Social Class Links 11/14/2009
November 14, 2009
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A Parent’s Unemployment Stress Trickles Down to the Children – NYTimes.com
“For many families across the country, the greatest damage inflicted by this recession has not necessarily been financial, but emotional and psychological. Children, especially, have become hidden casualties, often absorbing more than their parents are fully aware of. Several academic studies have linked parental job loss — especially that of fathers — to adverse impacts in areas like school performance and self-esteem.”
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Social Class Links 10/21/2009
October 21, 2009
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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.
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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”
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Social Class Links 10/13/2009
October 13, 2009
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News: Organized Against Labor – Inside Higher Ed
Attacks on Labor Centers at Universities as promoting a “particular political ideology”.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Giving Credit Where Credit is Due
October 12, 2009
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.
In Denial
October 5, 2009
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.
