Quotes from Robert D. Putnam

Neighborhoods are important sites of growing class segregation.

The decline in religious participation, like many of the changes in political and community involvement, is attributable largely to generational differences.

Most fundamentally, school systems need to put higher quality teachers in poor schools under conditions in which they can actually teach and not just keep order.

This geographic polarization was made possible by the growth of suburbs and the expansion of the highway system, which allowed high-income families to move away from low-income neighbors in search of large lots, privacy, parks, and shopping malls. This class-based residential polarization has been accelerated by the growth of the income gap and (ironically) by changes in housing legislation that enabled more affluent minority families to move to the suburbs.

Rehabilitate ex-prisoners, keeping in mind that the prison population is comprised of young men with very little education, poor job records, and frequent histories of mental illness and substance abuse.

often within a single school, AP and other advanced courses tend to separate privileged from less privileged kids.

often within a single school, AP and other advanced courses tend to separate privileged from less privileged kids. Later on, kids from different class backgrounds are increasingly sorted into different colleges: for example, by 2004, kids from the top quarter of families in education and income were 17 times more likely to attend a highly selective college than kids in the bottom quarter.

today is a place of stark class divisions, where (according to school officials) wealthy kids park BMW convertibles in the high school lot next to decrepit junkers that homeless classmates drive away each night to live in.

Neuroscience has shown that the child's brain is biologically primed to learn from experience, so that early environments powerfully affect the architecture of the developing brain. The most fundamental feature of that experience is interaction with responsive adults—typically, but not only, parents.

Intuitively, we know that neglect is not good for a child, and abundant evidence from neuroscience helps explain why: neglect during early childhood reduces the frequency of serve-and-return interactions and produces deficits in brain development that are hard to repair. A landmark randomized study of Romanian orphans who were institutionalized at an early age found that extreme neglect produced severe deficits in IQ, mental health, social adjustment, and even brain architecture.

Consequently, children who experience toxic stress have trouble concentrating, controlling impulsive behavior, and following directions.

Delayed parenting helps kids, because older parents are generally better equipped to support their kids, both materially and emotionally.

Young Americans are dropping out of religion at an alarming rate of five to six times the historic rate.

How well you do in life shouldn't depend on how well your parents did.

Social capital may turn out to be a prerequisite for, rather than a consequence of, effective computer-mediated communication.

We all know that the way to get something done is to give it to a busy person.

People divorced from community, occupation, and association are first and foremost among the supporters of extremism.

Poor kids, through no fault of their own, are less prepared by their families, their schools, and their communities to develop their God-given talents as fully as rich kids. For economic productivity and growth, our country needs as much talent as we can find, and we certainly can't afford to waste it. The opportunity gap imposes on all of us both real costs and what economists term "opportunity costs.

Financial capital - the wherewithal for mass marketing - has steadily replaced social capital - that is, grassroots citizen networks - as the coin of the realm.

Social dislocation can easily breed a reactionary form of nostalgia.

Parental wealth is especially important for social mobility, because it can provide informal insurance that allows kids to take more risks in search of more reward.

TV-based politics is to political action as watching ER is to saving someone in distress.

Schools themselves aren't creating the opportunity gap: the gap is already large by the time children enter kindergarten and does not grow as children progress through school. The gaps in cognitive achievement by level of maternal education that we observe at age 18-powerful predictors of who goes to college and who does not - are mostly present at age 6when children enter school. Schooling plays only a minor role in alleviating or creating test score gaps.

Busy people tend to forgo the one activity - TV watching _ that is most lethal to community involvement