• College Choice and the Success of Working-Class Students « Working-Class Perspectives

  Excellent blog post from Sherry Linkon on working class students’ completion rates and the complicated questions of college “fit” for working class students. Check out the comments for info on the great First Generation Program at UW Madison.

  tags: social class

• Democrats, Poverty and Schools

  An excellent essay on schooling, poverty, and the essential work of targeting poverty itself.

  “For decades, solid analyses have demonstrated that while aspects of schooling can be important in improving student outcomes and alleviating the effects of poverty, the effects of factors schools cannot and do not control are much greater”

  ….”And to my knowledge, no study has ever rigorously compared the effectiveness of interventions based on cash transfers, housing subsidies, and teacher quality improvement”

  tags: social class

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• News: Organized Against Labor – Inside Higher Ed

  Attacks on Labor Centers at Universities as promoting a “particular political ideology”.

  tags: social class

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

I weary of writers in the Sunday Style section attributing the wonderful designs in the featured private homes of impossibly young architects to the distinctive talent of these prodigies when quite obviously, another thing that likely distinguishes these featured young talents from their equally talented peers is access to family money that allows them to build their own dream homes as very young adults, enabling them, then,  to attract the attention of the press at a point much earlier in one’s career than would otherwise ever be possible.

Dinner with friends last Friday took a depressing turn as we found it hard to talk about anything but the news of more  layoffs in the field in which most of them work.  No recent college grads were hired in any of their offices this year; friends with ten years of excellent performance reviews were summoned last week  to  conference rooms and were  told to be gone within the hour.

Yesterday, an otherwise lively and loving conversation with members of the  conservative branch of the family tree took a different sort of depressing  turn when they mentioned that someone within  their social circle had lost their house to foreclosure this week.  They were stunned.   “You hear about this happening, but we didn’t know anyone who was  affected themselves”.

The media has made it easy to keep one’s head  in the sand, according to a study released this weekend by Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism:

Pew found that almost 40 percent of economic news reports dealt with the trials of the banking and auto industries, and the federal stimulus bill passed in February. Unemployment and the housing crisis accounted for 12 percent. And, the study said, “stories that tried to explicitly examine the broader impact of the economic downturn on the lives of ordinary Americans filled 5 percent of the economic coverage.”

On Friday, my friends spoke of unemployment rates in their field approaching  40%.  They spoke of young people just out of college who, having played by all the rules of the game through 16 years of schooling,  are now likely permanently shut out of their chosen profession.

Yesterday,  my relatives had finally encountered someone personally affected by the recession.

We are deeply segregated  by social class, by ideology, and in my family members’ case, by age.  The media  is doing little to bridge these divides, finding it easier and cheaper to report on a few hundred people gathered to protest “socialized medicine” than to cover the thousands of people like my friends who have not yet figured out how they can possibly  pay their own insurance premiums while living on unemployment.

• Wealth Matters – Too Rich to Worry? Not in This Downturn – NYTimes.com

  On the worries of the super-rich, and how their worries affect us all.

  tags: social class

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

In today’s NYT,  White collar workers, thrown off their pace by the economy speak of “getting it real”  by working with their hands.

In the early heady days of renewed appreciation for “meaningful” physical work, of course, there are few on-the-job injuries and bodies have not yet  been worn down.  And, in these times when everyone understands that one’s own fate is  shaped  by things other than one’s innate talent and hard work, there may be less disparagement of those doing physical labor.  After all, in these days, a job is a job.

Yet even though it’s framed within analysis of economic turmoil,  articles like this still imply that one shapes one’s own destiny and the work that one does is a personal choice.

Perhaps, having recently worn a suit to work and to any number of  elegant restaurants after work, one has a different sense of self than someone who long ago was convinced that the best that someone like them could hope for was a life of physical labor.

I want to know not just that some white collar workers have rediscovered their souls by working now with their hands.  I want to know that an exodus into blue collar work is something other than just  another narcissistic move by people who do have exceptional choices in their lives.

I want to see a significant shift in policy, in attitude, in knowledge of the status of workers in this country so that even the pipe fitters, floor cleaners, and landscapers who do not happen to have  degrees in economics are worthy of such curious, respectful coverage in the New York Times.

• News: SAT Scores Drop, Gaps Grow – Inside Higher Ed

  Trends in this year’s SAT scores:

  “The growing gaps are even more visible when examined by income level. As in past years, there is a fairly direct pattern: the more money a student’s family earns, the higher the SAT scores. But this year’s figures show not only the gap, but its growth.”

  tags: social class

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

I wrote last week about the potential of new media for being sure that more voices would be heard in the health care (or any other policy) debates, regardless of class background.

I want people to hear Jeanne, someone who has pushed my thinking on this blog and on many other things.

I want us to hear her story, and also to hear the power of the indvidual stories such as these:

Among my friends on FaceBook these days, there is lively dissemination of news clips,  videos and commentary about the health care debate.  I’m learning a great  deal from all of this.  I feel vinidated that I’m on the right side.

Today, someone that I respect a great deal  posted this:

I wondered while watching this if “Real Man” was convinced. I somehow don’t think so and I don’t think that in the end, Real Man was the audience for this video.

I wondered if, of all the feedback that Sanders and others are getting on health care, it was deliberate that the opposition voice to Sander’s clipped New England accent was  a bearded southern man in a baseball cap and t-shirt.

I wondered, in situations like this, about the differences between answering someone’s concerns and shutting down the conversation by proving that you’re smarter. There isn’t a thing that Sander’s says here that I’d disagree with, but at the  same time,  the contrast in syntax and vocabulary (though Sanders starts off differently, even throwing out an “ain’t”) is striking. Does Sanders really think that Real Man and those he represents will smack their heads in amazement at how clear things now have become  when they hear “dissemination of information in a democratic society” and “‘cost effective health care” in response to what they’re saying?

I’m not advocating talking down to people.

I do want to think about ways of communicating that go beyond didactic argument.

I freely acknowledge that it’s likely because I had to come face to face with my own inadequacies in responding to fear about failing health and my deep frustration that I had no way to counter someone’s adamant insistence that the lies in the health care debate  are true that my class radar is set to “over-sensitive”.

But I wonder why, in these weeks of debate, we have educated politicians speaking  on behalf of workers in desperate need of health care reform while “the people” that Sanders references  have rarely been positioned to speak for themselves.  I’ve wondered why, in the media,  those politicians don’t name names in the insurance industry but instead refute the (often working-class) public voices of opposition to reform so that  the insurance industry is getting away with framing this as a fight  between angry white working-class people and  educated congress people, not as  between the health care industry and the citizenry (and criticizing Fox News is way too easy a target…).

And I wonder — over and over — why it is seems impossible to speak across these divisions and why the Left has been so ineffective.

So I wonder if the spokespeople on the Left are willing to step away from the podium to let people tell their own stories.  I wonder if, in this  train wreck of “debate”, there is room for the affective as well as the intellectual.   We have the tools now for everyone to powerfully convey their own stories and to disseminate them widely. And stories can move in ways that logic and argument cannot.

I wonder, if instead of refutation  in middle-class syntax, there isn’t a need for more stories. I wonder if we who are well-educated and confident in the power of our rational argument can make room also for story.

Can we stop arguing– at least some of the time –and also ensure that everyone has access to the  tools to powerfully tell their own stories?

Are we willing to share  the podium?

• Welfare Versus Minimum Wage » Sociological Images

  Why working hard does not always mean getting ahead.

  tags: social class

• Big City – Aristotle Circle Connects Parents With Educators, at $450 an Hour – NYTimes.com

  “It would be her mission to democratize information for New York’s most competitive elite.”

  … in which a woman leaves Morgan Stanley to charge $495 and hour to advise anxious parents in New York about private school admissions.

  Services include a $500 pre-K standardized test prep booklet.

  tags: social class

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.