Education and Class

From the New York Times, this article about the high-powered tactics of upper-middle class parents investing their energies into the PTA. From the article:

With many members who stepped out of high-profile careers to become stay-at-home parents, traditional parent-teacher associations (and the similar parent-teacher organizations, or PTOs) have evolved into sophisticated multitiered organizations bearing little resemblance to the mom-and-pop groups that ran bake sales a generation ago.

Are there any good reasons for all of this energy, beyond the parents’ propensity to demonstrate that they can wield such power in whatever setting they find themselves?

Jared Bernstein and Larry Mishel at the Economic Policy Institute have published a concise and important response to President Bush and others who argue that growing income gaps are attributable to “an economy that increasingly rewards education and skills.”

If only teachers would do their jobs, this argument implies, kids could anticipate earning much more than their teachers, in work in which their skills were justly rewarded.

Bernstein and Mishel’s analysis shows, instead, that inflation-adjusted earnings of college graduates rose very modestly between 2000 and 2006, and that college graduates are less likely to be employed now than they were in 2000.

Bernstein and Mishel point to other factors creating the growing income gaps between high school and college educated workers: the steep decline in the real value of the minimum wage, the loss of high-quality jobs in manufacturing, the decline in union representation, the depression of wages in slack labor markets.

Blaming teachers for the wage volatility of the new global economy seems to work pretty well: while we’re myopically focused on test scores, we’re paying precious little attention to how even those who have aced their exams are struggling to find their footing in these new economic times.

I had another one of those stealth class experiences while I was away.

I was sitting around with a group of people who didn’t know one another well. One of the men started telling stories about growing up, and I sat up a bit straighter when he started telling of his time working in one of those jobs in which men live in camps and perform grueling physical work.

He implied that this work was part of his journey of discovery of who he was, how he came to realize that he was not someone who would do that labor as his life’s work, how he then left to spend the next few years exploring other roles.

A few years ago, I had an uncomfortably intense argument with a (now former) friend. I was trying to explain to him that class is more than income — that walking around in the skin of someone who had been raised working class was a very different experience from being raised to simply assume that the world will fulfill all of one’s needs.

My friend insisted that he knew what it was like to be working class, because his father had required that he spend a summer working construction so that he’d understand “real” work.

His insistence that he “understood” class from these few months when he was 19 — when he was the kid whose father got him the job that someone else’s kid really needed — is one of the reasons that we eventually had a hard time finding things to talk about.

Both of these stories romanticized manual labor as something that builds character and affords insight into one’s “real” self.

And both imply that class is something from which we can just walk away, whether it’s the middle-class kid walking toward something more “real” or the working class kid deciding that better things await elsewhere.

There is another layer to these stories, though.

There was an almost indiscernible ripple of respect last week as my new friend was telling of his foray into the woods. Points were definitely scored in the subtle little contests for admirability that were being enacted among that group of relative strangers.

I thought, of course, of how often I and many of my formerly-working-class friends have learned to just not talk about what our parents did, about how we’ve learned that if we do, we should expect not admiration but condescension when people learn that we walked away from such backgrounds, even when our leaving required much more than packing our bags and calling home for the money for a bus ticket out.

Stephanie Lawler recently wrote that while the working class in the abstract is admired by middle-class liberals, working class people are a different matter entirely.

So middle and working-class kids who cross class boundaries both learn the implicit rules of class passing — the middle class kids learn to frame their temporary downward mobility as fable: “I learned some thing about myself, part of which was that I can be so much more”.

Working class kids, whose parents did not find existential meaning in years of demeaning work, learn to just nod along in admiration.

Lawler, S. (2005). Disgusted subjects: The making of middle-class identities. The Sociological Review, pp. 429-446

I’ve been away for several weeks, working on technology in an amazingly un-wired place, so my blogging plans fell by the wayside.

But among my many emails when I got back was this great new contact: The Class on Campus yahoo group. Formed by Will Barratt at Indiana State, the group is looking at issues of social class on college campuses, particularly the transitions made by first generation college students. Looks like a very good resource.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/classoncampus/

An interesting analysis on NPR last night of the experiences of students from different class backgrounds meeting up with one another at an elite college.

How interesting that the president believes that elite colleges like Amherst are potentially among the most democratic places in US society. As he explains:

President Marx believes that American colleges have no choice but to try to address class. He says it’s their responsibility as educators, noting that in a society that’s becoming more divided by class, schools like Amherst College are among the few places where people of all income levels can interact.