It’s not new news that educational advantage starts very early for the children of the wealthy, but the competition for admission to kindergartens charging $30,000 tuition has apparently intensified, in spite of the economic downturns in  much of the rest of the country.

A family member does physical labor for a small business that went through a round of layoffs a few months ago (he survived) and that is now dropping health insurance for the remaining employees (he’s not sure that he can financially survive this, and is justifiably concerned that this is the beginning of the end of his job).

When times get tough for privileged five year olds in New York City,  any number of entrepreneurs step up to fill the void.

When hard working middle-aged men hit hard times,  there’s little profit potential in their circumstances, and they’re pretty much left on their own.

Lane Kentworthy, over at Consider the Evidence, has been doing a series of posts here, here, here, and here on economic mobility and income inequality in the U.S.  The news is not good.  In his latest post in the series, he writes:

The median income of [sample] families  increased by about $12,000 between 1964 and 1994. Between 1974 and 2004, in contrast, it increased by only $4,500. The gain from generation to generation declined. And this is despite the fact that a growing share of these families have two earners rather than just one.

Public rhetoric would suggest that this is, in essence, an educational problem: That we’re not adequately preparing kids for high paying jobs so that employers then reluctantly move those jobs elsewhere.

Yet the data that he cites suggests that declining mobility may be attributable not simply to a slowing economy (as is assumed in much educational policy making), but instead to growing income inequality.

As he notes, the “American ethos” is enveloped in a deep belief in the chance to move up — in large measure, through doing well in school.

It seems unfortunately clear, however, that poor and working class kids cannot simply learn their way into the middle class in these troubled economic times .

The Center for Working Class Studies at Youngstown State University has launched a new blog, Working Class Perspectives.  With an impressive roster of contributors and the legacy of the Center’s work, this one’s going to the top of my (too often overloaded) aggregator.

The Tour de France ended yesterday.  We’re huge Tour fans in my house.  We’re talking lycra-clad fans at 5:45 a.m., huddled around our TV to watch live.

So attribute this post to sleep deprivation and croissant overload.

Coming in last of the 145 finishers yesterday was Wim Vansevenant, a Belgian rider for the Silence- Lotto team.

And I assure you, gentle readers, that if 99.9% of you went out to test your meddle against the 145th ranked rider in this competition, he’d kick your butt.  Leave you in the dust.  Humble even the fittest of you.  Cause you deep pain.

And after 28 days of riding in one of the most grueling sporting events in the world, the distance between #1 and #145 was merely a matter of a few hours.  And Wim is and remains an incredibly talented cyclist.  And he’s ranked last today.

So I believe, deeply, that discourse about public education in the U.S. would be well-served if we moved far beyond the often dire ranking of the average kid in the U.S. with the average kid elsewhere, as in this PSA that’s getting a lot of press this week:

CEOs are not sitting around looking at the relative test scores of 15 year olds as they develop their strategic plans. Rankings tell us next to nothing.

But those CEOs may well be devising ways to increase profit margins by, say,  cutting employee medical benefits, leaving five year olds without medical care.

So speaking of Finland:  If we’re concerned about test scores, why are we not talking about high quality medical care for everyone; universal, high quality preschool; and a system of schooling that understands that a well prepared teacher with professional autonomy will take kids places that weeks and weeks  of testing every year never will?  Do we really believe that those things are inconsequential in the relatively high achievement of kids in Finland?

Good jobs moving to Finland, with a population lower than that of New York City?

Come on.

American “schools” are not failing our kids.   Poor kids in this country go to poor schools.   They go to school sick and hungry.  They go to school having been shut out of preschool that is the birthright of middle-class kids.

The Finns understood years ago that they couldn’t rely on schools to level playing fields rendered so uneven by  unemployment, illness, housing, and discrimination.

We think that we can get to #1 through school alone.

Wim Vansevenant only finished 145th, but he finished an unbelievably challenging race in no small measure because he had access to some of the best support available to professional athletes anywhere.  He had personalized medical care (just skip the doping smirks, ok?), a nutritionist,  a comfortable bed every night, sponsors who provided him with the very best equipment available regardless of his ability to pay for his bike himself.

You don’t finish the Tour on your own- even when you finish 145th.

So if we’re worried about the Finnish kids getting all the good jobs, we really shouldn’t expect poor five year olds in the U.S.  to navigate school essentially on their own either.  Because Finnish kids are enshrouded in layer upon layer of support as they make their way through school.

Much like professional cyclists.

Even the cyclists who come in dead last.

Because the rankings tell us next to nothing.

My librarian friend and sometimes commenter on this blog (Venta, I’m talkin’ about you) have talked often about how rare it is to find literature for children and young adults that includes poor or working class characters that are neither victims nor on the inevitable road to self-improvement.

So, much gratitude to Stephanie Jones who is on the hunt for exactly such books and seems to be hitting paydirt.

Is there other such  literature out there to be found?

I’m working on a collection of narratives written by education faculty from poor and working class backgrounds.    As I read these,  it’s impossible to miss the profound sense of place in many of the essays.

For the most part, we are not people who moved around a lot (from home to home, perhaps, but not from place to place), so in ways that may be unusual in these highly mobile times, most of us have grounded our experiences of class and education in particular geographies.

I was fascinated, then, to read of this Australian project in which literacy and architecture people in a university are working with poor and working class kids to “know their place” and to act within the spaces in which they live as they develop critical literacy skills.

As the authors of the book I’m editing and the authors of this project so vividly observe, critical pedagogies tied to  locality could be potent for poor and working class kids who may be uniquely immersed within particular social and physical spaces.

Thanks to the literacies log blog for the link to the project.

There’s too little time for reading or writing during this hectic stretch that I’m in,  but I did sneak away with an iced tea last week to read a very good analysis of Ruby Payne’s work published by  Teachers College Record last November (Formal cite: 2008, Vol 100, Number 11. E access # 14591)

The article, Miseducating Teachers about the Poor:  A Critical Analysis of Ruby Payne’s Claims, by Randy Bomer, Joel Dworin, Laura May, and Peggy Semington is among the most carefully researched, thorough, and detailed analyses of Payne’s writing that I’ve found.

The authors systematically weigh the claims made by Payne against what can readily be found within peer-reviewed research about the causes of poverty and the lives of the poor (their reference list alone runs to five pages), and as others have already observed, Payne comes up very short.

They review research on the lifestyles, values, goals, language, and educational aspirations of the poor.  They find evidence for little of what Payne writes and teaches, and instead cite solid and respected research that directly contradicts much of what she claims.

As I’ve written before here, here, here, and here, this sort of analysis makes it very difficult to understand why schools settle for Payne’s work when there is so little support for her claims, and so little evidence that poor kids are well-served by teachers who have experienced her training.

I’d encourage folks who have dismissed  criticism of Payne’s work as “academic jealousy” (or other personal, rather than intellectual motives) to read this article.

And I’d welcome discussion here — not about the motives of the article authors, but about the research that they cite.

It would be a violation of Fair Use policies to attach the entire article here, but it’s worth the effort to track down a copy.  Readers with access to  academic libraries can find copies there, you can get a PDF (for a fee) from the publisher here , or you might email the lead author, Randy Bomer, at rbomer at mail dot utexas dot edu.

So, are we willing to get past questioning the motives of those who critique her work,  past the “but she seems to make sense” reasoning,  past  anecdotes about ones own family members, and down to the core questions of whether we’re simply settling for Payne rather than bringing all that we know to the education of poor children?

I have no doubt whatsoever that teachers exposed to solid, carefully done research such as that cited in this article can, together, formulate ways to better serve poor children in schools.  Given how this field is developing while Payne’s work stands still, I think that we should be well past the point that we depend so heavily on someone  who just hasn’t done her own homework  to tell us how to do this work.

Doug, over at Borderland, writes at the end of the year with his 6th graders about class and social reproduction, about weariness, and about decompressing on his bike. He writes:

As Eduwonkette pointed out back in November, structural issues are problematic for practitioners because we can’t tell kids, “Forget it. The deck is stacked against you. Give up.” But if we simply tell them, “Work hard. Be nice,” we risk losing credibility and setting them up for disappointment when things don’t work out as well as we’d like, even if they did work hard and act nice. However, since we know it’s their best option, that’s what we tell them to do. We teach compliance with a system structured to favor some over others.

How, then, to navigate this chasm that is also called the “achievement gap?” It becomes a fascinating issue in diplomacy, psychology, politics, and strategy, and it holds promise for new areas of teacher inquiry.

Indeed it does.

]]> http://educationandclass.com/2008/06/12/teaching-working-class-kids/feed/ http://educationandclass.com/2008/06/09/on-being-curious/ http://educationandclass.com/2008/06/09/on-being-curious/#comments Mon, 09 Jun 2008 20:58:21 +0000 janevangalen http://janevangalen.wordpress.com/?p=180

Mike Rose, one of my favorite writers about the education of first-generation college students (and much more) has written an interesting post on a recent Atlantic Monthly article by a faculty member frustrated by the lack of preparation among many of his freshman composition and humanities courses.

Rose writes:

The professor doesn’t come across as a bad guy, and he frets over the grades he must dole out. But what is so frustrating to people like me, certainly to those who told me about the article, is that the professor seems clueless about alternative ways to engage his students in the humanities and help them become more effective critical readers and writers. Nor does he seem to grant them much experience or intelligence that could be brought to bear on core topics in the humanities.

I share this deep frustration with the “cluelessness” among the well-educated middle class, while poor and working class people shoulder (and internalize) the blame when things go awry in school.

Rose writes that the stance of such educators is one of “shock or dismay or cynicism rather than curiosity and engagement.”

In an culture in which even enlightened, educated, and otherwise liberal educators rationalize away their own professional frustrations by inferring that the students before them are not entitled to even be in their courses, how do we spur our colleagues to the most basic level of curiosity about students from backgrounds very different from their own?

The journal Equity and Excellence in Education has published a special issue on Class in Education, guest edited by Felice Yeskel of Class Action.

From the press release

The editors and contributors hope to provide an economic and social context for the necessary discussions on class in education, the definitions of class, an overview of how class defines education and how education defines class, the invisibility of class, and new ways that class should be considered. “Class is the elephant in the classroom, impacting students and teachers alike but little acknowledged and rarely talked about. This special issue makes an important contribution to the ongoing effort to fulfill the promise of equal education for students from all backgrounds,” says Dr. Yeskel.

You can find the full press release here.

And I’d welcome feedback on my article …