Education and Class

• Seeking College Edge, Chinese Pupils Arrive in New York Earlier – NYTimes.com

  For-profit independent high schools in New York City serve welathy international students who move to the US early to gain an edge in college admissions.

  And yet we continue to be told that we can test our way into level playing fields for poor and working class kids in rural schools, small towns, and poor neighborhoods of cities.

  Too many poor immigrant children from Mexico and Latin America languish in classrooms with few resources for language support.   At this school, students are provided translation software, adult note takers, and special language classes for keeping up with the rigorous curriculum.  

  “The students settled into studio apartments in a residential tower on Wall Street above a Tiffany & Company store and across from a Trump office building. The apartments feature marbled bathrooms, bean bags and bunk beds. The students are supervised by a team of houseparents who live in the same building and serve as round-the-clock caretakers to help ease their transition to a new city. The total tuition: $68,000 a year, compared with $36,400 for nonboarders.”

  tags: social class

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

• On ‘Hicksploitation’ And Other White Stereotypes Seen On TV : Code Switch : NPR

  I listened to this piece as I was dashing off to work Friday morning, and thought that while I agreed, the commenter spoke too often of “white” stereotypes and less forthrightly about class.

  Reading the comments now on the NPR website, the social reluctance to talk openly about how easily class stereotypes are justified seems apparent.

  “What many forget is that it can be just as easy to stereotype white, working-class folks, and just as hard to scrub those stereotypes off your TV screen.”

  tags: social class

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

I grew up in a small town in Wisconsin, about an hour away from the flagship UW campus in Madison.  For reasons I’m still untangling many years later, I never applied to Madison as I was deciding to go to college.  As a high school student who could see corn fields from the desk at my bedroom window and whose parentts’ involvement in my college selection was limited to their willingness to sign my financial aid forms if I first explained them, I would never have understood that class  played a role in that decision.

And perhaps, then, class was not the whole story.  Students much less academically focused them me did apply (for the football, at least in part ) and were admitted.  But then again, not all made it through.

But this new report on  UW Madison faculty recommending that  the school serve a a more socioeconomically diverse student body from the state resonated deeply with me.

What if?  What if anyone from UW Madison had actively sought out and welcomed kids like me?

Imagine:  Instead of admitting high test-scorers from elsewhere in the implicit assumption that these “better and brighter” students will then take responsibility for the complex social and economic challenges in historically working-class states like Wisconsin, the state would instead commit to admissions criteria that  encouraged the state’s poor and working-class kids themselves to come to Madison to learn about making the state better for all its citizens.

The committee was chaired by the fabulous Sara Goldrick-Rab, who, I believe, is spot-on in her comments in the Inside Higher Ed article:

“When I think of my best students, the ones who are most engaged in class and make the greatest contributions, it is rarely the ones with the highest test scores,” Goldrick-Rab said.

And, she speaks to my memories of the people my homeland, even while many parents there may not have the words to explain to their striving sons and daughters of the opportunities that might await them if  they’d take a shot at admissions at a place like Madison:

Goldrick-Rab said Wisconsin’s population is likely to be receptive to the university’s ideas of fostering a more diverse class. “I think this is a culture that doesn’t like elitists,” she said. “The people of Wisconsin want their state institutions to be as responsive as possible to the people of this state. They realize that the future depends on it.”

Imagine:  Flagship universities combing their states for  smart and ambitious kids to tackle the social and economic complexities of these times, even if their high schools have few AP classes and no one in their hometowns offers expensive SAT prep courses.

I’m glad that  faculty at UW Madison can imagine this very thing.

• NEW REPORT: Colleges Leaving Low-Income Students Behind | NewAmerica.net

  Yet more on the shift in financial aid from the lowest income students to wealthier students.   Are we talking to our state and federal legislators about this?

  “The report finds that over the past two decades colleges have made a dramatic switch in how they use the majority of their financial aid. Schools have gone from helping to make college more affordable for those with the greatest financial need to strategically awarding merit aid to students who can increase their standings in rankings like U.S. News & World Report and bring in more revenue. This report identifies colleges that are committed to enrolling low-income students and charging them affordable prices and others that are stingy with their admissions slots, their financial aid dollars, or both.”

  tags: social class

• Money Cuts Both Ways in Education – NYTimes.com

  Policy makers refuse to believe that poverty matters in explaining gaps in school performance, so they’re likely to also deny that wealth matters in ensuring that higher end of those gaps are a moving target, regardless of what we do in school.

  Still, at least some scholars are talking about this. 

  Dr. Kornrich and Dr. Furstenberg warn that social mobility is in jeopardy. “In the race to the top, higher-income children are at an ever greater advantage because their parents can and do spend more on child care, preschool, and the growing costs of postsecondary education,” they write. “Thus, contemporary increases in inequality may lead to even greater increases in inequality in the future as advantage and disadvantage are passed across the generations through investment.”

  tags: social Class

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

• Social class influences where even valedictorians go to college, research finds | Inside Higher Ed

  Valedictorians from low-income schools aim lower than their wealthier peers in choosing colleges.

  While the news clip focuses on the lack of information provided by high school counselors, it would be relatively easy for more colleges to contact these students directly to actively inform them of the options available to them, if those colleges actually had an interest in socio-economic diversity on their campuses. 

  “Guidance offices tend to provide advice to large groups of students, Radford said. As a result, they focus on college options that are the most common. And that leads to a paradox where the top students actually get worse guidance than average ones.
  In the absence of formal guidance from their high schools, needier students turn to who they know for help.”

  tags: social Class

• The Prom ‘Ask’ Becomes a Big Production – NYTimes.com

  Kids using school settings to play out their elaborate and expensive prom proposals. I wish that I had some sense that these kids who’ve turned prom invitations into competitions (not for the date, but for the drama created) understand that while they’re paying $400 to hire a “Prom Invite Planner”, other kids are struggling to come up with the $50 application fee to get to college? 

  tags: social class

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

• Who Knew That Greenwich, Conn., Was a Model of Equality? – NYTimes.com

  Poor children do better in wealthy schools. Fascinating, since family structure, family vocabulary, family values, or other qualities of their home life presumably don’t change. Only the resources, teaching methods, and social capital available to them changes, and those things matter.

  ” The remarkable thing about economic integration, Kahlenberg says, is that it seems to improve outcomes for the poor without diminishing educational attainment among the rich. Christopher Winters, headmaster of Greenwich High School, says that the greater diversity of the population makes for a better educational experience for all students. The low-income population has nearly doubled in the past seven years at Greenwich High, and no parent, he said, has complained. “

  tags: social class

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

I’m reading two news items from the UK this morning, each illustrating the degree to which the British are considerably more conscious of class dynamics than many of us in the United States.

First is this study  of British academics facing budget cuts and job insecurities adapting “posh” accents in the workplace to show that they “fit in”.  In the author’s words,

“In the current environment, universities are in competition with each other and their unique selling point is often to be ‘elite.’ In turn, academics wanted to portray an image that is also elite”

Even more compelling is the recent BBC survey of class in in the UK, in which the researchers concluded that conventional categories of wealthy, middle, and working class no longer describe the actual dimensions of social stratification.  The survey considers not only wealth and occupation, but  also consumption patterns. On the site, you can take a (decidedly British) class survey to identify your placement as “technical middle”, “emergent service workers” or one of the other five new “classes”.

Two questions come to me as I’m reading:

I’m sure that upwardly mobile academics (and others) in the U.S. learn to “act” more elite than their backgrounds were in reality.  Accent would be less relevant in the US, but what would be some other markers of “elite” membership?

And in this age in which every U.S. politician appeals to a single, broad, amorphous middle class, how would politics change if we could have a more nuanced discussion of class in the US, as this BBC study is sparking in the UK?