Tuesday

Is Diversity the Opiate of the Masses?

Walter Benn Michaels can be counted on to provoke us, and his 2006 The Trouble with Diversity is, at the least, provocative.

At America's 146 most selective universities, a meager 3% of the student population hails from the lowest socioeconomic quarter [that figure rises to an unimpressive 7% at the next-most-selective 250 or so, though Benn Michaels doesn't mention this]. Taken with oft-cited stats about increases in income disparity between the richest and poorest workers among us and the declining incomes of those without college degrees, Benn Michaels sees these gaps as more significant and less frequently discussed than our preferred arguments over racial equality and identity politics. To him, complaining that there are too few female physicists places emphasis on the difference between rich physicist men and slightly-less-rich physicist women rather than on the difference between any physicist and any Wal-Mart employee.

So not only are discussions about diversity less important than discussions of class, but they distract us from focusing on class at all. And where diversity discussions invite us to respect (even celebrate) identities as equally valid, we're less comfortable admitting that there's nothing to celebrate about being poor:

"While it may be plausible to think of cultures as different but equal, it cannot be plausible to think of classes in the same way. Defined on a vertical axis--upper, middle, lower--classes are nothing but structures of inequality. Blaming the victim (treating poor people as if they were responsible for their poverty) may be bad, but it's hard to see how congratulating the victim (I love what you've done with your shack!) is better" (107).

That's Walter Benn Michaels for you. He also argues that we seduce ourselves with stories about minor class differences to quash our guilty awareness of major class differences; stories about how hard it is to be poor at Harvard perpetuate the (all but incorrect) belief that there are poor people at Harvard. Stories about the lifestyles of the super-rich in the New York Times reassure the upper-middle-class that they're not really that rich. Class gets recast in terms of attitudes and lifestyles rather than material realities, mirroring the way we talk about diversity:

"Diversity, like gout, is a rich people's problem. . . . As long, in other words, as the left continues to worry about diversity, the right won't have to worry about inequality." The left "has suppl[ied] the right with just the kind of left it wants" (109).

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Monday

The Economics of Happiness

A late December article from The Economist reports that levels of happiness (according to national surveys) has remained more or less fixed over the last 50 years, even as the "richness" of most relatively affluent nations has shot up. What are some mechanisms that would leave, say, an upper-middle-class white American male in 2007 no happier than an upper-middle-class white American male in 1957, even though our guy today is considerably wealthier than his counterpart in the '50s?

There are two recurring explanations in the article that are worth considering. First, the habit argument: "People grow accustomed to what they have--however much of it there is." Just because the 2007 guy can spend circles around his counterpart from yesteryear, happiness simply isn't measured by gross tonnage of stuff you own. Today's luxuries can become tomorrow's necessities, so having the hot new thing isn't likely to sustain your joy. As mentioned in my previous post, this is a fundamental criticism of commodity culture: if we look to purchases to make us happy, they'll only break our hearts.

Second, and related to the habit issue, there is the problem of "positional goods", an economic term for goods that are valuable when you have them and others don't. It may be that having a fancy car is less important than having a fancier car; if everyone gets the same amount richer (for the moment, forget that we know this isn't the case) and can afford better cars, you might be no happier than you were before, since back then you had a better-than-average car and today your (more expensive and capable) car is still simply better than average. A better example is in schools: if you or your future employer value a Harvard degree, going to a good high school might be less important than going to a top high school. Even if many good schools are better today than they were in the '50s, there are still only a few that can call themselves "top".

What you may see, then, is a type of inflation in the world of wealth. If everyone makes huge sacrifices at work in order to stand out from their colleagues, then the bar is raised and the standout employees much work that much harder to maintain their edge. If many parents push their kids to be dreamy college candidates, the top candidates must look that much better. The overall improvement in worker or student quality (an increase in wealth, really) might not translate into much happiness if happiness is measured through competition with peers, just as the overall improvement in technology or other goods might not translate into much happiness if happiness is measured through the owning of cool new toys.

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Anonymous terrifyingsockpuppet said...

A couple of considerations, perhaps. 1) Inflation adjusted wages have--I'm told--remained static for 30 years now. So a great many people aren't better off, at least not better off than 1976 American Man. 2) There has been a disparity the past several years between what people have to say about the economy and how the stock market and other economic indicators have suggested. People think the economy sucks, but the numbers say it's quite strong. One suggestion has been the increasingly provisional nature of employment. Job security has eroded drastically--again, I'm told, having no data of any kind to back this up--and the absence of security may impact how 'happy' one feels. --Alex

April 16, 2007  
Blogger Burke Scarbrough said...

Interesting points, both. My understanding about inflation-adjusted wages is that the seeming stability over decades masks, not surprisingly, major disparities between the better-off and the worse-off. Education is one of the most consistent determinants: a college degree earns one much more than it did (adjusted for inflation), and there are many more people who have them, but a high school degree or less leaves people much worse off than it used to. Though the article didn't say that it disaggregated by such factors, they claim that those who ARE better off than their historical counterparts are nonetheless no happier on average. They also mentioned Japan as an example of an economy where there has been a more consistent rise in wealth across the board, but not an increase in happiness.

Lastly on that point, inflation-adjusted prices for a number of goods have fallen over 50 years, which would increase the purchasing power of an income that hasn't changed over the same period. That is, income is only part of wealth.

As for your other thought, job security as an "intangible" factor in happiness self-assessments makes sense to me. My father has also argued that there's evidence that people measure their success (and, perhaps, happiness) against their expectations for themselves. That is, whether or not a person will make more money than his historical counterpart matters less than how he compares to his expectations for himself over the course of his life. Like the "habit" and positionality arguments in my post, self-expectations can experience the "rising tide" effect, adjusting the bar for whatever economic conditions one finds oneself in. And one thing that's increasingly, depressingly clear is that social mobility (perhaps one measure of how well one meets or exceeds one's hopes for oneself) is harder and harder to find anymore.

April 16, 2007  
Blogger Happiness said...

Many thanks for an interestinq question and posting!

Wealth buys freedom from some worries... good food, nice shelter, adequate healthcare.

Past that, MANY studies show money does NOT significantly increase happiness. You can certainly have a great deal and still worry about being over extended.

Happiness and success are two very different things. Many people chase after success thinking it will bring them happiness and they are often disappointed. There are lots of very successful people who are NOT especially happy.

Happiness skills are very different. There are simple, eternal, universal truths that lead to happy, spiritually successful lives.

If we embrace and adopt these values, beliefs, ideals, strategies and boundaries we all can be happy or at least happier.

They're very simple steps like "Avoid the Fault Finding Feel Goods" and "Avoid All Unnecessary, Non- Productive Negativity, Be Guided by Goodness, Fuel Your Life and Your Work With Fun, Try to Be Your Best, Do Your Best and Feel Your Best All of the Time."

We can learn to "Choose our Moods and our Attitudes, Drive our Discipline with Desire," and realize that "Love Powers Happiness, Spiritual Success and Performance Excellence." "The Best Way to Excel at Anything is to Cultivate a Love for It."

These are just some of the simple, powerful things we can do to be happier.

Anyone who has visited a third world country and seen genuine joy and happiness beaming from people with little materially understands the silliness of thinking happiness comes from economic prosperity. It comes more from cultures that love, appreciate and enjoy everything around them.

Habitually happy people assess reality accurately, make wise decisions, power their decisions with desire and lots of positive expectations.

They decide what they are going to do and they find ways to make whatever they do enjoyable and rewarding for everyone involved.

When you try to enjoy and make the most of each moment, amazing things happen.

Habitually happy people try to be happy all of the time, and so do I!

Michele Moore, author of Happiness Blog http://HappinessBlog.com,
and "How To Live A Happy Life - 101 Ways To Be Happier"
www.HappinessHabit.com

April 16, 2007  
Anonymous John Scarbrough said...

Per-capita real income has increased significantly since the 1940s, while average real wages have not. This is due in large part to the increase in the participation of women in the workforce. That increase in workers increases total income, without increasing the population. Hence, per-capita income increases. However, since the number of workers has been increased by the additional female workers, average earnings "per worker" would not be pushed up by this. How might these facts impact an evaluation of happpiness measures over that time period?

April 17, 2007  

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Cumulative Advantage, Or the Market Makes the Man

An April 15 New York Times Magazine Article wonders why media publishers are so spectacularly bad at predicting hits in advance. Why do companies know so little of our preferences for music or movies? Much of it may have to do with "cumulative advantage", the tendency for something that is getting popular to get the attention and, ultimately, the love of more fans. Some economists describe this as the "network effect", the tendency for some goods to get more attractive the more people are using it.

Carrying this logic forward, the authors suggest that although "it’s natural to believe that successful songs, movies, books and artists are somehow 'better' . . . than their unsuccessful counterparts," in the end what a given person finds "best" can have a lot to do with what other people are calling "best" and what people in the recent past have called "best". In short, then, markets not only reflect our preferences but also shape them. This complicates the work of publishers, marketers and economists who may be tempted to assume that people tend to make choices that reflect stable preferences. In some settings, it seems, they really don't.

That the authors put forth recent experimental findings to support this tendency should be satisfying to critical theorists and critics of capitalism, who have articulated complex theories for the ways a market economy manipulates and enslaves us. Those looking for accessible, concrete examples of the effects markets have on people should start with this article.

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Blogger James said...

Science Friday did a story a few weeks back about a company called
Platinum Blue that does exactly that: predict what songs will become hits. They have a pretty good track record (pun intended).

June 20, 2007  

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Saturday

"The Incredibles"

A January 7 NYT article shows how educational rigor seems to follow the distribution of wealth in America: relatively more and more for relatively fewer and fewer.

Being a top student in my high school meant taking several AP classes and taking on sports or activities. This resume easily distinguished less than ten percent of the class in an affluent suburb, most of whom went on to attend highly-selective, often "top-ten" colleges. Here, by comparison, is the current state of the nation's most overachieving secondary schools:

"The new reality for high-achieving students: work crazy-hard in high school and cruise in college. In high school, they pile on the college-level Advanced Placement courses, face reading lists that can’t realistically be completed and tackle complex, advanced ideas once reserved for undergraduates. 'The high-end students have greatly expanded their preparation and their exposure to the life of the mind and scholarship,' says John C. Bravman, vice provost for undergraduate education at Stanford. 'This has been a huge change, especially in the last decade.'

"There are currently two national conversations about high school. In September, the Commission on the Future of Higher Education released a report on how ill-prepared high school graduates are for college, citing statistics like this one: 40 percent of college students take remedial courses. Of 1.2 million seniors in the class of 2006 who took the ACT, only 27 percent reached its college-readiness benchmarks in biology, 42 percent in algebra, 53 percent in social science and 69 percent in English composition. . . . At the other end of the academic spectrum, however, are the stellar students who are doing ever more difficult work at ever younger ages.

"As they stretch to accommodate students at both ends of the preparation spectrum, universities are grappling with that question: How do you challenge and engage undergraduates? One answer is to focus less on the acquisition of knowledge and more on how it can be furthered. Undergraduates are being offered more research opportunities and interdisciplinary programs, which require them to apply related concepts in different fields. Other efforts connect extracurricular and community service to coursework so students can road-test what they have learned.

"Advanced Placement is no longer the zenith of academic challenge. Now there are “post-A.P.” courses, for which a good grade in the A.P. course is the prerequisite. . . . Most telling is that several advanced math courses — for example, “Complex Analysis,” which blends abstract math with practical applications in physics, electrical engineering and fluid modeling — are taught by Robert Sachs, a math professor and former department chairman at George Mason University. Dr. Sachs uses the same text for some high school and college classes, and says “Complex Analysis” covers the same material a college junior or senior would take. “If you ask me, ‘Is it like the honors curriculum at M.I.T.?’ we’re probably real close,” says Dr. Sachs, who notes that he had the most students ever, 35, enrolled this past semester. The number is particularly impressive because students gain entry to the course by completing a full year of advanced math after A.P. calculus. “The courses I teach are actually a second year beyond A.P.,” he says. . . . Some students actually enter ninth grade having taken the A.P. exam in calculus.

"David Oxtoby, president of Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., is troubled by the trend. He believes that professors can no longer count on high schools to make sure students have fundamentals down cold. 'High schools are trying to imitate college and teach college-type material instead of the high school material they used to teach,' he says. 'They are now learning the advanced stuff, but not the basic stuff.' He continues: 'We are finding students who have learned about s-, p- and d-orbitals — a theoretical concept in chemistry — but they don’t know that chlorine is a gas.'

"Katherine Bergeron, dean of the college at Brown, believes the bigger issue is not about sequencing academic content, but getting students to view college as a time for reflection and exploration. It is part of the liberal arts ideal that pre-med students delve into Proust, but college leaders say many top students want to pursue serious challenges in their fields of interest earlier in their college careers.

"Some colleges have been pushing back against A.P.’s, which students rack up hoping to waive entry-level courses. At Stanford, departments are less willing to let students with top A.P. scores (4 or 5) skip courses. As of this fall, says Laura Selznick, a freshman adviser there for 28 years, 'a 5 on A.P. Econ is no longer an express ticket into the economics department.' Partly this reflects doubt that A.P. classes actually cover college-level material. But also, 'part of it is that students think they know it, but they don’t know it all,' Ms. Selznick says. She insists college academics are different from high school, even if the texts are the same.
Dr. Rhodes, of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, concurs. High school-age students are not mature enough to grasp the subtleties of some material, he says.
Many colleges frown on letting students skip entry-level courses, even with placement tests, he says. 'Some say, ‘You start out at the beginning, even if there is repetition; we want you to get what we’re offering the way we’re offering it and have our education,’ ' he says."

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

So, should high schools attempt to sequence with local colleges? Would it make sense that the rigor of high school be followed by a challenging, rigorous, yet economical, higher education?

April 21, 2007  
Blogger Burke Scarbrough said...

I doubt that anyone would argue that high schools shouldn't serve the interests of its most "advanced" students (don't withhold a challenge from kids who want one just because it's college-level material!) but teachers and students in some programs seem to be undervaluing the development of understandings and dispositions that underlie many of the practices of college-level inquiry. Instead, they're jumping ahead to so-called "advanced" material...After all, which is seen as more impressive: developing thoughtful and creative interpretations of any text in 8th grade, or saying you read King Lear in 8th grade? High schools should be focusing on the thinking routines their students use to interpret the world, not on the lionized content that advanced college students engage with. We all know students who unthinkingly spout "facts" they heard in college. Are they thinking or just dressing themselves in high-status language? A "college-level" course is more than just a daunting syllabus...it's a set of assumptions about how students work with the world they encounter in class. If 16-year-old kids aren't college-level worldworkers, then the class is nothing like a college course, no matter how similar the syllabi appear.

April 28, 2007  

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How Much Do We Learn Without Being Taught?

There is an interesting concept in language acquisition theory and deaf studies that I have just recently begun to think about, thanks largely to the research interests of two deaf students in my doctoral program.

How much of the learning we do in schools happens as a direct result of teachers' speech and explicit instructions? By contrast, how much of our learning is shaped by more informal interactions as we go about the school day? "Incidental learning" refers to the learning that goes on indirectly or informally, and some researchers have estimated that 80% or more of what we really learn in schools comes from incidental learning.

This is no surprise to many constructivist or student-centered educators, who see student interactions and processes as essential for (meaningful) learning. But an important nuance of "incidental learning" when applied to deaf studies is that much of what makes for rich learning in a classroom is the enormous amount of information students learn from their environment. Think of it this way: If you were a deaf student with an interpreter, you'd have some access to what one person at a time is saying, and you have some ability to communicate with hearing persons (both, of course, require meaning to be mediated by the interpreter, but.) But what about the side conversations that hearing students are privy to? What about when several people speak at once? What about the learning you do with your eyes while also capturing what someone is saying with their ears (I spent quite a bit of my high school hours absently browsing some book or other while 'keeping an ear on' the sanctioned discussion in class).

There are troubling statistics about the development of deaf students in mainstream schools, and incidental learning provides on way to think about why that may be. Not only do we learn much of what we know and do without being explicitly taught, but we learn much of it as we're officially focusing on something else.

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Anonymous Chad Pitts said...

I thought that this was very interesting. The statistics in this article were very suprising to me. Do you think we learn incidental because of the activities that we do in school? I think that if the activity is helpful and fun, the student will learn better.

April 01, 2007  
Blogger Burke Scarbrough said...

Thanks for posting my blog's first comment, Chad! I think the point is that we're learning all the time, whether we realize it or not. When I have a conversation with somebody, I might learn from what they say to me, but I also learn (or re-learn) things about how to have a conversation, or how people react to things I say or do. I might also learn from the sights and sounds in the room where we're talking. Learning takes place outside of the "main event", but deaf students have to focus their attention with their eyes. You can miss out on a lot when you don't get to look one place but listen someplace else, or listen to two things at once. The things that go on "incidentally" around us are things we're learning from all the time. We just take most of those things for granted (or at least I do!)

April 16, 2007  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I suppose this answers the puzzle: when you give a pop quiz, or even an announced assessment, the student who has not cooperated in groups, who has not appeared to pay any attention to the lessons, surprisingly, this kid scores the highest!!

April 21, 2007  
Anonymous Martha Q said...

I actually have an older brother who is deaf. However, he was not mainstreamed. He attended Baxter School for the Deaf in Maine where I live. I definitely think that he received a better education there than he would have in a regular school. At Baxter, all the students were signing, so as we hear side conversations, they can "see" side conversations. It is amazing how quickly deaf people can sign and understand sign. They have become accustomed to this just as we have become accustomed to speaking and hearing. We can listen to the person speaking to us, but at the same time listen to a side conversation. I have no doubt the same is true for deaf people. They can watch the person signing to them, while also watching a conversation being signed behind that person.

On another note, I do agree that students, in general, learn a lot from their surroundings, visual and auditory. Knowing this, I try to incorporate many chance for student interaction and collaboration in my classroom.

September 27, 2007  
Anonymous Oftedal said...

This was a very interesting post/blog. It is true that we are constantly learning and that the surrounding environment has a lot to do with how much knowledge we absorb. I suppose that's why we have word walls and a print-rich environment in our classroom. I can see why having a print-rich environment would be especially important for our dead/hearing impaired students.

November 08, 2007  

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Monday

On the Failed Racial Integration of Public Schools

Statistics recorded from "What Happened to Brown?", a review by Kathleen Sullivan in the New York Review of Books:

  • White students make up two thirds of the American school-age population, but on average they attend schools that are 80 percent white.
  • Fewer than 10 percent of black students attend schools whose students are mostly white.
  • Only 10 percent of white students attend schools in which minority students predominate.
  • The students in some school systems, like the Mott Haven elementary schools in the Bronx, are over 99 percent black or from other minorities.

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"Schools Need to Pay More Attention to 'Intelligence in the Wild'"

This article by David Perkins, published in the Harvard Education Letter in 2000, has been a key text in my thinking about student learning in the last year. The article is a gloss of several articles and books Perkins has published along with his colleagues at Harvard's Project Zero.

In essence, it calls out the kind of learning most kids do in school as limited in its opportunities for the kinds of thinking and problem-solving that carry over into the real world. The kind of intelligence needed for school Perkins calls "laboratory intelligence", the work of "teaching kids how to deal with clearly defined problems. However, life is more confusing and complicated than that. Often the greatest challenge is just discerning whether there is a problem or what the problem is. You have to muck around and puzzle out what you want or need to do and where to invest your efforts. That's intelligence in the wild."

"The principal roadblock to thinking well is usually detecting the problem in the first place and then caring enough to invest effort, not in following through. People tend to be much better at solving problems than detecting them. Intelligence in the wild includes the ability to recognize problems hidden in messy situations and the motivation and good sense to choose which problems (because there are always too many!) are worth the time and energy it will take to solve them."

Children's proficiency at tasks requiring laboratory intelligence, Perkins has found, is not at all correlated with their proficiency with intelligence in the wild, suggesting that
  1. Schools engaging laboratory intelligence only are not somehow also building students' intelligence in the wild.
  2. Students with "wild" intelligence do not have those talents validated in the typical school.
Indeed, Perkins argues, "Ill-defined problems are better than well-defined problems for helping people get the knack of coping with the murky wild. The murk is good; it is more authentic."

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Blogger oceducator said...

I like the comparison of "laboratory intelligence" vs. "Intelligence in the Wild"!! I aggree that the kind of learning that is promoted in school is not preparing students how to deal with real life problems and issues. I teach an Adult Living course at the high school level where I teach students how to deal with situations related to families, substance abuse, sex, suicide, death, finances, careers, stress, and so much more that I know will help them become responsible and successful contributors to society. The sad truth to what I teach is that my class is the first one on the list to be cut when administrators need to cut somewhere. There is so much push for ALL students to go to college in our district that a course like "Adult Living" is left in the shadows because it isn't on the list of requirements to get there. Thank you for acknowledging that life skills are just as important as academics.

January 26, 2008  

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"Must Schools Fail?"

Richard Rothstein's 2004 article in the New York Review of Books takes on several recent books examining the famous achievement gap between white and black students. Three recurring questions frame these studies:

  1. Where should one lay the blame for these differences (schools, families, and wider society being the usual suspects.)
  2. To what extent is the achievement gap a race-defined gap, and to what extent is it a gap between rich and poor?
  3. Given answers to 1 and 2, what is to be done?

While the essay does put forth several researchers' answers to #3, my interest tonight is more in the first two questions, so it will be data relevant to those that I reproduce below. No firm answers are forthcoming here, and the below is a somewhat rough assemblage of data, to be sure. But taken as a whole, they help to sketch out some of the challenges in the schooling, family life, and careers awaiting quite a few young Americans based on the skins and income levels they are born into.

(The following is a series of direct quotes)

Race-Specific Differences in Education and the Workforce

  • Only a minority of Americans, black or white, are college graduates (18 percent of blacks and 34 percent of whites in their late twenties have college degrees).
  • Male black workers with only high school educations earn on average 79 percent of what similarly educated whites do. If only high school graduates with similar test scores are compared, then black wages are 87 percent of white wages. These figures, however, understate the difference in annual earnings between white and black high school graduates because black high school graduates work fewer annual hours and annual weeks than do white high school graduates.
  • In the early 1990s, teams sponsored by the Urban Institute in Chicago and in Washington, D.C., trained applicants for jobs with nearly identical résumés to present themselves in the same way in their interviews. Black males were three times as likely to be rejected as white males. A recent study found that whites' applications were more successful than blacks' even when the whites had criminal records and the otherwise identical blacks did not.
  • Black median family income is now 62 percent of white income, up a little from 58 percent thirty years ago. But . . . the median net worth of black families is still only 8 percent of whites'. Part of the reason for this difference is that government and private lenders have discouraged or prohibited black families from buying homes in suburban communities where values have appreciated in the decades after World War II. Part of the reason, too, is that black middle-class adults are more likely than whites to be the first generation in their families to have risen to the middle class; many have low-income parents and other close relatives to help support, making it more difficult for them to save money.
  • Familiar claims about black students [found accurate by the authors under review]: They put pressure on one another not to "act white" by doing well in school. They do not work as hard in school as white students from economically similar families. Black students watch TV and socialize with friends more than whites do. More black students than whites come to class unprepared and are more disruptive. Black students spend much more time at after-school jobs. Many think grades are unimportant because they can go to college on athletic scholarships. When given the opportunity to take more academically challenging courses in high school, they frequently decline. Moreover, black parents supervise homework less frequently than white parents do, while black adolescents are exposed daily to skepticism about white-controlled institutions, such as schools. Black students also accept conventional notions that they have less academic ability and make less effort as a result.
  • No one can say how much of the gap in academic achievement between blacks and whites is caused by racially neutral class differences, how much is attributable to black culture, and how much of that cultural difference is itself a defensive reaction to continuing discrimination. The Thernstroms write that poverty (defined by current income), parents with little education, and residence in poor neighborhoods explain only about a third of the gap.

Class-Specific Differences in Early Childhood Development
Middle-class children today are encouraged from an early age to negotiate with their parents over what to wear or eat, to question adult statements if they seem implausible, and to interact with adults as equals. Money tends to be less frequently discussed in middle-class families, so it less frequently occurs to middle-class children that their ambitions might be blocked by a shortage of resources.

Working-class children have no such sense of entitlement. Most of them, black and white, speak to adults only when spoken to; they are not expected to express opinions that challenge what adults say. Money or lack of it is a frequent topic of conversation at home, and children become aware early of the limits to their futures.

Middle-class parents were more likely to encourage children to figure out problems for themselves; working-class parents were more likely to tell them what to do. Lareau's middle- and working-class parents both encouraged their children to read, and parents from both classes read aloud to their children when they were young; but middle-class parents were more likely to read themselves, thus showing the importance of reading by their own behavior. Moreover, Lareau's middle-class parents more frequently intervened in schools when they felt it in their children's interest to do so.

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Meritocracy & Social Class

Two articles from The Economist, one a 2004 piece entitled "Ever Higher Society, Ever Harder to Ascend" and the other a 2005 piece called "Middle of the Class", lay out some of the data available on social mobility and education in America. Below are a series of relevant quotes pulled from both articles:

A Gleam of Apparent Good News

Americans' average salaries have risen over the past 30 years, though admittedly not by much. A far smaller share of the population lives in poverty now than in the supposedly golden age of equality in the 1950s (12% compared with 22%). Moreover, a surge of immigrants on minimum wages tends to bring down the average: home-grown Americans are probably better off than the figures suggest. The rich have not got richer at the expense of the poor. The rising tide has lifted dinghies as well as yachts.

On a Widening Gap Between Rich and Poor
  • Between 1979 and 2000 the real income of households in the lowest fifth (the bottom 20% of earners) grew by 6.4%, while that of households in the top fifth grew by 70%.
  • The family income of the top 1% grew by 184%—and that of the top 0.1% or 0.01% grew even faster.
  • Back in 1979 the average income of the top 1% was 133 times that of the bottom 20%; by 2000 the income of the top 1% had risen to 189 times that of the bottom fifth.
  • In 2001 the top 1% of households earned 20% of all income and held 33.4% of all net worth. Not since pre-Depression days has the top 1% taken such a big whack.

On Social Mobility, or Lack thereof
Take the study carried out by Thomas Hertz, an economist at American University in Washington, DC, who studied a representative sample of 6,273 American families (both black and white) over 32 years or two generations.

  • 42% of those born into the poorest fifth ended up where they started—at the bottom. Another 24% moved up slightly to the next-to-bottom group. Only 6% made it to the top fifth.
  • On the other hand, 37% of those born into the top fifth remained there, whereas barely 7% of those born into the top 20% ended up in the bottom fifth. A person born into the top fifth is over five times as likely to end up at the top as a person born into the bottom fifth.
  • There is also growing evidence that America is less socially mobile than many other rich countries.

Results from other studies/research:

  • The years from 1880 to 1960 were a period of great corporate behemoths. These produced a new class of Americans—professional managers. They built elaborate internal hierarchies, and also accepted their responsibilities to both their workers and their local communities. But since the 1970s the pressure of competition has forced these behemoths to become much leaner—to reduce their layers, contract out some activities, and shift from full-time to part-time employees. It has became harder for people to start at the bottom and rise up the company hierarchy by dint of hard work and self-improvement. And it has also become harder for managers to keep their jobs in a single company.
  • If you are among the poorest 5% of the population, your chances
    of achieving an average income are only one in six. If you are among the poorest 1%, they become very dim indeed.

The Role of Schools

  • Over the past 25 years, globalisation has increased rewards for intellectual skills, pushing up the value of a degree. The income gap between college graduates and those without university degrees doubled between 1979 and 1997.
  • The education system is increasingly stratified by social class, and poor children have a double disadvantage. They attend schools with fewer resources than those of their richer contemporaries (school finances are largely determined by local property taxes). And they have to deal with the legacy of what Michael Barone, a conservative commentator, has labelled “soft America”. Soft America is allergic to introducing accountability and measurement in education, particularly if it takes the form of merit pay for successful teachers or rewards for outstanding pupils.
  • Three-quarters of the students at the country's top 146 colleges come from the richest socioeconomic fourth, compared with just 3% who come from the poorest fourth (the median family income at Harvard, for example, is $150,000). This means that, at an elite university, you are 25 times as likely to run into a rich student as a poor one.
  • In most Ivy League institutions, the eight supposedly most select universities of the north-east, “legacies” make up between 10% and 15% of every class. At Harvard they are over three times more likely to be admitted than others. The students in America's places of higher education are increasingly becoming an oligarchy tempered by racial preferences.
  • The budget squeeze on states in 2001-04 forced them to increase fees at state colleges, traditionally the places where the children of less wealthy parents went. Those children also face increasing competition from richer kids squeezed out of the Ivy League. As a result, a student from the top income quarter is six times more likely to get a BA than someone from the bottom quarter.
  • College graduates tend to marry college graduates. Both go out to work, so in the households of the most educated the returns to a university education are doubled. College-educated women are also postponing children for the sake of their careers. On average, they have their first child at 30, five years later than in the 1970s and eight years later than their contemporaries who have not been to college. At the bottom of the heap, you see the opposite: women have children younger, often out of wedlock and without a job.

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"Colleges: An Endangered Species?"

Andrew Delbanco's 2-part 2005 essay in The New York Review of Books takes stock of the purpose of higher education.

Delbanco considers it a recent trend that colleges offer unprecedented freedoms to students (social freedoms and freedom from prescribed core curricula) in order to attract them in such a competitive student marketplace. He discusses that trend in light of a historically moral purpose for higher education and, he believes, increased cheating and segregation along class and racial lines on American campuses.

(All text below, save my subject headings, is quoted directly from the essay.)

Historical Trends

College Attendance:

  • At the turn of the century fewer than a quarter-million Americans, or about 2 percent of the population between eighteen and twenty-four, attended college.
  • By the end of World War II, that figure had risen to over two million.
  • In 1975, it stood at nearly ten million, or one third of the young adult population.
  • Today, the United States leads the world by a considerable margin in the percentage of citizens (27 percent or 79 million) who are college graduates.

Role of Higher Education:

  • The antebellum college was typically an arm of the local church—an academy for ministers, missionaries, and, more generally, literate Christians—that remained true to the purpose of the oldest American college, Harvard, which had been founded in dread "lest the churches of New England be left with an illiterate ministry...when our present ministers shall lie in the dust."
  • By the mid-nineteenth century, the need for expert training in up-to-date agricultural and industrial methods was becoming an urgent matter in the expanding nation, and, with the 1862 Morrill Act, Congress provided federal land grants to the loyal states (30,000 acres for each of its senators and representatives) for the purpose of establishing colleges "where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific or classical studies, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts." Eventually these "land-grant" colleges evolved into the system of state universities.
  • By the end of the nineteenth century, the professionalized university had absorbed schools of medicine and law that had typically begun independently, and was acquiring teacher-training schools, along with schools of engineering, business, and other professions. It was on its way to becoming the loose network of activities that Clark Kerr, president of the University of California, famously called the "multiversity." When Kerr coined that term in 1963, in The Uses of the University, he remarked on the "cruel paradox" that a "superior faculty results in an inferior concern for undergraduate teaching," and he called this paradox "one of our most pressing problems."

Increasing Competition & Threats to Universal Availability

  • In The Future of the Public University in America: Beyond the Crossroads, former University of Michigan president James Duderstadt points out that private universities now enjoy what are, in effect, large public subsidies that, unlike the legislative appropriations on which public universities depend, are dispensed out of sight of the public eye. "When the investment corporations created by many private universities to manage their endowments make profits on a business venture," Duderstadt writes, "that profit is tax-exempt, and, in effect, the forgone tax revenue must be replaced by tax dollars paid by other citizens."
  • Applicants are stampeding toward early admissions programs that offer, in exchange for a promise to attend if admitted, a better chance of getting in. These programs, which now account for roughly half of all enrolled students in the Ivy League, favor candidates from private or suburban schools who have well-connected counselors (sometimes privately hired) and the financial freedom to pick a college without waiting to compare financial aid offers—and the colleges know it.
  • In today's educational landscape, barely one sixth of all college students fit the traditional profile of full-time residential students between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. One third of American undergraduates now work full-time, and more than half attend college part-time, typically majoring in subjects with immediate utility, such as accounting or computing.
A Socially-Uniting, Morally-Sound Core Curriculum (in Danger)
  • The incursion of market values into the putatively pure academic world has been the subject of a host of recent books, all of which point in one way or another to the marginalization of undergraduate teaching.
  • One suspects that behind the commitment to student freedom is a certain institutional pusillanimity—a fear that to compel students to read, say, the major political and moral philosophers would be to risk a decline in applications, or a reduction in graduation rates (one of the statistics that counts in the US News and World Report college rankings closely watched by administrators). Nor, with a few exceptions, is there the slightest pressure from faculty, since there is no consensus among the teachers about what should be taught.
  • Peter Gomes . . . in his essay "Affirmation and Adaptation: Values and the Elite Residential College," he seems to say that universities have refused once and for all any responsibility for the moral education of undergraduates, but that perhaps it is not too late (it may even be timely) for small colleges to do something about it. "
  • In our "postmodern" moment, we no longer have any consensus about what culture is or should be, yet the need for cultured authority has become more urgent. Perhaps the most remarkable sentence in all of these books—as remarkable for the fact that it appears in a footnote as for the fact that it is patently true—occurs in Bok's Universities in the Marketplace: "Arts and Sciences faculties," Bok tells us, "currently display scant interest in preparing undergraduates to be democratic citizens, a task once regarded as the principal purpose of a liberal education and one urgently needed at this moment in the United States." It is not hard to imagine what other purpose the faculties have in mind. Preparation for well-paying jobs seems high among them even if that goal is not explicitly stated. So does introduction to various academic disciplines as they are conceived by the guilds in charge of them. Any larger sense of purpose seems absent and there are few signs that anyone is concerned about it.
  • As my former colleague the literary scholar Arnold Rampersad (now at Stanford) remarked a few years ago at the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Columbia Core Curriculum, the Core is like the interstate highway system: we are glad we have it, but we could never build it today.
  • Diversity (to be achieved not by quotas, but by considering race as one factor in admissions decisions) contributes to the purposes of liberal education, which Kronman summarizes as "expansion of the student's powers of sympathetic imagination" through appreciation of "views, moods, dispositions and experiences other than his or her own. The one place where students might be compelled to listen to one another—"to educate ourselves by knowing opposite lives," as Stover put it a long time ago—is the classroom. And yet small group education is expensive and therefore increasingly rare, and universally required courses, where students of different backgrounds cannot avoid each other, are almost unknown. The human proclivity to stick to one's own, especially in our age of diversity, is an argument for a shared general education, not
    against it.

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"What's Wrong with Cinderella?"

Peggy Orenstein's recent New York Times Magazine piece wonders where the latest trend in princess merchandising for girls stands in contemporary feminist understandings of growing up female. Is the princess persona an appropriation of feminine power for girls (a la third wave feminism), or a clear undermining of girls' rights to be socialized into something other than rich, graceful ladies? "I’ve spent much of my career writing about experiences that undermine girls’ well-being, warning parents that a preoccupation with body and beauty (encouraged by films, TV, magazines and, yes, toys) is perilous to their daughters’ mental and physical health. Am I now supposed to shrug and forget all that? If trafficking in stereotypes doesn’t matter at 3, when does it matter? At 6? Eight? Thirteen?"

Orenstein's thinking speaks best for itself, so here are some long quotations that sketch out her arguments:

"To call princesses a 'trend' among girls is like calling Harry Potter a book. Sales at Disney Consumer Products, which started the craze six years ago by packaging nine of its female characters under one royal rubric, have shot up to $3 billion, globally, this year, from $300 million in 2001. There are now more than 25,000 Disney Princess items. 'Princess,' as some Disney execs call it, is not only the fastest-growing brand the company has ever created; they say it is on its way to becoming the largest girls’ franchise on the planet."

"There are no studies proving that playing princess directly damages girls’ self-esteem or dampens other aspirations. On the other hand, there is evidence that young women who hold the most conventionally feminine beliefs — who avoid conflict and think they should be perpetually nice and pretty — are more likely to be depressed than others and less likely to use contraception. What’s more, the 23 percent decline in girls’ participation in sports and other vigorous activity between middle and high school has been linked to their sense that athletics is unfeminine."

"According to theories of gender constancy, until they’re about 6 or 7, children don’t realize that the sex they were born with is immutable. They believe that they have a choice: they can grow up to be either a mommy or a daddy. Some psychologists say that until permanency sets in kids embrace whatever stereotypes our culture presents, whether it’s piling on the most spangles or attacking one another with light sabers."

" 'Playing princess is not the issue,' argues Lyn Mikel Brown, an author, with Sharon Lamb, of Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters From Marketers’ Schemes. 'The issue is 25,000 Princess products,' says Brown, a professor of education and human development at Colby College. 'When one thing is so dominant, then it’s no longer a choice: it’s a mandate, cannibalizing all other forms of play. There’s the illusion of more choices out there for girls, but if you look around, you’ll see their choices are steadily narrowing.' "

"When colors were first introduced to the nursery in the early part of the 20th century, pink was considered the more masculine hue, a pastel version of red. Blue, with its intimations of the Virgin Mary, constancy and faithfulness, was thought to be dainty. Why or when that switched is not clear, but as late as the 1930s a significant percentage of adults in one national survey
held to that split. Perhaps that’s why so many early Disney heroines — Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Wendy, Alice-in-Wonderland — are swathed in varying shades of azure. (Purple, incidentally, may be the next color to swap teams: once the realm of kings and N.F.L. players, it is fast becoming the bolder girl’s version of pink.)"

"The infatuation with the girlie girl certainly could, at least in part, be a reaction against the so-called second wave of the women’s movement of the 1960s and ’70s (the first wave was the fight for suffrage), which fought for reproductive rights and economic, social and legal equality. If nothing else, pink and Princess have resuscitated the fantasy of romance that that era of feminism threatened, the privileges that traditional femininity conferred on women despite its costs. I mulled that over while flipping through The Paper Bag Princess, a 1980 picture book hailed as an antidote to Disney. The heroine outwits a dragon who has kidnapped her prince, but not before the beast’s fiery breath frizzles her hair and destroys her dress, forcing her to don a paper bag. The ungrateful prince rejects her, telling her to come back when she is 'dressed like a real princess.' She dumps him and skips off into the sunset, happily ever after, alone. There you have it, Thelma and Louise all over again. Step out of line, and you end up solo or, worse, sailing crazily over a cliff to your doom."

"Some scholars I spoke with say that given its post-9/11 timing, princess mania is a response to a newly dangerous world. 'Historically, princess worship has emerged during periods of uncertainty and profound social change,' observes Miriam Forman-Brunell, a historian at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Francis Hodgson Burnett’s original Little Princess was published at a time of rapid urbanization, immigration and poverty; Shirley Temple’s film version was a hit during the Great Depression. 'The original folk tales themselves,' Forman-Brunell says, 'spring from medieval and early modern European culture that faced all kinds of economic and demographic and social upheaval — famine, war, disease, terror of wolves. Girls play savior during times of economic crisis and instability.' That’s a heavy burden for little shoulders."

According to Sharon Lamb, a psychology professor at Saint Michael’s College: “There are other ways to express ‘innocence’ — girls could play ladybug or caterpillar. What you’re really talking about is sexual purity. And there’s a trap at the end of that rainbow, because the natural progression from pale, innocent pink is not to other colors. It’s to hot, sexy pink — exactly the kind of sexualization parents are trying to avoid.”

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"White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack"

This essay by Peggy McIntosh is a favorite among students of education and cultural studies.

McIntosh came to realize "I had been taught about racism as something which puts others at a disadvantage, but had not been taught to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage. . . . I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was 'meant' to remain oblivious."

It follows, then, that addressing power imbalances cannot include simply empowering oppressed or marginalized people, but must include a relinquishing of power as well. Whether or not this is truly a zero-sum game, it is crucial for white children to cease learning that their lives and identities are morally neutral and/or ideal and that the goal for other groups is to come up to their level, so to speak. In other words, white people must give up the "myth of meritocracy" by which they rationalize their social standings and the superficial understanding of racism that sees whites as raceless and racism as enacted only through hate crimes and racial slurs.

Here are some of the daily priviliges McIntosh feels she enjoys, though has not earned, as a white person:
  • I can, if I wish, arrange to be in the company of people mof my race most of the time.
  • I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.
  • When I am told about our national heritage or about "civilization", I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.
  • I can go into a music shop and count on fining the music of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods which fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser's shop and find someone who will cut my hair.
  • I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.
  • I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and children's magazines featuring people of my race.
  • If my day, week, or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it has racial overtones.
  • I can choose blemish cover or bandages in "flesh" color and have them more or less match my skin.

These privileges, McIntosh argues, vary between positive advantages which we would want for all people and privileges that reinforce hierarchies and operate necessarily at the expense of others. It is important to distinguish such privileges as we assess whether our goal at a given moment is to share a paritcular privilege equitably or eliminate it.

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

It's late and I'm tired, so I won't spend long on this.....

* I am never asked to attend a White conference.

* I am never "positively targeted" for employment or promotion.

* I'm never allowed to comment when "people of colour" move into my area and insist that they really don't need to learn to speak English. Even though my taxes pay for the interpreters that Government provides for non-English speakers.

* I'm never allowed to comment when "people of colour" move into my area, dress and act exactly like they did elsewhere, turning local streets and schools into downtown Karachi, Baghdad [insert town here] and destroying my culture in the process.

* I can, if I wish, watch as my language and the language of "my people" is bastardised. Yo, wots up wid dat tho.?

* I can, if I wish, walk down my daughter's road and find every second store is either selling halal meat, veils/saris, or is a curry restaurant.

* When I am told about our national heritage or about "civilization", I am shown that people of my colour developed slavery (which we didn't - it was in fact the Africans themselves) and I should feel ashamed and apologise for that.

* I'm never allowed to openly discuss matters such as the above in public, because then I'll be called a racist.

If you're going to argue that finding bandages in your skin colour gives you an advantage, then
a) you are pretty petty and
b) you aren't looking hard enough.

its like complaining that "I am never asked to vote in a poll for Music Of White Origin".

June 01, 2007  
Anonymous Sadia Hussaini said...

Hello. I wish to respond to your blog. First of all, I think you're incredibly intelligent. I am a person of color who teaches ELD to ELL. But you are not entirely correct. I'll explain why later, I promise.

November 08, 2007