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213 Notes Chapter 1 1. Academic accounts tend to be somewhat more circumspect in their language , but concur that the word underclass “says more about behavior than income” (Ricketts and Sawhill 1988, 318). 2. The creative team behind The Corner, David Simon and Edward Burns, followed its success with two hugely popular television programs also set in Baltimore: Homicide and The Wire. 3. See “About the Book,” Random House, http:/ /www.randomhouse.com/ book/167536/the-corner-by-david-simon-and-edward-burns (accessed November 18, 2013). 4. The labor force census count includes those looking for work as well as those employed. For that reason, labor force participation rates, as here, usually are higher than employment rates. 5. Needy children qualify for free meals at 1.3 times the poverty level and for reduced price meals at 1.85 times (adjusted for family size) under the National School Lunch and School Breakfast Programs. The 90 percent figure is for the entire school, based on school records. 6. It might be suspected these self-reports understate hard drug use, but any such underreporting likely is minor. We have been involved with these youth over many years. They know us well and seem remarkably candid. 7. In several instances, more than one family member was mentioned. 8. The only notable difference in these comparisons is the number of families headed by women: 51.8 percent in the black communities, 37.8 percent in the white. It is a difference of some consequence, as we will see later. 9. For blacks, the corresponding figures are 5.4 million, representing 36.9 percent of the African American population and an increase of 74 percent from 1969. 10. Although the earnings prospects of young college graduates have slipped during the recent recession (see, for example, Shierholz 2013), a college degree remains a wise investment (see Bureau of Labor Statistics 2012). 214 Notes 11. This is according to Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz (2008), who look back as far as is practically doable, to around 1915. 12. These figures are for sixteen to twenty-four-year-olds not enrolled in school. 13. Most births outside of marriage are to young women, but among African Americans the prevalence remains high into older ages, not dropping below 90 percent until ages twenty through twenty-four. Among whites, it dips below 90 percent at age eighteen (Martin et al. 2012, 45). 14. To sustain black-white comparisons, we oversampled schools with large white enrollments: the Youth Panel is 55 percent African American; the African American enrollment citywide was 77 percent (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1983). 15. Ninety-seven percent of the randomly selected children were successfully recruited into the project (that is, parental consent for their participation was obtained), as were 100 percent of the schools (though subsequently, one school was replaced when a parent objected to the project). 16. Citywide comparisons with the Youth Panel throughout the volume attest to the representativeness of the initial sampling. Sample retention over the panel’s twenty-five-year span has been highly successful: 80 percent of the original group are covered in the project’s two surveys after high school (appendix B). 17. Both after high school surveys achieved 80 percent coverage of the original group, though not the same 80 percent. Joint coverage for the two interviews is 71 percent. The first was on paper, the second computerized. 18. The totals ranged from 99.7 percent in the fall of first grade to 52 percent in the spring of year 8 (fall interview coverage that year was 77 percent). 19. Members of the panel all began first grade in the fall of 1982, but their progress through school was highly uneven. Many repeated one or more grades and many were assigned to ungraded special education classes. In year 9, most were in ninth grade, but some were in seventh or eighth grade and others already had dropped out. Hence, when we say ninth grade or some other grade, it is approximate, a convenient shorthand. 20. Low-income children tend to move frequently, and after five years (the typical elementary school grade span in Baltimore), panel participants had spread to more than a hundred schools within the city system and a fifth had transferred out, either to private schools or to public schools in one of the nearby counties. 21. Our chapter in that volume is a useful source for additional background on the Youth Panel. 22. Attributed...

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