Education and Class

From CALDER, this comprehensive analysis of consistent patterns of lower qualifications among teachers in high-poverty schools in North Carolina.

A friend sent me this UNICEF report, An Overview of Child Well-Being in Rich Nations. It provides yet more evidence that children in the United States fare less well on many measures of education, health and well-being than do children in other Western nations. The report states

given levels of child well-being are not inevitable, but are policy susceptible. The wide differences in child well-being seen throughout this report card can therefore be interpreted as a broad and realistic guide to the potential for improvement in all OECD countries.

Yet how to begin discussions around policy change, when our national credo is that to place themselves on equal footing with other people’s kids, children raised in poor and working-class families need only do all of their homework and save their allowance for college?

In a recent comment, Elliot asked about John Taylor Gatto’s assertions that since schools were designed to produce a compliant, unthinking workforce, they can never be fixed and should, in the end, be abandoned.

I find much to admire in Gatto’s thinking (and in the thinking of many others who offer similar critiques of schooling from many different perspectives).

The question for me is what I do while awaiting the revolution. And the question for me is how I use the position of power I have to be part of deciding what is in best interests of other people’s kids.

Until the revolution happens, my work (and that of thousands of other educators) is to make schools better: slowly, persistently, tenaciously. Until the revolution happens and schools all close, I can work to get past the stereotyping of poor and working class folks as the passive dupes of the powerful. Until the revolution happens, we can stop the teacher bashing that blames relatively powerless women for the social ills that are manifest in schools and focus blame on the policy makers who won’t entertain ideas of basic equality in education. We can move off of this obsession with test scores and start talking about basic human rights to a basic education or basic health care so that kids can learn free of pain and illness.

I definitely think that people should read Gatto and think about what he says. I think, too, that people should be reading Mike Rose, and Deborah Meier, and Bill Ayers and Sonia Nieto, and Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot, and the thousands of other educators who attest to the power of schools — imagined differently — to change lives.

I’ve been tracking discussions about social class in the blogosphere for a few months now, and I guess that I’m not surprised that there is so little there.

Today’s collection is typical: There are more than a few students agonizing over Jane Austen assignments, other course papers such as this young woman’s poignant essay for her English 51 class, a very small number of postings about class and education from politically-attuned bloggers, and no small number of bloggers analyzing what is seen as the class-based bad behavior of contestants on British reality shows. Beyond such postings, I’m not finding much.

Why is it, do you think, that in these turbulent economic times, at this political moment, there is so little of substance and clarity about class in this medium?

The title caught my eye: “An Education Strategy to Promote Opportunity, Prosperity, and Growth , a new report from the Brookings Institute. Then on p. 16, my eyes popped open as I read two remarkably simple suggestions for simplifying financial aid for low-income students.

The problem, the report explains, is that young people who cannot possibly afford college without financial aid don’t find out how much aid they’re eligible for until late in their Senior year of high school.

And they find out then only after filling out long and cumbersome forms.

The Brookings people suggest two simple steps:

• Provide all high school kids with a post card size table from which they could calculate their eligibility for financial aid.
• Allow parents to apply for financial aid merely by checking a box on their income tax forms.

Why not do these things?