Conversation Starters

Labels: class, economics, economist, power

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.

Labels: class, education, NYRB, race

• 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.

Labels: admissions, class, economics, economist, education

• Reducing by half the proportion of the world's people in extreme poverty (defined as living on less than the purchasing-power equivalent of one U.S. dollar per day).
• Reducing by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.
• Ensuring that children everywhere are able to take a full course of primary schooling.
• Ending sex disparity in education.
• Reducing by two-thirds the mortality rate among children under 5.
• Reducing by three-quarters the rate of maternal mortality.
• Halting and beginning to reverse the spread of H.I.V./AIDS and halting and beginning to reduce the incidence of malaria and other major diseases.
• Reducing by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water.

Last year a United Nations task force, led by the Columbia University economist JeffreySachs, estimated the annual cost of meeting these goals to be $121 billion in 2006,rising to $189 billion by 2015. When we take account of existing official development aidpromises, the additional amount needed each year to meet the goals is only $48 billionfor 2006 and $74 billion for 2015."

• The 14,400 people who make up the richest .01% of taxpayers earn an average of $12,775,000 (totaling $184 billion), with a minimum income of $5,000,000. If each gave away a third of his annual income, the contributions from this group would total $61 billion.
• The 129,000 taxpayers who make up the rest of the richest .1% average $2,000,000 and make at least $1,100,000. If they gave 25% of their income yearly, they'd contribute $65 billion.
• The 575,900 taxpayers who make up the rest of the richest .5% average $623,000 per year and make at least $407,000. Giving one fifth of their income would total $72 billion.
• The 719,900 taxpayers who make up the rest of the richest 1% average $327,000 per year and make at least $276,000. Giving away 15% of their yearly income would yield $35 billion.
• The 13 million taxpayers who make up the rest of the richest 10% average $132,000 and make at least $92,000. Giving 10% of their income would yield $171 billion yearly.

Labels: class, nytimes, philanthropy