are \u003ci\u003eIn the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare.\u003c\/i\u003e He is the editor of \u003ci\u003eThe Underclass Debate: Views from History\u003c\/i\u003e (Princeton).\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Princeton University Press","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":40087115858035,"sku":"9.78E+12","price":39.95,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0555\/9255\/0515\/products\/img_adfd3a79-dbb4-465b-9d39-df7132f414ef.jpg?v=1652537968","url":"https:\/\/bookstorenmore.com\/en-de\/products\/improving-poor-people-the-welfare-state-the-underclass-and-urban-schools-as-history-9780691016054","provider":"Bookstore N More","version":"1.0","type":"link"}