In The Long Shadow, a new book published by the Russell Sage Foundation, sociologists Karl Alexander, Doris Entwisle, and Linda Olsen present new and sobering findings on the life opportunities of low-income children in west Baltimore. For 25 years, the authors tracked the life progress of a group of almost 800 predominantly low-income Baltimore school children through the Beginning School Study Youth Panel (BSSYP). The study monitored the children’s transitions to young adulthood with special attention to how opportunities available to them as early as first grade shaped their socioeconomic status as adults.

Several new articles on inequality in the U.S. cite Alexander, Entwisle, and Olsen’s original research. At Colorlines, Kai Wright’s comprehensive overview of unemployment and African American men uses the authors’ Baltimore study to explore the shortcomings of education as the sole path out of poverty. As The Long Shadow finds, education primarily enhanced the privileges of those who were already middle-class, rather than boosting up poor children. While many low-income youth profiled in the Baltimore study pursued higher education, only 4% had earned a bachelor’s degree by age 28, due to barriers such as the cost of college and family obligations. As Wright notes, The Long Shadow further shows that black men in the study were penalized more for “problem behaviors”—including dropping out of school and getting arrested—than their white counterparts. In other words, race and class interact closely to limit poor Baltimoreans’ life opportunities.

Author Karl Alexander was also recently profiled in the Baltimore Sun and Mother Jones. The Sun emphasized the book’s unique research on low-income whites in Baltimore, a group that Alexander says is routinely overlooked. In The Long Shadow, the authors show that due to family connections and access to well-paying industrial jobs, white men have a much lower rate of unemployment than black men. Meanwhile, Mother Jones highlighted the book’s disquieting conclusion that where children start in life is typically also where they also end up. As the magazine notes, “[The authors have] decided that family determines almost everything, and that a child's fate is essentially fixed by how well off her parents were when she was born.”

Still, despite these pessimistic findings, Alexander also notes that parents’ investment in their children’s future success can make a positive difference. As he told reporter Irene Florez, children whose parents were able to invest time in their lives, and take them on non-school outings to places such as museums and libraries, fared much better than children of parents who were not.

Click here to read the introduction from The Long Shadow or purchase a copy of the book.